Spring is upon us, and I am shedding my clothes one by one.  Anyhow, shedding of clothes in summertime is a healthy thing to do, even a mentally healthy thing to do. But how do you know? How can you tell that you're mentally healthy? Let me help you. Who is better qualified to answer this question for you than Mwah? Sam Vaknin, author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, a former visiting professor of psychology, a current member of the Faculty of Sea Ups, and the list is long. Three signs that you're mentally healthy. This is the topic of today's inordinately short video. Here are the signs. Here is what characterizes mentally healthy people. Number one, they control their impulses. It's not that they don't have impulses, everyone does. Everyone has urges and drives and lucid fantasies and wishes and dreams and rage attacks and you name it. Everyone, everyone wants to act from time to time. You know the famous saying?  That's an expression, a sublimation of impulse. Impulses, a normal impulses, a common impulses, a healthy. Controlling impulses is what makes the difference.  They have a problem controlling their urges, their drives. They don't know how to sublimate. They don't know how to convert instincts and drives and urges and impulses into socially acceptable modes of expression and manifestation. So their behavior is impulsive.  It's reckless. It's crazy making. It's defiant. It's unpredictable. And it's a bit terrifying, frankly speaking. Opal's control, number one distinction between health and illness in the mental realm. Number two, mentally healthy people are aware of who they are, aware of what they're doing, their actions and aware of the consequences of their actions. Three types of self-awareness. Which are usually the outcomes of process known as introspection. Intro, inside, inward, inspection, looking, to look inwards. Mentally healthy people have conducted or are conducting a SWOT analysis all the time. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. They know themselves, mentally healthy people. They know their strong points, their advantages, they know their shortcomings. They are fully cognizant of their behavior. They have a very powerful conscience. Super ego, call it what you want, inner critic, a voice or a constellation of voices that inform them that some things are wrong to do and others are right to do. They are able to anticipate and extrapolate the consequences of their actions and are fully willing and able to hold themselves accountable and to pay the price when and if they had misbehaved. Make amends if necessary. These are healthy people. Of course the opposite of all this these are mentally ill people, people with mental health problems. They are not aware of who they are. They have an inflated view of themselves, like the narcissist who is grandiose. They have a deflated view of themselves, like for example the codependent. They are not aware of their strengths and shortcomings. They exaggerate either or they are subject to voices which are hostile ego incongruent, self-negating, self-destructive. They are sometimes not aware of their own actions because they are dissociative or because they are confabulating or because they are goal-oriented to the point of not caring about whether their actions are right or wrong, the psychopath for example. And above all it's as if they are immune to the consequences of their actions, mentally ill people, as if mental illness is a kind of permit, kind of permission to act wrongly, to misbehave, to engage in egregious misconduct, in ostentatious violation of all boundaries and rules, individual and societal. So this lack of self-awareness coupled with entitlement and cobbled with a euphoric state of mind that seems to confer upon mentally ill people a kind of cosmic immunity, this combination indicates mental illness. And number three, mentally healthy people always choose to minimize harm, do no wrong or as little wrong as they can. Minimize harm to themselves, this is known as self-love, and minimize harm to others, and this is known as empathy.  Their empathy is either reduced or absent altogether, for example, in antisocial personality disorder or the more extreme form, psychopathy. Empathy is a major barometer and thermometer of mental health, because the personality, the self, the ego, call it what you want, this core identity, which is you, is relational. It's all about relating to other people, interacting with other people, fitting in with other people, collaborating with other people, towards common goals, teamwork, it's all about this. In the absence of a context, in the absence of a human environment, you don't exist. Personality, individuality, these are metaphors, counterfactual metaphors. We are all the outcomes of relationships, starting with the earliest one, mother. And so people who are unable to perceive others as separate, as external, as worthy of consideration, as equal to them, such people are mentally ill. If you are not able to perceive other people as separate, independent, autonomous, agentic units, entities with their own wishes, own dreams, own hopes and preferences and priorities and cognitions and emotions, if you are unable to do this, this separation, this bound-read, bound-read construction of what is known as the internal working model of the world and of yourself in the world, if you are incapable of this, you're mentally ill. Now all this has to do with the concept of object, internal object, which is essentially borrowed from Melanie Klein and later the object relations schools. We need to distinguish between bad object, good object and idealized object. The bad object is a constellation of voices, internal voices, also known as introjects. And these voices are self-negating, self-humiliating, self-destructive, self-defeating.  This is a bad object. These voices are relentless, they're harsh, they're unforgiving, they're hateful, they're your enemy. People with bad objects, internalized bad object, try to somehow survive despite the bad object. They could pretend that the bad object is wrong. They could suppress the bad object by creating an inflated grandiose fantastic good object that is called, this is known as narcissism. Whichever the case may be, the bad object is intolerable, burdensome and bearable and life-threatening in the long run. So this is a bad object. The good object is the exact opposite of the bad object. It keeps telling you that essentially you're good, essentially you're worthy, you're lovable.  People with the good object are resilient, they're flexible, they're able to cope with life because they have a stable, sturdy inner core which keeps informing them that you're okay, you're okay despite everything. You can do it because you have what it takes and because you're lovable, because you will always find people to love you and to support you and so on. So that's a good object. And then there's the idealized object. The idealized object resembles a good object because it says the same things basically, you're amazing, you're beautiful, you're lovable, you're this, you're that. So people often confuse the good object with the idealized object but the difference between the two is that the good object is grounded in reality. It is not hyperbolic, it's not exaggerated, it's not a caricature, it's not grandiose, it's not fantastic, it's not insane, it's grounded in reality. It's with its feet on the ground, the good object. The idealized object is a caricature of the good object.  That's the idealized object. Now only the good object is grounded in reality, only the good object has nuances, it's shades of gray, not everything in the good object is a hundred percent good, totally perfect. The good object provides compass, navigation compass, orientation and affords its owner with the ability to calibrate and recalibrate, always get it more or less right heuristically.  The idealized object informs its owner that he is all good while the world is all bad, that he is superior while the world is inferior. The bad object does exactly the opposite, it informs its owner that she is all inferior and the world is superior, that she is a failure while all others are successful, that she is irredeemably corrupt and bad and unworthy. This is the outcome of the primitive infantile defense mechanism of splitting. Either you're all bad and the rest of humanity is all good, in which case you're in possession of a bad object or you are perfect, you're perfection reified while the rest of humanity sucks and that's the idealized object and of course they don't provide appropriate guidance, they're very misleading, they lead to dysfunction and self-defeat and self-destruction and the good object is not the outcome of splitting, the good object doesn't say you're all good, it says there are aspects of you which are good and taking into account these aspects you are likely to be loved, you're likely to succeed, it's a probabilistic model so to speak. Now mental health emanates only exclusively from the existence of a good object, that a bad object and an idealized object lead to mental illness, mental health disorders and mental health dysfunctions. We know for example that narcissism is founded, pathological narcissism is a compensatory reaction to the existence of a bad object or the existence of an idealized object, the order of an idealized object suspects deep inside that it's not real and therefore the idealized object is actually a bad object in camouflage, it's in itself compensatory. We'll discuss in a forthcoming video the fact that the narcissists must accommodate all these layers and layers and layers of camouflage and compensation on a constant basis, pathological narcissism is a form of multitasking but that's for another video that's all I had to say today and I wish you a merry spring and a warm summer Stay with me for the next episode


Thanks, Liz. So this webinar today, we have an exciting lineup of presenters. We're talking about funding to support OER development with an equity lens. Our agenda today is to give you a quick overview of our CCC OER and OE Global Overview. Our presenters are talking about the CC ECHO Project, Rotel Project, and the Open Oregon Educational Resources Targeted Pathways Project. Please stay tuned at the end so I can let you know about some upcoming events and how to stay in the loop. CCC OER, if this is the first time you're joining us or you're ready for an update, we have about 105 members from 37 states, including Canada. And we are a community of practice supporting and encouraging colleges in the collaborative development of open educational programs to ensure equitable access and success. Feel free to join our email and Liz just put that in the chat. I do want you to know that our equity diversity and inclusion committee has openings. There's a link to sign up and join this committee to advocate for open educational practices to empower contributions from diverse learners and educators who have been underrepresented. Let us know if you're attending OE Global 23 coming up in November. This OE Global will be focused on Indigenous worldviews. It's exciting to have a carbon neutral event. And we have diverse keynote speakers, global participants, a variety of social activities. We will have a CCC OER dinner party. And don't forget there are member discounts. Exciting news today. Winners of the Open Education Awards for this year were announced today. Washington Community and Technical College System won an award for their Washington OER and low-cost labeling policies. Congratulations to them. In Kingsborough Community Colleges won for an open reuse remix adaptation. Exciting news. And Liz has put a link to the livestream for that event that just happened an hour ago, I believe. Our speakers today are Amy Huffer with the statewide Open Education Program Director from Open Oregon Educational Resources. We'll also be hearing from Kelsey Smith, who is a librarian and CCC Echo Project Director from West Hills College, Lemur, California. Sue Tashin and Millie Gonzalez will be joining us as well. Sue is the coordinator of instructional design from North Essex Community College in Massachusetts. And Millie Gonzalez is the dean of library at Framington State University also in Massachusetts. Thank you for spending time with us here today. And I'm going to quit sharing and Kelsey, take it away. All right, let me get into your center mode. Is all my slides are showing okay? Awesome. Okay, so today I will be talking about the open textbook pilot program. One of the grants called California Consortium for Equitable Change in Hispanic Serving Institutions with OER. And since that's such a mouthful, we are also known as CCC Echo. So I am Kelsey Smith. I am the project director for this grant, but I am also an OER librarian at West Hills College in Lemur, which is in Central California. So what is CCC Echo? Like I said, it was one of the funded projects from the open textbook pilot program from the U.S. Department of Education. We are a consortium of four different community colleges here in California. West Hills is the primary fiscal lead. We're also working with Allen Hancock College, which is on the Central Coast, College of the Canyons, which is down south, and College of Marin, which is in Northern California. The goals of this grant are one was to create peer reviewed OER for 20, at least 20 high enrolled courses that had little or no OER when we first started, which was at the very beginning of 2021. So we're in the last year of our grant now. Our second goal is to promote textbook affordability, student success, diversity, equity and inclusion to benefit all students. And we're particularly focusing on HSIs and the underserved students there. But of course our work can be scaled to other underserved student groups as well. Our third goal was to provide professional development for integrating DEI and OER into the curriculum and to create more culturally relevant resources. And then our fourth and final goal is to share out everything we're doing, so our processes, procedures, training materials, and of course all of the OER that comes out of our grants as well. We do have a kind of a landing page that Alan Hancock College is hosting for us and the URL is at the bottom here, it's www.hancockcollege.edu. And we will be posting all of our deliverables or OER projects to this site once they finish. So like I mentioned, we were one of the fiscal year 2020 grantees. So we got our funding at the beginning of 2021. This is a three year grant. And so it's been a bit since we did our application for OTP. But I did want to touch on a few things that I thought were important to think about if you are thinking of applying for an open textbook pilot grant. The first thing would be to establish the need. The Department of Ed really wants to know what what makes your project special? What are your goals? And how are you going to fill those gaps in OER that exist? So our goals were to, you know, fill in the OER gaps, particularly at high and real courses at Hispanic serving institutions. All of the OER we are going to create is based on a diversity equity and inclusion framework. And then we also wanted to make sure we shared out all of our resources so people could take what we did and then scale it and implement it at their own institutions. We also did an OER gap analysis back when we were applying for the grant to make sure we identified where those gaps were. And we wanted to make sure that when we were applying for the grant, we knew where those gaps were and we were emphasizing that we weren't duplicating what was already out there that we were going to add to what was out there and fill in some gaps. It's important also to include on the application for any funding, how you're going to be measuring impact, what data are you going to be looking at? So will you be collecting qualitative data from interviews and student surveys or will you be focusing more on quantitative data like student success measures, cost savings, things like that? And it's always great to include if you can calculate it, an estimate, return on investment. So take the amount that you are requesting for your project and then turn around and give usually a cost savings amount if you're able to, cost savings for students, that is. And CC ECHO, we are contracted with the RP Group, which is the research and planning group for the California Community Colleges, and they're taking care of all of our, most of our data collection and measuring student success for us. Another important thing for any funding application is to include information on who's on your team. If you have a multi-member team that will be taking on the project, who's involved? What departments do they work in? What are their credentials, their experience? Any OER experience that they already have? And then who's responsible for what on your project? For CC ECHO, we're working with four different colleges, so it was important to really distinguish between the colleges, who's doing what, and the roles and responsibilities of each college. And then most importantly, anytime you ask for money, you need to create a budget as detailed as you're able to at the time. And it really should be just enough money to achieve the goals that you've outlined for whatever stakeholder you are working with. And then this is something we learned after the fact, but I wanted to emphasize it. If you are working with multiple institutions, just keep in mind that all institutions pay faculty differently. Some like to do stipends or can only do stipends for faculties, extra load. Some colleges can only do release time and they don't do stipends at all. How will you pay faculty if you want to bring them in from outside the state or outside your college to help you work on something? And even hourly rates between all of our colleges differ. Of course, it varies widely in California. We have the very high cost of living areas that have a very high hourly rate for their faculty and we have some other areas that have lower hourly rates. So that's something just to keep in mind as you're working on your budget. So the project processes and procedures for CC ECHO specifically are the yearly gap analysis that I mentioned. We actually ended up doing this quite a few times. We did one while we were writing the narrative for the Department of Ed. And then again, once we got our funding and we're about to start funding projects. And then again for our next round of projects. As you all know, the OER community moves quickly. There's always new OER coming out and a gap that used to be there may not be there the next year. So if you really don't want to duplicate what's out there, just look for gaps before you start funding something. We use the diversity, equity and inclusion framework from the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges called the IDEA framework. It's linked on my last slide. So if you get the slides later, you can check it out. We also use the peer review rubric with some edits from the Academic Senate as well. The RP group is doing our data collection and evaluation. We have OER specialists that are lovely from the College of the Canyons. So we took infrastructure that was already at our colleges and tapped into them when we could. So the OER specialists at College of the Canyons are current and former students. They help our faculty find OER and format for accessibility and get their textbooks looking all nice. And then we really wanted to emphasize that our OER that we share, we're trying to get it in as many file formats as possible and disseminate it on as many platforms as possible. We know certain file formats work better for others and when it comes to reusing and adapting the OER in the future, PDFs aren't always the best or there's certain websites that are hard to edit. So that was something we really wanted to make sure we did. So I'm just going to highlight quickly three of our projects that really, I guess it would be highlighting the DEI and CC ECHO. So one of the projects that I'm going to touch on is the American Government Audiobook. So we had Brian Barrick, who was a political science instructor at L.A. Harbour College and his A-former student, Sarah Aria. They narrated the OpenStacks American Government third edition book. I'm at my 10 minutes. Sorry, let me real quick. There is a link I wanted to mention. Let me go through my slides here. There is a QR code for everyone up here. And if you get the slides later, you can click on it and it will take you directly to the book. So, you know, audiobooks are great for English language learners, people with disabilities, etc. We have an Ethics Studies book, which is very important in California. Now we have a new GE specific to Ethics Studies. We also included people of color and adjuncts in the creation of this textbook, and we are working on a Spanish translation. We have a new Microbiology Lab manual that does scientist spotlights on people that were often excluded from other science materials. And some lessons learned. One thing I wanted to touch on, there's several on the slide, but just to be quick. Faculty, they're going to be at all different levels of OER expertise and some of them, many of them haven't created OER before. And so we learned after the fact that we probably should have put more support in the way of accessibility and formatting licensing and dissemination of their projects. And so we are working with them on that now. Here are some resources for you to check out. Our peer review, rubric and our DEI framework are listed on the slide. So someone's putting links in for me. Thank you. All right. Sorry. I'm done. You're good. Exactly right. Thanks, Kelsey. That was amazing. Stop sharing. There we go. Great.  Thank you, Sue and Millie. Take it away. Hello everyone, my name is Millie Gonzalez from Framingham State University, and Sue and I are going to be talking about Rotel remixing open textbooks to an equity lens. Next slide please. This is about the grant. So it is from the, we were funded by the open textbook pilot $1.3 million. It didn't come at, you know, one full, you know, one chunk. So, you know, so it was interesting the way that it came. That's another story for another time. But what's really special about the grant is it's a collaboration of three university state universities and three community colleges. This is something that personally I haven't seen this type of collaboration. And it's only enriched the project, the project. The grant pays stipends to faculty. We provide institutional support at each institution. We provide extensive training, and then we also have an industry advisory board.  You know, the goal really is to remix and develop accessible, intentionally inclusive OER. So from its inception, we are centering accessibility and inclusive equity. So, and it's important to reflect the students local and lived experiences, particularly from underserved communities. There's a lot of information about the stipends for faculty. A little bit about the support, we provide support and training and we, you know, we actually had to develop this. We created our own entity, and then we enlisted the OER heavy hitters, right. We partnered with Rebus Foundation. We developed a publishing success team. We have training webinars. We reached out to consultants who are experts in DEI and accessibility. And then our goal at the very end is really to ensure scalability and longevity and really promote the textbooks not only within Massachusetts but statewide and nationwide. As I mentioned before, really, you know, in its exception, inception, we are focused on making the textbooks inclusive and equity focused. So as I mentioned before, we partnered with, with leading experts in OER and accessibility without their expertise, we, we, you know, the project would not be as successful as it is. The faculty are exposed to training, to mentoring and consultations and things like that. So it's personal, it's group training, things like that. As I mentioned before, we actually realized, oh my gosh, we need, we're actually publishing these textbooks. We ended up creating a publishing support team. And what was important as we brought in our, our vendors, our experts and the publishing support team members were thoroughly trained in inclusiveness and accessibility. One of the things that we wanted to do is we wanted to encourage diverse faculty to remix textbooks. You know, and it was quite surprising how difficult that was to enlist faculty of color to be interested in this project. So, you know, so we have some lessons learned how to do more outreach. You know, from the outset, when we talked to faculty, we wanted to make sure that the textbooks that they produce, they were intentional about representation, pronouns, accessibility and context. And most importantly, we anticipate student learning outcomes that will be improved. Again, particularly from underserved communities because of exposure to an inclusive accessible textbook. And how will we know we're going to track it through assessment. Next slide please. I'll turn it over to Sue. So, nearly talked a little bit already about our partners, but our goal in partnering with the professional organizations is really to offer the ability to offer a high quality output of the OER creation and ensure that it is shared widely. Rebus community, all of our faculty went through the textbook success program, and we felt that the faculty that did go through that program were much better prepared when it came to writing their textbooks. You know, we partnered with Hypothesis. So, faculty to encourage, you know, open pedagogy practices by really allowing students to interact with the textbooks. You know, press books is the publishing platform that we chose. So we wanted, like I said, the high quality output. And lastly, we, well, Millie already mentioned ISME and the professional development training that they offered around accessibility and DEI. And then the lastly, we are working with Dr. Michelle Promwell as our diversity equity inclusion consultant to work individually with our faculty to ensure that their textbooks are centered in equity. And she has been reading through all of the textbooks and meeting and consulting with faculty through the process. Next slide, please. And the publishing support team, as Millie said, we quickly realized that faculty needed more support to get their textbooks to the finish line. So, and of course my phone is ringing, sorry, if you can hear it in the background, it won't stop. Based on this need, Rotell has established a grant-wide faculty publishing support team led by Marilyn Billings, who is, I believe on this call today. And this team works in conjunction with each of the local institutions. The purpose is to provide a consistent level of support and look and field faculty projects that are funded by Rotell. It consists of Marilyn, who is out the faculty advisor and the point of contact for the faculty. We have two content editors, a media specialist who works with faculty on interaction H5P activities, images, things like that. And then we have a technical editor who has developed a style guide who is, you know, ensuring that the faculty, the books are getting into press books. And if you are at OE Global, Marilyn will be presenting a couple of times, I believe so. You can learn more about this team, but I truly believe that the PST, the publishing support team, is a model worth considering and duplicating for these types of OER publishing projects. And it's really made a huge difference for us. All right. Next slide, please. So the assessment. So what does success look like? How are we going to measure it? Outside of the data that we need to report to the grant, we're using the poop framework that allows, you know, for more advanced assessment outside of just the cost savings. And then the perceptions area is really where we wanted to focus. So we have a student perception survey that we created that will tell us, are these textbooks making a difference? Are they our students feeling more included? Are faculty feeling more engaged and included? And we kind of based our survey off of a survey that Amy had created and shared with us. So thank you for that, Amy. All right. And the next slide, please. So the most exciting part now are our books. Next slide. So one of our textbooks, as we, as you know, are equity centered, thereby enabling minoritized and marginalized students to have their needs, experiences, and stories centered in the content in the pedagogy. So the first book that I'd like to just talk about quickly is in these books have not been published yet, but they are coming soon. Social Work Practice and Disability Communities by Elsbeth Slater and Lisa Johnson. The main goal of this textbook is to introduce an intersectionality informed and critically, culturally competent approach to anti-oppressive social work practice with disabled people in the United States. So the themes woven throughout the book are the intersectionality theory and critical competence framework. The secondary objective is to present the experiences of a range of disabled people with different social identities in various service areas as a way to inform better social work practice. So we're very excited about this book. Next slide. The next book is the whole child from two faculty at Northern Essex Community College, Professor Bedziner and Buckley, they collaborated on this project with a strong commitment to creating a culturally relevant content that's relative to all of their students, a majority of whom are Hispanic. The course is required by all Massachusetts early childhood educators to receive their teacher licensure. So it's widely used across the community colleges. And they have spent the past few semesters using the book and really getting a lot of student input from it and having the students help create the content of the book with them. Next slide. And the next book I would say is very exciting statistics through an equity lens by Professor Yvonne Anthony at Framingham State University. Dr. Anthony has observed over the many years of teaching statistics that the statistics education community has not yet emphasized how to improve achievement of traditionally underserved and marginalized students. So her project is an opportunity to help fill this void. Each chapter there is an intentional focus on promoting equity in society and using data that is not generally used in statistics textbooks to improve social issues in society. So another book that we're excited about all of them we are so next slide. And what are the results so in five years this is what we hope this will look like we have 43 projects that will be published. 58 authors in total 1290 students reached a projected savings for one year of $149,000 which we know will be a lot higher because there are more than one section of each, you know, of each course taught six institutions and you can see the bottom the cost savings. So those are the results and hopefully lots of improvement in student learning outcomes through the focus of equity centered in each of these textbooks. The last slide I'm going to just hand it back to Millie quickly is to talk about the challenges because of course not to end on a negative note but we do there were a lot of challenges. So what we discovered is that we were quite naive in the very beginning of the grant and we didn't realize and understand how complex the grant is which is okay but you know when you're when you're thinking about writing your grant you also have to take into consideration that it's going to end up to be a lot harder. You know we were initially ambitious we projected 70 textbooks one on earth where we think he go. So but we landed in, you know, like around 40. So, heavy workload, you know, that's what it is, you know, it's really hard when you have six institutions in terms of the communication so we're always trying to improve that. You know, we are not publishers right we learned quickly that we needed to create a publishing team so that was just really interesting.  Right. And they're like, is that all. So, you know, so it is really setting the expectations and reminding them that this is something that is unique, and that our individual institutions just couldn't provide. And, you know, and it is a lot of work and so, you know, that's one thing to remember but you know, when it boils down to when we think about the what we are trying to achieve. We do it, you know, no matter what any time again. So, it is challenging, you know, there is a lot of work. It's on top of our regular work, but we would do it in a second and I would do anything to work with Sue again. Thank you. So this is the information resources if you want some more information about motel, the list of projects. We're very excited to share our results. And thank you so much. Thank you both, Millie and Sue. If you're watching the chat, there's quite a bit of quite a few responses here. Thanks, Amy. Okay. Can you see my screen? Okay. So I'm going to talk about the Targeted Pathways project in Oregon. And as one of the other groups mentioned, we didn't initially receive the funding when we first proposed this grant. And I just want to emphasize that having a grant proposal not funded means that you have pretty well thought through models in your back pocket that's kind of shovel ready. So, when we, when Oregon was thinking about how to allocate the gear funding, governor's emergency education, really funding, you know, COVID pandemic, really funding. And we had just spent, you know, a lot of effort to create this federal OER grant proposal. I was like, hey, here's a project that is pretty much ready to go. So. That was a really persuasive thing to be able to say to our higher education coordinating commission. And then later, as, as Millie mentioned, it's like a bit of a story that we received partial funding and then there was another allocation we received full funding. So the projects that I'm going to tell you about were funded by the open textbook pilot program, the federal OER grant program and also gear funding. The pandemic funding ended right in June. So now it is fully under the umbrella of the federal OER grant funding. So anyway, just to kind of normalize that it was like a bit of a twisty road to get where we are. So our project goal is to develop high quality accessible open educational resources, including textbooks and course materials with an equity diversity and inclusion lens. And this is a graphic that our previous grant project manager, Phoebe Dario created to really show that the students experience with the OER is at the forefront of what we're doing. Our goal is to keep that in mind at every step and the way that we've defined quality is in the circles that are around the students experience. So we consider a high quality text to be relevant, meaning that our students show up in our texts through representation and Oregon specific contexts and inclusive assignments. High quality also means accessible so it's usable by people with disabilities to the greatest extent possible, aligned with state course outcomes and workforce standards and designed with an equity lens, meaning it's transparent. There's aligned learning pathways, clear expectations, clear connections between the course content and the student experience and engagement. So having a really strong definition of quality has guided us. And I think in this group it's really clear what an openly licensed textbook is right the book has the open license where the creator retains their copyright, but is giving future users permissions to do what we call the five hours. And alongside that we're also sharing openly licensed course packs. So those are learning pathways that are complete with module structures and, you know, aligned outcomes and objectives, learning management system shells and other ancillaries like assessments and activity outlines. So we're removing barriers for students by providing low cost and no cost materials that have this equity lens in their design. But we also really want to remove barriers for future instructors to make it as simple as possible to adopt, or if it's not exactly what you need to adapt. So that's our project goal. And these are the courses that we are developing. We are four. We've got three disciplines criminal justice human development, family studies and sociology. And we're doing lower division courses. Lower division courses are relevant at our community colleges and our universities and our dual credit programs in the high schools where students burn college credit while they're before they graduate from high school. So lower division courses are really where we can reach the most possible students. And at the end of my slides, I have some links to other resources and PB and I shared a blog post on OER and beyond about how we use different data sources to arrive at the conclusion that these were the courses that we should develop open curriculum for. So we had a data driven approach to identifying high enrollment degree pathways that lead to in demand occupations with minimal OER currently available. And if you've been reading that federal request for grant proposals, you will see those keywords show up in the grant requirements. So we really used the data to try to narrow in on what the grant was looking for. And we were lucky in that we were able to reuse an existing analysis of statewide data that correlates high enrollment majors with high workforce demand, but it would be possible to recreate that from data sources in your state if you don't already have that. And I also should point out that both criminal justice and HDFS offer career opportunities at every level of credential. Right. So there's a workforce element with a certificate and associates, a bachelor's or even a graduate degree, making the OER that we're creating relevant to anyone in a community college or university pursuing those pathways and then sociology, lower division sociology in Oregon tends to be more of a transfer course rather than like a workforce development oriented course. But that discipline is often a prerequisite or even a pathway requirement in CJ and HDFS. So this is how that all the courses hang together that we were developing. And then the other blog posts that we shared on OER and beyond. And again, the link is at the end of my slides is about how we talked about what we expected the impact of our work to be from an equity perspective. So in our grant proposal, we were very open about the fact that, you know, the research in the open ed field shows that the sense itself is it's not expected to have an effect on student outcomes. And to me, that makes perfect sense because the open license doesn't tell you about quality and any of the dimensions that I was just mentioning, right, like the open license tells you about its copyright status and what permissions you have to, you know, make use of the work. And I'm going to tell you about whether it's aligned relevant designed with an equity lens or accessible, right. So, instead, our proposal said, okay, that's not where we're going to be looking for impact. Instead, we expect student outcomes to improve because we're going to provide access to higher quality learning materials than those available commercially. Right. So we really brought it back, centering it on our definition of quality. And we're expecting to see a positive effect on students affective experience of the curriculum. And we're also expecting to see improved academic achievement. And as I mentioned in the chat a minute ago, we are working with a professional research firm RMC research to help us do this assessment. And I really have loved working with them. And it's just great to have a professional because it is, you know, sort of beyond my goal set to be able to do this research in a way that we can feel really confident in. So having a professional really helps. So I want to also just talk about our project team. I know that all of us have mentioned the importance of support. And I think a common theme is that we needed more support than we initially expected. So, we needed more support for our authors and instructors. We found ourselves adding like development consultants for the author teams and adding an instructional technologist and a book designer. We needed all kinds of roles to support the folks that were creating the OER, but then we also even needed more support for our support. So, we had an open education instructional designer on our team and she raised the flag and said, this is more pilots than I can support development for we need some contractors. So we've been adding even more support for the supporters that we already thought that we needed. So, just to underline that. Which I know other folks have also mentioned today. And there's one role that I wanted to particularly pull forward because of the topic of this webinar we have two equity consultants on this project and Heather Blicker is here and she's one of them. So I just wanted to recognize her efforts on this project. So, oh no. There we go. So, these are a few bullets from the request for proposals that we shared when we were looking for equity consultants and that full RFP is also linked to the end of my slides so don't feel too worried about reading all of this text. In summary, we want the equity consultants to help us ensure that considerations of equity diversity and inclusion are built into the development process from the very beginning of the project and remain a priority at every step. So this happens on multiple levels. We work with the development consultants. When we need, you know, another pair of eyes on something that the authors or the pilot instructors have created. Or if we need another pair of eyes looking at peer review feedback that we might or might not share with authors and how do we make that actionable for the authors to take that feedback. But we also really value the equity consultant input on the process itself and informing how the leadership team works. So one example of this is creating an equity statement specifically for the targeted pathways project, which one of our equity consultants led that process. So I just wanted to pull this forward and say this is a role that you can build into your grant budget at the proposal stage. And I have a few quotes from participants talking about the impact of working with the equity consultants and the instructional designers and using open pedagogy. I think I won't read these out. I know that you have the link to the slides, but I want to leave enough time for questions. But to me, the takeaway from these statements, you know, just with my coordinator hat on is just how incredible the people on this project are and how wonderful it's been to work with them. And we're very excited that we get to share their work hopefully soon. So these are the questions that I imagine people might have. Maybe I'm heading off a few chats at the past. So can you pilot that we are course materials. If you looked at that list of courses and they're relevant to you. Please reach out to me. My email address is on this slide and I'll also put it in the chat. We're prioritizing Oregon pilots, but there is room for us to look beyond Oregon. So, yes, you can pilot and it's not the final launch version yet. It's a script that has been through one pilot and is now under revision. So that's, that's what you would be piloting now. And when will the text books be out of pilot mode? We're looking forward to a launch next spring 2024. Part of our grant is to disseminate the open curriculum development model that we have created to guide these 12 projects from start to finish. And we're going to share that at the end of our grant period, which is going to be August 2024. That's going to be like the big book of everything. It's getting very big. And all of this will be shared on open Oregon dot org and reach out to me if you want to talk about any of this or, you know, find out how to be notified. So this is the slide with links to more information. The first two links here are the blog posts that I mentioned from Phoebe and me on OER and beyond that are relevant to anyone who's writing a federal OER grant right now. And then we've got a couple of posts on the open Oregon dot org blog about a couple of the different roles that I didn't talk about so much today. Our research consultant and her workforce advisory board roles. And then last is the request for proposals that I mentioned when we were hiring equity consultants. And one last thing here lessons learned. I've got an image of a very tall pile of papers and what I mean to say by that is that it's a very tall pile of lessons learned on going, I would say. And just a couple of things to share that very much echo the wisdom of the other presenters as well. You know, thinking about timing and trying to avoid eating up your grant funded time on recruitment and decision making if at all possible. So in the proposal stage, if you can think ahead about your structure and your partners and get those in place so that when the funding comes you're ready to go as much as possible. That's the more efficient use of the time once the clock starts ticking on the grant. In terms of capacity, something that I've been thinking about is sort of a compare and contrast like, are you looking for funding that is going to build your core capacity. Right, like that would be one kind of grant writing process, or are you going to leave your core operations exactly as they are and look for grant funding that'll let you do stretch activities that are outside of your normal operations and then at the end of the grant period. Maybe it becomes sustainable to roll that into your core operations but it's something that's sort of a satellite of what you are currently doing. So just two ways to think about capacity that might help clarify. If you're writing a proposal and then the third piece of advice is that you'll very likely need a project manager. I really recommend writing that in as a line item. I think if you want someone at about one, one day a week, like 50 bucks an hour, you would put in about $15,000 a year. And then, you know, maybe you'd be able to hire someone full time if there's more room in your grant budget. But it is a really important role. And if it's someone who only has time to like help you make sure that your deliverables are on track and like file those federal reports that need to be filed quarterly like that alone having someone to be able to take that assignment would be a huge help. So with that I will turn it back to Lori back. Thank you. We do have a few minutes for questions. If you have some questions you can put them in the chat. I think there were some questions. You see Amy, they were wondering how many books were published and how many authors involved. Oh yeah. So we're developing 12 books and the number of people involved at this point. When we last counted I think it was like over 70. I think all of our authors and contributing authors and pilot instructors and people on the team in general it has become bigger than I ever expected and I think that's a common theme among everyone who presented today. Huge. Milly, there's a question for you here. What are the lessons learned on recruiting faculty authors who are people of color what are effective strategies. I think that you know I was kind of surprised initially when we started to do the outreach, because we, you know, the, the proposals were really excited the funding was really there, just in the support. When the first round we received crickets. We're like, what, you know, what do we have to do, right, especially because, you know, in our proposal in our outreach we are saying this is something that is extremely important to, to the, you know, to our grant. So the second round, the second we had three rounds. So the second round really is again, you know, within our institutional support teams that are six institutions, it really is, you know, just doing one on one outreach to specific faculty.  You know, and one of the things that we, we would like to do, you know, if we do something like this going forward is also, you know, tap into the affinity groups the existing affinity groups on campus like for example at framing him state there's a faculty of color. You know, affinity group is also a faculty of color mentoring thing so there are opportunities to, you know, to reach out but but initially I was quite surprised, but that one on one outreach is extremely important. But I think we can always do better. Thank you. Any other questions. Thank you all so much. I'll go back over and take a look at some of the links and the slides. Great stuff. Our future fall webinar series are going to on October 11. Kimberly Carter will host a panel talking about faculty buy-in for OER adoption and development on November 15. We're going to have a presentation on designing inclusive and accessible OER courses with the EDI and UDL. And then on December 13 we're measuring impact with open ed course markings. I'd like to mention that we use the feedback for planning future webinars. If you take time to fill out the survey at the end, that'd be great. Stay in the loop. Join our community email or you're welcome to read the EDI blog posts and the student OER impact stories. This is the feedback if you wouldn't mind filling out a short survey so that we can plan future. Liz has put that in the chat. Thank you again to all of our presenters and feel free to email us with any questions or comments. I had another question. Please. So, Kelsey Smith from CC Echo mentioned some of the professional development courses that were developed that they want to share widely. She wanted to mention some of those while we still have everyone here. That's sure. So we have two. Sorry, my memory is a little bad today. One of which had just we piloted this summer. It's all about using OER and open pedagogy for. The focus of the course was for HSIs, but all underserved students in general. That one is available on Canvas Commons. I'm sorry, I don't have the exact title of it right now, but if you. Liz or Una, could you put in the CC Echo homepage where I can when I'm done. The other course was done a couple years ago now. It's a fantastic course if you have support staff on your campus for OER. It's all about hiring and training OER support staff, whether that's students or classified to get them ready and prepared to help your faculty with OER. Adaptation or creation and that one I believe is called the OER specialist. Yes. Yeah. And I put the case study link in earlier studies on all of those where you can find out a little more about them. I just have to go back and look that up again. And the first course I mentioned is available in both a self paced as a self paced course and a facilitated version. So if you have someone on your campus that can facilitate the course for a group of faculty or you just want them to work through it on their own. Yeah, so they're all, if you just go through this link I put there, you can see those courses and they're available for, you know, colleges that may not have that support directly and might want to adopt them. Because they're all open and licensed. Thanks, Kelsey. Thank you. You were the question here if the slides will be available. And yes, this does make the slides available on our website. CC, OER.org. Thank you, Amy. Thanks Amy. Perfect. We have a few more minutes if anyone has any other questions. Oh, here's here's a wild question. Would you do it all over again? I know it's a lot of work and it's a little bit of a joke but I think you go into these grants and of course we're so excited right you know, and then wow. I think that's a really good question and to be honest, when the federal OER grant folks got back to me and said how about accepting your proposal at one third of the proposed budget. And please rewrite the budget narrative to fit this. I really did think about saying no. Because it is so much work to do it and I sat down with a spreadsheet and realized that I would still be able to hire a full time project manager at that lower funding level and to me that made it worth it. But like, yeah, I think that's not a silly question at all. I think it's a really serious question. I wonder what the other folks would say. I was going to say absolutely, but I would do it differently. And I would take a lot of Amy's advice about hiring support for your support and we need a lot more support and we had a lot of turnover during it and suddenly I became PI and project director and I didn't have a project manager like Amy was saying it would have been great. And L is here, L is our lead at Moran and we, the leads at each college ended up having to do a lot more support than we knew we needed to do. So I think we would have structured things a little bit differently and use our funding for more support to help us with less stress next time but I've, it's been a great experience and I've learned so much through this experience as well. And I agree with that. And I think now that we have had all of this experience we do things a lot differently but I would definitely do it again, especially since now we have this, you know, whole process in place and in Massachusetts we don't have any funding for OER so these grants are really the only way that we can keep this going for now so we're hoping that who knows maybe there might be another grant coming. Thank you everybody. Thank you for joining us. Don't forget to fill out that survey.