Well, good afternoon. I'm going to speak into the mic because we are recording this. I'm really excited to be here. My name is Jasmine Roberts. I'm a professor at Ohio State University. My colleague, Marilyn Billings, she's from UMass Amherst. And we're here from the Open Textbook Network. It's basically an organization that helps to provide infrastructure and open education programs for your respective institution. Thankfully here at Roger Williams University, you guys are a new member of the Open Textbook Network. And so essentially, I kind of want to provide this faculty perspective of using open textbooks. I've used OER in my own classroom. I took on the ambitious endeavor of authoring my own open textbook so I can also speak to that experience a little bit. But honestly, guys, I want to hear from my faculty, well, everyone, but I definitely want to hear from the faculty in the room in terms of where you're at, in terms of your pedagogy, some of your concerns about course materials, and ultimately, what do you truly want to get out of this workshop? And so that's essentially going to be the agenda today. For the first half, it's going to kind of sound like doom and gloom, because I'm going to be talking about affordability issues and how high-cost textbooks kind of contribute to some of those issues. I'm going to try to focus more so on, again, the pedagogical benefits, because I think that's where faculty really play a larger piece to that. But of course, students matter just as much. And then I'm talking about open textbooks, open pedagogy. I'll talk a little bit about the library that we provide through OTN, and then also the faculty reviews that we so, so, so want from you. So just to kind of hear from you guys, I wouldn't like it if you would to introduce yourselves. Yes, I am that professor. So just your name, department, why are you here, your level of awareness of OER, whether you have never heard of OER, like what the heck does that stand for? Or you've used OER in your classroom, open pedagogy, all of that. So we will start actually right here, and then go, yeah, we'll start right here, and then go, oh, yep. Uh-huh. Very good. Why I'm here, this is a tremendous question, really. Yeah. I like to think I don't mind about the sort of thing I've not used OER in my classroom before. Have you heard of it? Absolutely. I mean, I've thought about it. Right. And I understand that many of my, I would like to get my students more engaged in the process in one way or another, so I guess I'm here. Thank you. All right, start. Yeah, thank you. Just name, department. Could we use the mic for this? Thank you. Because we're recording, I'm sorry. I probably should have specified that in the local market. Hello? So I'm Karen Bellotti, and I kind of crossed a number of departments. But I work here in the library in the second floor. I'm the director of the tutoring center. I also run the writing center. I teach in writing studies, typically. This semester, a couple of semesters, I also teach in English. And I also co-run the intercultural leadership ambassadors, which is the ILA program on campus here. And those are students who come to the university who have significant financial need. And so the textbook issue has been a constant issue. Hello, everyone. I'm Mirta Ventura, I'm the instructional design specialist. I'm located at University College in Providence. And I'm here because I support faculty and adjunct faculty members. So I'm familiar. I've studied OER to some degree, but I would like to know what are the most burgeoning practices and what I can do to support our faculty. I'm Maya Bennett. I teach in engineering, which is a department that relies heavily on textbooks and very expensive heavy ones. I have a little awareness of OER. I heard Lindsay and some other colleagues here talking about it at the Women at Roger Williams conference last spring. And that's what really opened my eyes to this, even being a possibility. So I have one senior level elective that I'm trying to implement this in currently. And I would love to have a little more guidance on how to find really great textbooks and not feel like I'm just shooting fish in a barrel, kind of like searching the internet frantically for sources. So that's where I'm at. I'm Adam Moore from the Department of Education. And I tried to incorporate OER reading materials into my course. I found it difficult to find quality, sort of. We're going to talk about that. Some of the textbooks. So for me, in my field of special education, I haven't found a lot. And maybe it's that I worked with Lindsay, too, to help start with that. But certainly, I'm trying to, in my classes, turn classes into more open access for students. We're just doing introductions. Just name department. Why are you here? Your level of awareness regarding OER. OK. I'm TJ Sotomayor. I'm with the School of Justice Studies. I'm an adjunct at the program. I get a school of no Doug White, so I work for him. I only have a part-time. I have a full-time job everywhere. I think a lot of adjuncts have to sort of couple together. But anyway, so for this particular semester, I'm actually teaching an online only class. Sometimes, I've been with Roger Williams for five years. But the evening classes, lecture, online, are a mix of continuing ed, what is it called now? University College, UC, and also the traditional students. So we have a mix of those. And what I've actually found challenging is to have different types of learners to comedy. Lecture only doesn't work for some people. Online only doesn't work for some people. So what is a good medium? Because the discipline is cyber security, computer programs. I do a lot of the computer program courses. So that lends itself for online. There's a lot of online tutorials. I am basically going out to the internet. I guess somebody else, some other speaker, said that. I have sort of curated my own set of good instructions that whatever the topic at hand at the right level. Defining the right level content for the right audience at the right length is always a challenge. And I have to spend a lot of time. And sometimes I just have to give up and just use, you know, a set. That's convenient, yeah. Cengage already has a lot of programs, workbooks, quizzes, and so forth. So I don't like to cheat in that sense. But I know that they're very expensive. I didn't even know that some of those textbooks cost like hundreds of dollars. Times how many credit hours you have to take. And it's when I realized that, oh, I better go for something alternative. And I think last semester, as a good example, one student, actually two students, were using the old edition of the same textbook. And I was wondering why you keep on turning in these old, even the one edition off, they were different enough that when they were submitting their assignments, they were working on the wrong assignment. So I kept not saying, why are you working on this? And they told me that, oh, I couldn't really afford the latest version. So I actually went out and bought the old versions. Why didn't you tell me that? Because I probably could have gotten you something. Or I didn't realize that. I know that I think a lot of students don't share this with me, but I think the cost of the textbooks is just prohibitively expensive. So I really start to seriously think about that. Then when I heard this, oh, I better do something. That's why I'm here. I think that's it. Yeah. Sorry, I'm late. No, you're fine. Like I said, I'm really excited. It seems like this is going to be a really great group. A couple of things that I do want to establish for everyone. Oh, I'm sorry, before I get into that. So again, I am from Teach at Ohio State, full-time there. But I also speak through the Open Textbook Network. This number probably has changed since we created this little cool infographic. So we have approximately 604 textbooks in our library. And about 2 thirds of them have been reviewed by your respective colleagues. So I think that's a really cool thing. OK, so what I'm not going to be doing in this workshop, I'm not a sales rep, so I've already established who I am and my affiliation. It's with Ohio State. We are not a textbook publisher, so this isn't going to sound like a Pearson, Cengage, McGraw Hill type of workshop. We're not trying to sell you anything. We're just trying to raise awareness about OER and how that can enhance your pedagogy.  I might mention maybe how they can improve in terms of not gouging prices.  They do serve a purpose in our marketplace. And whether we agree with that, that's a whole other situation. But I really want to leave space and time to talk about OER mostly. And then you might find at the end of this workshop that OER might not fit into your respective classroom setting. And that's OK. You can at least pass this information along to some of your colleagues. All right, so here's a question that I kind of want you guys to kind of tuck in the back of your head in terms of the course materials that you've been using in your classroom. What are some of the most pressing concerns and or challenges that you or your students have with your current course textbooks or course materials? So just think about that and save that for later. All right, so this is me and my students from a couple of years back. I know I look like one of my students. That's a perk of being a millennial professor. But part of the reason why I'm here, guys, is because of my students. This is very personal for me. I remember as a first generation college student at the University of Michigan, a professor assuming that since I was at Michigan, I can afford his $120 textbook. And that was furthest from the truth. And I remember now, at least as a professor, I definitely don't want my students to have that impact or that impact, that same experience that I had with that particular professor. There was another experience that I had. It was in an investigative journalism class that it took, I believe, my junior year. And it was a great course for the most part. But I noticed there was a heavyweight in that field that was missing from the course curriculum. And this is her, Ida B. Wells. So if you don't know who Ida B. Wells was, she was a prolific journalist back in the late 1800s. She was an editor for the Memphis Free Speech Paper. She really spearheaded and reframed the conversation about lynching in the United States, because up until that point, it was framed, not necessarily in a positive way, but not in the way that we perceive it today. And again, I was just really shocked that we weren't talking about her. And so I remember coming to the professor during office hours asking, why aren't we talking about this person? And I kid you not, she literally said, well, it wasn't covered in the textbook, I'm sorry. And I just thought that wasn't a good enough reason to leave someone like her out. And again, just kind of harkening back to that experience. I don't want my students to have that same experience as well.  And as a result, whose experiences and voices are you leaving out and consequently marginalizing? And what are some priorities that or some factors that you use to basically come to this decision? So a lot of people don't know from the United Nations, there's actually language embedded that calls for higher education to be accessible and affordable to everyone. And unfortunately, as we know, that's not necessarily the case. In fact, cost has been a factor for so many students. I think it was 2.4 million low to middle income students, unfortunately had to drop out of college due to costs. And I just think that's unacceptable. Sometimes this price tag, right, affects students before they even come onto our campuses. So I'm not sure if you guys have heard of the notion summer melt. It's this phenomenon that prevents, or the cost aspect I should say, prevents prospective students from coming onto our campus. These students in particular come from low income backgrounds. They're first generation students. They're transferring from community colleges and they're coming from minority communities as well. And it's up to 40% of those college bound high school students. In terms of funding, again, we read the newspaper all the time in terms of the bleak picture of funding for higher education. A lot of the responsibilities being shoved onto the parent or to students to provide funding for their college degree. Here in Rhode Island, it's completely flipped. So there's a lot of pressure for students and their parents to provide financial support for their own education. In terms of debt here in Rhode Island, as of 2018 approximately, or there's approximately $36,000 in college debt, here at Roger Williams, unfortunately, it's a little bit higher than that state average. And so this brings me to this slide. So unfortunately, I wish I could tell my students that I can provide them with free tuition. Wouldn't that be amazing? We just had the Democratic debates yesterday and I'm sure they talked a great deal about that. Room and Board, I wish I could provide them with free housing. But what I can control, books and supplies, definitely. And it's really interesting because if you look at this list, I'm gonna go back here, books and supplies, I would imagine it's not the most expensive item on this list. But again, this is the one that I can control as a faculty member or have the most control over. All right, so what I'd like you guys to do is to actually partner up or get into groups of three for my faculty members especially in the group and kind of discuss these questions with your partner. So how exactly do you go through that selection process of choosing your course materials? What are some pedagogical priorities that you use to select those course materials? And do you actually ask your students about their opinions about the textbook or course materials? I'll give you guys about three or four minutes or so and then we can kind of get back together as a group. All right, so let's go ahead and get back together as a group. Already hear some really great discussions going on. So starting with the first question. So how do you guys select your course materials? Take me through that process. Is it just the content that you're looking at? Colleague who authored it? Cost? Cost and everything is entered by selection. Okay, great. Now you're just here. Yeah, yeah. Oh, are we still using the mic? I'm sorry, when we're... Okay, sorry about that. It's for the recording. Yeah. People are going to listen to this like, okay guys. The cost never really entered into the picture until fairly recently, as I would say. But I do have specific course sort of a path, learning path for the entire cybersecurity curriculum. It's sanctioned by NSA and Homeland Security. So I pay attention to where does this particular course fit into the overall achievement of this degree. So I kind of start from top down in that sense. And of course I do consult Doug White, the chairperson. So what do you think about this? He usually says, whatever you think is good is good. I trust you. He's like, oh, thank you very much. That's good that you have that autonomy. Oh, I have plenty of time, sometimes too much. Someone else want to chime in? In terms of... I actually do consider costs. Not for any altruistic reasons, but simply because I want my students to read the material. And I mean, I know based on experience that sometimes if you tell them this is the book and they look and it's $127 that they're not gonna buy it. So I try to, as we talked about in our small group, I try to incorporate currency and social science so I can do that. And I can literally say to them, listen guys, I know this book is $5 used on Amazon. We could order it now. So I'm sympathetic to the notion of you can't afford textbooks. I really get that, but not this particular textbook. You can afford this one or this book. $5 textbook, right? I'm sorry? The $5 textbook, okay. I know you can afford the $5 one. And I know you can afford the $7 one. So let's do this. So don't, and if you can't, and I always tell them, come to my office and have a private conversation, I'll get it for you. We'll figure out a way, but we can't have this excuse of not getting the textbook because it's too much. So that kind of, I am incredibly sympathetic to cost and I do kind of factor it in, but it's easy in my distance. Let's move on to the second question. Do you guys have any particular teaching styles or your own pedagogical philosophy that you're using when you're selecting course materials at all? Can I speak up? Yeah, absolutely, of course. So what I always try to encourage people to do is to use something where you can, it's one click almost where you go to one page and you can find everything because with online learning in particular, I find that people create links to links to links and then students get confused or they get lost. And so for me, yeah. So for me, I always say to people, if you can put everything on one page, then that will create, in my mind, the least amount of confusion. So I'm always trying to think of, for people who aren't in the classroom, what's the least confusing experience that they can have? Anyone else? I think for me, I try to explicitly tell them that the readings or whatever course material I'm using, we are gonna reference in class and they'll say thank you because I think that's often something that students have said, people ask us to buy these $200 books and then they don't use them. They just say, read this, but then it's never explicitly referenced. So I try really to explicitly tie in, talk about the readings, have them use the readings, whether it be a journal article or the book that I've asked them to borrow. And then finally, do you guys actually ask for feedback from your students? I'm getting a couple of like, yeah, maybe I should do that. You're taking your head, yeah, how do you do that? How do you ask for feedback? Just at the end of the semester, like a survey or? I actually continuously ask, or throughout every week, I actually have an online Bridges forums. What'd you think about this chapter? Oh, nice, okay. The Bridges Hour of Learning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And some say, great. Some says, no, I hated it. It's a difference between everybody's learning style. Right. But unfortunately with the textbook, it's already fixed. Can't fix that if you're not into reading. Well, I think you're bringing up a really interesting point in terms of with traditional textbooks, they are fixed, right? You're not able to, with some of them, customize them, tailor them to your own respective learning style, your classroom experience. And I think that's one of the promises of at least some OER in terms of you can do that for your students. The students can even do that for themselves. So, yeah. And I did want to kind of do a little tangent here. These slides will be provided to you guys at the end of the workshop. So you don't have to hurry and write everything down. All right, so we have already kind of hit on some of these points in terms of from the student perspective, their general dissatisfaction with some of the course materials that we're assigning. The biggest thing that I hear from my students is that they're not seeing how this applies to real life or on a bare minimum level, they're not seeing how this applies to their lived experience, their personal experiences. Along those lines, especially my students that are coming from minority communities, they're not seeing how this relates to them culturally. A lot of the examples that we don't even know that we're using in the textbook come from a very westernized white perspective. And for my students who are not coming from that perspective, that makes them feel left out of the classroom. Students are able to learn better from an example, excuse me, that's more culturally, socially relevant to their lived experience. I'm sure we get this a lot as well from our students. There's too much jargon. Like just give me the high points, concise, get to the point so I can move on to the application part. I find that a lot of my students are more interested in how can I apply this either to my job? How can I apply this to other classes? How can I apply this perhaps as something that I've viewed in the news? So they're getting so tied up in the jargon to where they don't have time, at least they feel like they don't have time to apply. And last but not least, it's boring. Yes, I do too sometimes. I'm gonna kind of breeze past this line because I feel like you guys get the point in terms of high college or high textbook prices. They've risen, oh my gosh, astronomically since 1977 over 1,000%, which is crazy. That's higher than the consumer price index. Here is a picture of someone. I believe she's from New York University so not that far from here. Back in 2014, 2015, these are all her books that she had to buy over a course of seven semesters and they totaled up to grand total of $1,400. So it looks like I'm trying to figure out her major history of medicine, the Communist Manifesto, Oxford Study Bible, Biochemistry, Microbial Disease, something in the science. All right, in faculty, we're chiming into this conversation as well. I think we all can agree that textbooks are way too high for students. They're not able to access the textbook because of this cost aspect. And as you stated earlier, it might not be in terms of for altruistic reasons while we're concerned about the textbook cost. It might be because we simply want them to engage with the material, and they can't do that if they can't afford the material. And then students, of course, outside of tuition, the ability to afford course materials is right up there in terms of some of their biggest concern, excuse me, and their biggest challenge. So I kind of wanted to show a clip from students at my University of Ohio State in terms of their perception about high cost textbooks. I always find this video very, very funny because it is refreshing to hear from them, and it's also kind of funny to hear some of the responses to this issue from students. I think it's ridiculous. I get most of my textbooks through Ohio Link, so a lot of them I can get for free just running them, but a lot of the language ones I know, like my Spanish textbook, I have to go pay 200 bucks today. I think that there are a lot of good alternatives to getting textbooks, usually. I think they're pretty overpriced, around $200 for a Calcura Chem textbook. I know there are a lot of good options like CHIG and other places you can go to rent them or get them for lower prices, but I do think, especially since they're a necessity, that they should be all lower. The cost of a new textbook is over $100, which is ridiculous, and then on top of that, a lot of times they make you pay for your homework. I think they're too high. Honestly, for some classes, chemistry was just insanely high just for one class. They're really annoying. They're super expensive, and I feel like going to a school of these standards that we're already paying so much for classes that pay so much for textbooks, it's a really large hassle. I think they're ridiculously high often, especially for biological sciences and other sort of sciences like that. I've always appreciated when they're not that bad, especially when professors maybe don't even assign textbooks because it can be such a huge waste of money, it feels like. Any other school-related stuff, like tutoring services or school supplies or just any other living related things, like buying food and stuff. There's a lot of different costs for students living on campus. I've been thinking about doing a study abroad trip, and I would definitely like to be saving some money for that. I could probably put it more towards clubs and other things or even going out in town or experiencing more stuff around campus. Like using the money towards my rent or towards my food or towards other supplies for those classes. I'm kind of a big nerd, so I'd probably spend that money on books that I actually want to read sometimes. So I love that video because it kind of illustrates that students are doing value judgments all the time when they're in the classroom. And so this is actually, I actually forgot the university where they did this kind of a campaign to raise awareness about the high costs of college textbooks. And they had students write on a sticky note and place it on a wall. What could they have spent their money on instead of high cost textbooks? Now some of them are really funny. I'm not sure if you can see it. PS4, right? We have Justin Bieber, video games, trip to Disney, a ukulele, vacation to Europe. But some of them are actually kind of serious. Food, yeah puppies, right? Food, food is coming up a lot. Rent, a decent meal, right? So it's really unfortunate that some of our students are foregoing sometimes food, right? Just to afford a textbook. I think that's just completely unacceptable. All right, and along the lines of value judgments that students are making in order to cope with the cost, they're doing a lot of different things. So one of my friends is an academic advisor at a university that I'm not gonna talk about. And she actually started a crowdfunding campaign for one of her students in order to help her to cope with the cost. People are going to go fund me, right? To afford textbooks. I know, right? Other things that people are doing, so you kind of mentioned that your students, or I think someone else had mentioned your student, yeah, you've mentioned, your students are buying older editions of the textbook, obviously. They have, or they run the risk of turning in something that's out of date, not correct, all of that. Some of them will delay purchasing the textbook until they receive a refund check. But what are some academic ramifications to that? So if they're waiting to purchase the textbook, what's gonna happen? Yeah, they'll fall behind. Anything else? Especially if you're eating. Yeah. You know, they can't do these things. Right. Yes. Mm-hmm. Right, right, absolutely. You're doing a net running. Yeah, yeah, right, right. And it's a lot more common than what you would think, yeah. Yes. Uh-huh, yeah. So they withdraw from class, perhaps, or they just stop coming at all. That's what you're saying. Okay, right. Yeah, absolutely. Mm, wow, wow, yeah. He felt like it was just, it would be too overwhelming for him to try to catch up and, yeah, wow, yeah. Well, I mean, kudos to you for even reaching out to that student, because sometimes professors won't even do that, so, yeah. Some students will not purchase a textbook at all. I've done that when I was in college. They share it with other students, but again, what's the implication of that? Negative impact, sharing with other students. Yeah, so limited access. And then around exam time, the textbook gets really, really popular. And I separate this out because there are legal ramifications to downloading a textbook from the internet. Illegal ramifications, so. And then here, this is a quote from a University of Minnesota student in terms of justifying why he did not buy the most recently updated textbook. He said, I figured French hadn't changed too much. But again, I don't blame him for making that value judgment. And then academic impact in terms of the high cost of textbooks. This is from the Florida Student Textbook Survey. It was conducted twice. Once in 2012 and once in 2016. So two thirds of students in that survey reported not buying the required textbook because it was so expensive. Some of them will take fewer courses, which affects all of us in this room, especially faculty. If we don't have students in our chairs, in our classrooms, that affects our livelihood in terms of being faculty members. Some of them will earn or perform poorly in class, drop the class completely or even fail. So again, just some academic implications here. And then this quote is from a community college student out of Santa Ana in California. And I thought this was really, really, really compelling yet depressing. She said, I've had friends and no other students who will change their major. Not because they're not intellectually capable of succeeding in this major. They will change it just because of the cost. And so I was saying this morning, we're losing very capable students just because of the cost. And I think that's really, really, really unfortunate. And now I wanna kind of transition into the pedagogy part because I feel like when we talk about OER, we focus a lot on students and as we should. But I also wanna make sure that we are incorporating faculty more in terms of the promise of OER put pedagogically. And so what I'm seeing in higher ed in terms of how instructors are approaching the classroom experience, a lot of us have been taught, whether it's by our advisors, whether we saw this in college, to teach to the textbook. So our syllabi is arranged according to the chapter in the textbook that we've assigned. And so for me at least, I felt like that really limited my autonomy that I had as a faculty member. But unfortunately we're still seeing that a lot. That's the traditional way that we're approaching classroom curriculum. Also kind of harkening back to the example of how some of our textbooks and course materials that we're using lack cultural relevance to our students and that can enhance this notion that the current pedagogical practice that we see in higher ed lack inclusive teaching practices. A lot of our students are not contributing to that knowledge and content creation. We approach students as these knowledge buckets, right? So I'm the professor, you listen to me, I'm the expert case close. Instead of really using students and leveraging their learning experience in terms of viewing them as fundamental contributors to that learning experience. They can spearhead this if you just give them a chance. And then kind of along those lines, disposable assignments, very transactional in nature. So essentially what we do as faculty members, we assign them a term paper or an exam. They get a grade and then that's it. They forget the content. They're not applying it to other classes. They're not applying it to their jobs. Very disposable in nature. And so I encourage you, especially the faculty in this room to stop teaching just content. We have to remember that we're teaching people. And one of the things that I've tried to do in my own classroom is to think to myself, what kind of student do I want to come out of the classroom or to, yeah, come out of the classroom at the end of the semester. And then from there, what kind of skills will help to develop that student. And then what kind of course materials will help to enhance those skill sets. And I think if we approach it that way, that kind of relieves us from this very textbook-driven course that so often we use. And so as you can see, the system that we're currently using is very, very broken. And so OER can be one solution to some of the issues that I've talked about, but again, it's not a silver bullet, I guess you can say. All right, so going back to this question that I posed to you guys at the very beginning of this workshop and we don't have to split up into groups, what are some of the most pressing concerns that you have with the current textbook or other textbooks that you guys have used in the past? Let's move this outside of cost because we talked about cost a lot. Any other concerns that you have about textbooks, course materials? I know it's hard. My concern is that I teach several courses and I'm always paying attention to how does that, how do these courses fit into other sub-disciplines or sub-specialization that the students might be teaching. And when you look at each individual textbook, they don't really, I think students have tougher time picturing how this particular course content relates to other courses that they're taking. And I have to really emphasize, bringing in real-world examples, hey, this is relevant because of this, this, this, this. But by simply just reading that, there's no way they're gonna get that. So that, part of my responsibility as a teaching staff is to make that connection. But I just feel that so many of these textbooks that we have, we just stand alone, disposable, like you said, that's a great word for that. Because I'm trying to... To be fair, I didn't make that up, that was David Wiley. I just want to put that out there. All right, thanks for Mr. David Wiley for coining that term. I try not to make each individual courses, textbook assignments disposable. They all relate in a professional life. And it's great when someone says, oh yeah, I remember you taught me this and back two semesters ago. I actually used it today. That's a great thing. Absolutely. That's why we teach. And I think that's my concern, right? There's no big picture, you know? Yeah. I was really compelled by you talking about Ida B. Wells because this is a problem in engineering. No surprise, right?  And I had to change my freshman year engineering course textbook because the first time a woman showed up in the book, it was a naked body of a woman talking about how you designed for different sized people. So it's bad. It's really bad. And how are we gonna get better representation in our textbooks?  That's just the fact. So how do we bring in this relevance to our students? And I don't know if that's happening in engineering textbooks anywhere, but I mean, you are able to bring in currency into your course. And there are obviously a lot of engineering things going on, but they're not showing up in our textbooks. So that's a big challenge. Yeah, we're probably like 20 years behind, you know? 30 years behind. That's why. So the thing for me that I see is this kind of delay in like, we have physical textbooks and then eBooks and then we have learning management systems. So you're trying to get everything to work together and it's very confusing for students, but it's also confusing for professors. And so for me, like the big thing is how do you stream, like in thinking about streamlining this process, and I think it's still in development, but the easier the better because then it will be such a more vivid and robust learning experience for people. And I think right now we're stuck in that kind of like weird spot where things are coming together, but they don't always work well together. So that's what I'm, that's what I think about with textbooks sometimes. Just to second that thought, if we are struggling, students are struggling. We are struggling to use these tools. And if you are struggling, the students are obviously trying to figure out the scratching their head out of these things together. I wanna go ahead and move on to actually talk about open textbooks. So I'm gonna actually breeze past this here I was just showing you guys the, and I'm not sure why, I think that happened with Maryland's presentation earlier. But here on this left hand side, this is the, I guess you can say the traditional model of how textbooks are created. So you have a publisher who is essentially going to pay people to contribute to this textbook. They recoup the cross through profits and they pay the authors of the textbook through royalties. I have quote authored a textbook and it's always so interesting when faculty members will say, I'll just team up with Cengage or Pearson and make $50,000. That will not happen. I get like a $2,000 royalty check every semester and that's about it. So I just wanna put that out there. That would be great. Right, right. That's a $35 check. Oh my, see, see, so you can attest to that as well. I really do think there's a misconception when I talk about OER. Some professors are like, I'll just write my own textbook and team up with a publisher who has an infrastructure in place and it's not all, the grass is always greener on the other side. I'll just put it that way. Here is the model that we're using in a lot of OER. So we have a foundation or some large source of funding that is gonna help with the content creation and overall infrastructure of publishing and creating this textbook or this open resource I should say. We do pay people who are contributing to this resource and there's very little cost, if any, cost to students. But we're missing something from this model. Where are we missing here? You wanna think of it? Copyright. So we don't know exactly what or how the user can engage with that material, what they can actually do with that material. And so with open textbooks, we basically explain what the user can do through license, open license I should say that's been created by the Creative Commons. You guys familiar with the Creative Commons? Non-profit organization that does a lot of great work in the open, just open field, I guess you can say. And so with these open licenses, I think there are about six of them. And they basically again tell the user what they can do with this open resource. And so I'm gonna quickly breeze through some of the license that you will see here through the Creative Commons. CCBI, that's the most liberal of the six license that you see here. So essentially you can do whatever you wanna do with that textbook or that open resource as long as you attribute the original author. So site, the original author. CCBI NC, non-commercial. So you can do whatever you wanna do with that resource except for you have to attribute the original author and you cannot make a profit off of that. I'm gonna put an asterisk by that cause I know there's, I'm not sure, anybody shouldn't even get into that. I'm not even gonna get into that, okay. CCBI share alike. So you can do whatever you want to do with that open resource. You have to attribute the original author and you have to license it in the same way that that original author did. So let's say that you're using my textbook which is a license under CCBI NC. And let's say it's a CCBI share alike I should say. And you want to edit that textbook a little bit. You wanna customize it to your respective classroom experience. Has to be licensed that derivative in the same way that I originally licensed it. CCBI NC share alike. That's basically what I just explained. CCBI non-derivative or no derivative. You cannot edit it. And then CCBI non-commercial, non-derivative that's the most restrictive of the open license. And there's some argument as to whether or not that's truly considered open. Again, I'm not gonna get into that conversation but that's the most conservative of the Creative Commons license. Any questions? I feel like I just gave a lecture to my students. Correct, CCBI. Do whatever you can, you can make money off of it if you want to, you can edit it, you can redistribute it, you can keep it for as long as you want. Whatever you do to it, you have to attribute to your original author. Yeah, correct. What were you gonna say? That's a really good question. I can't really speak to that. I know I will say this in the past couple of years because what some traditional textbook publishers are doing, they're taking open educational resources and putting a paywall behind it, those that have that CCBI license. So what you're seeing some folks who are authoring open content, they're changing their license from CCBI to CCBI non-commercial. So we're seeing that shift a little bit but in terms of the most popular, I can't really speak to that, to be honest with you. Does the Coast area use some of the creative content in the same model? Yes. I assume it's, you know, he or I can say. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cheryl, like, yeah. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah. Open source software. Right, right, absolutely. I think how it works with textbooks then. So if you actually create them, sort of a regular, do you have to contribute to it? That depends on the exact textbook. You don't have to contribute that if you don't want to, but you most certainly can, yeah. All right, so this is the model that we're seeing that a lot of open educational resources use in terms of having a funder in place to help to financially support the creation and infrastructure surrounding the open resource and that is licensed through Creative Commons open license. So I wanna make sure that we establish a couple of definitions here in terms of what I mean by open. Oftentimes, including myself, before I got into this whole open education, OER conversation, I thought open was synonymous with digital resources and that's not necessarily the case. So it's not just anything that you can find online or in the internet of that sort. I'm gonna skip past that. Oops, I'm so sorry, guys. So it's the permissions part that I find really, really fascinating about OER. So it's not just the free argument that you see a lot of OER folks engaging in. It's basically the permissions that are enabled through this open license. So as a user, I can keep this open educational resource for as long as I want. There's not a paywall that says to me, for example, as a student, as soon as I leave this class, I can't access this text or I can't access this homework packet. I can customize it to my own respective learning experience. So I can remix it perhaps with other materials that are also openly licensed. As soon as I remix it, maybe I wanna share it back out to the general public so I can redistribute it. I can reuse it to my liking and again, I can edit it, especially if I find something in there that maybe is not as accurate as it could be or again, isn't as relevant to my particular context. Okay, and so as you can see, these are called the Five R's of OER. One of the gurus in the open education movement, David Wiley, who I mentioned earlier, he came up with this really cool way of remembering the permissions part of open education or OERs. All right, so I wanna again, kind of circle this back to faculty in terms of what I hear from my colleagues and when I talked to other faculty at various institutions, their concerns about open textbooks. So the number one thing that I hear from faculty is quality. Quality, quality, quality. How are we vetting the content and the accuracy of this particular open textbook? And I will say there are some open textbooks out there that are not great, just like there are some commercial for-profit textbooks out there that are not great. There are some open textbooks that are in fact peer reviewed or reviewed by your respective colleagues and there are some that are not. So it's a wide range of quality that you're gonna get as you would see with a textbook that was published by a traditional publisher. Time, so I also hear this a lot from my colleagues. I don't have time to look at all the resources that are out there in reference to OERs. And I kind of said that this morning in terms of I find that interesting. I'm not trying to tell people what they should do with their time, but I know as a professor, I get some breaks here and there. I get a summer break, I get a winter break and I think we can use some of that time, or at least we're supposed to use some of that time, to reflect in our courses and think what's been working for our students and what hasn't been working for our students. So again, I think that's one way that we can kind of get around that time argument, their time barrier. Now, this one is very, very difficult, right? So lack of infrastructure or lack of institutional support. I get that a lot from colleagues who are at other institutions. They say, Jasmine, you were really lucky. You had a grant to support your OER adoption project, your OER creation process and absolutely, I was very, very, very lucky. Another thing that we're seeing here at a lot of institutions, this doesn't count towards T&P, their tenure package. And that's a true concern. I know we're having conversations about this at universities nationwide, but nevertheless, that's a serious barrier that we have to consider when we're trying to get faculty to at least look at open textbooks and adopt them in their own respective classroom. I think you had talked about how you've already looked at open textbooks in your particular area and they're not really that relevant. And so we get that a lot as well. Of course, you can customize and edit it to your liking, but again, that goes back to the time aspect that I just talked about, so. And this last one here, I feel like we do not talk about this a lot in academia. We don't like to share our stuff. We like to share it with our colleagues, right? The same five people that are in our respective field, but we don't like to share that out with the public. There truly is a fear of sharing in academia. It's something as simple as a syllabus that we don't even wanna post online because we're afraid of being ranked in some capacity. We're afraid of the perception, right? So I think that's another factor that we definitely have to consider in this conversation. Any other barriers that you guys can think of, faculty? This is a pretty exhaustive list, right? So going back to tenure and promotion, does this count towards anything? It's a reward system that we have in academia. If it's not helping my research, if it doesn't count towards tenure and promotion, if this isn't gonna go on my CV in some way, I don't see the point of it. And not only that, the incentivization of adopting OER. Outside of a grant, a lot of faculty members are still like, this is great, but I don't know if I'm really motivated too. So yeah, having that support to really adopt it. And for those who are ambitious like me, who wanna create an open textbook, that can be even more of a concern, you know? Yeah. Yes, exactly. Yeah, I can speak to my personal experience. So it was really important for me that I wasn't writing this textbook just for my students. I really was thinking about this in terms of from a global audience perspective. And so I submitted the textbook to the open textbook library so that other faculty members could see that this is available, other repositories, other places that host OER. So I think that would be a good place to start. I actually, let's see, another thing I did. Oh, I attended open education conferences to talk about my experience. And so that's a very kind of like already natural thing that faculty members are doing, presenting at conferences. So that will be one thing that another faculty members can do. Yeah. Other, yeah. It does. You gotta take them through that process. Right. And I don't know if my support people in the room can kind of speak to that a little bit in terms of the Roger Williams context of it. Yeah, so I think it's really easy for me to help you with adoption. If you just wanna adopt a textbook, I can help you find that resource, show you how to embed it in bridges. It gets a little trickier if you say, I'd like you to help me revise this textbook and customize it, which we can certainly do. We have the technology to do that, but we don't necessarily have the manpower and the resources yet. So yeah, I think a lot of institutions are kind of grappling, we're at that step where faculty are engaged and they want to do this work, but we need the actual resources to do it. No, be a problem, be an agitator. I feel like you potentially undersold the notion of sharing syllabi and things like that. Particularly in this day with the increased adjunctification of the professoriate, the death of tenure, the needs, the desires of a lot of institutions, hypothetically, to get rid of tenure track faculty to replace them with contingent faculty. So why, what interests would there be in full-time departments making syllabi super easy so that we could be replaced with adjuncts and farm out all of our work in our intellectual property that way? I know that's not the intent, but it just seems as a full-time tenured faculty member who sees the death of tenure probably in my lifetime if I live a little longer, why should full-time, if we truly believe sincerely that tenure is a good thing, that full-time professors are good things, why do we want to contribute to the death of it? To be honest with you, I don't really have an answer to that question, I think it's very compelling. I'm not sure if I personally agree with the whole death of tenure argument there, but yeah, no, no, you're not, you're not. But I think that's a really, really good question. I truly do, I don't know if anyone else, I just wanna, yeah. I don't think this really answers your question, but I think there just has to be a culture shift in academia because sharing is a taboo thing, we don't do it, we're not rewarded for it. So I think that shift has to really come from the administration. I think there needs to be language in the contract that supports creation, faculty's support of OER, stuff like that, so all of these dominoes have to kind of fall into place. I don't really know how we do that, but like you were saying, that's gonna take some time, absolutely, I mean anything in academia takes a long time to change, but I appreciate you bringing up that point. Anything else, I just wanna make sure. All right, in terms of why some faculty members choose to use OER in their classroom, so they feel like it really facilitates that free exchange of information that we kind of hit on a little bit earlier. It enhances this faculty autonomy that so many of us love in this room, so instead of selling our knowledge to a traditional publisher, we can take ownership of that content because we are the experts, like you were just talking about earlier, I'm the expert in this classroom. And then also, a lot of the OERs that we're seeing here, at least some of the new ones have been authored by your colleagues, by higher education professionals from very, very highly ranked institutions, such as MIT, Brown University, Harvard, and so much more. All right, so finally, open textbook network library. So what we're asking you to do at the end of this workshop, not at the very end, but at some point in time, before November 28th, to review a textbook that's relevant to your particular discipline out of the open textbook library. This is powered through the open textbook network. We have, like I said, almost or probably over 605 textbooks. The website, again, I just wanna make sure that you guys have that, open.umn.edu. And then if you were to go onto the website, you will see that there are a variety of subjects here. And then also the cool thing about each particular entry for each textbook is that you have the table of contents once you actually click onto that textbook. You have the different files that this textbook or that you can access this textbook through. You can also see the license of the textbook. And then again, that lets you know as the professor what you can use or how you can use that textbook. And then you can also, excuse me, you can also see some reviews from, again, colleagues, folks that are in your field. All right, I just wanna pause here, any questions? All right, in terms of submitting to the open textbook library, we do have a couple of requirements here. So this particular resource needs to have some type of portable file. So in other words, you need to have the ability to download it. Has to be a complete textbook or a complete resource of some sort. So no drafts or anything like that. Also anthologies, we try to stay away from anthologies in the open textbook library in terms of hosting those. It has to be an affiliation with some type of higher education institution or scholarly society. It has to be what we call original or new work. And then it also has to be used to support some type of course, again, at a higher education institution. And it goes without saying that it has to be openly licensed and that includes images. You can link out videos. That's a question sometimes I'll get from faculty members especially those who want to create OER. So you can link out videos from YouTube but you can't embed it in your actual text. So I also want to make sure that's clear. Yeah. Actually learn something from the IP lawyer at Creative Commons. You can embed videos and open textbooks. Yes. Good, good. What's great. I do have a question. For my course, I often annotate the actual textbook with using PNAPTO. And I'm actually doing things with multiple screens and I'm actually doing the code samples and commenting and just blabbering on. So that's, I typically have like five, 10, 15 minutes short segments and I'm actually embedding my coursework. So if I were to use those resources, how would I do it? I don't know if you can, I'm so sorry. I don't, I think. It's not meant for open use but it's for my students. Oh, okay. That's a really good question. I've customized, so I would have a PDF portions of whatever it is and I would insert a link and say, okay, watch this, this is not clear to you. Here's my comment. For those people who get it, they can just skip it. Yeah. That's, I was told that having to use short videos in a five, 10 minutes, the millennials, whatever they used to using. It's Gen Z now. Gen Z, whatever it is. They're used to using short videos. So you don't want to record 50 minute lectures. So that was my comment. Carolyn, did you? Okay, okay, all right. All right, so how many guys have heard of open stacks in the room? So they're out of Rice University, they produce a lot of open textbooks. They're one of the more popular open textbooks in the marketplace and what I really appreciate about open stacks is that their textbooks provide a lot of support, a lot of ancillary materials that are on my next slide here. So this is some of the ancillary materials that you might see from this particular textbook. The physics one, yep, just want to make sure. These are for students. And then on the next slide, ancillary materials for instructors. And that's another barrier that I see from instructors, college professors. That's great, OERs are great, but they don't have ancillary materials. And we're actually seeing more and more OERs come out with ancillary materials. It's not at the level that I think we would like it to be, but it is coming. So definitely be looking out for that. All right, so OER is definitely making an impact here in the state of Rhode Island. You guys as governor, this is most certainly on board with many open textbook initiatives. In fact, this one here, and I believe you guys, have you guys hit that a million mark yet? Okay, well see, this is even outdated. This was from, I think, yeah, yeah, that's really, really amazing. So, and so you guys are also at your respective university doing some really, really good OER work, excuse me. So here this is a textbook from one of your colleagues at Roger Williams University in the Open Textbook Library. Okay, very good. Another one from Dr. Paul Webb, and he's in which department again? Okay, all right. So again, some of your own colleagues are definitely contributing to OER content. Dr. Heather Macelli, she's a course science instructor, and she's really interesting in terms of what she's using in the classroom. And I don't know if, Lindsay, you can kind of speak to that just a little bit so I feel like you can explain it a lot better than me. So Heather is one of our OER fellows and she's been with us for two years in this project and she basically said, I wanna know what an open textbook in core science would look like written by core science students. So she's having the students write the textbook. It's openly licensed, so each new semester when she gets a new cohort of students, they evaluate what's been created and then they contribute more. They fill in the gaps, they revise the research, they update it, so it's really, it's been a really neat process. But Lindsay, doesn't that adulterate the content or the quality of the textbook? No. But again, I understand in terms of open pedagogy, and I'm actually gonna go ahead and move, oh wait, maybe I should talk about this. But open pedagogy is essentially OER enabled pedagogy where you're really engaging with that permissions piece of OER and it's a radical approach to the classroom experience because it's no longer this notion where again, students are knowledge buckets. We're actually using students as content creators, it's user-generated content and for some of us in the room, that's scary. And in fact, it might be like, I'm not doing that with my students. But it's really cool to invite students into that process. But kind of going back here in terms of the impact of OER on teaching, so this data is from a couple of studies that I'm pulling from here. So I remember when I was authoring my own open textbook, one of the things that I found, I guess you can say empowering is again that I was more intentional about my teaching practices. I couldn't just hide behind this textbook that my department had said, yeah, go ahead and use that. And I couldn't hide behind the chapters that were provided in that textbook. I had to think really, really strategically and intentionally about that process and that I believe, firmly believe actually that was due to OER. And then in terms of collaboration, I know that there's a colleague of mine at the British Columbia Institute for Technology out of Canada. She and I have kind of collaborated to produce an edition of the textbook that I originally authored so that it's more applicable to a Canadian context. And I probably wouldn't have been able to do that through a traditional textbook. And again, going back to that faculty autonomy, I no longer am kind of ridden to this particular textbook that someone told me to use. I can do essentially what I want to do or what I feel is most beneficial to my students. And speaking of the customization promise of OER, here are just a couple of examples. So I wanna talk about press books a little bit. Press books is essentially the platform that a lot of OERs live in. It's powered by WordPress. Super easy to use for the most part. That's where my open textbook, or that's the platform I'm using to create my open textbook. Press books has this really cool feature where you can clone a press book's books. So all you have to do is go into the back end of press books, copy and paste the link to the textbook that you wanna perhaps modify or remix with another material. And it'll copy that entire textbook for you. And some of my colleagues who have done this at Ohio State, they love, love, love, love this feature. Yeah, right, right. Oh no, no, no. And I'm not saying, and I hope you don't get that impression from today's workshop that I'm trying to encourage everyone to start from scratch and go ahead, do your own. He's like, no, that's not it. In fact, if I had to do it all over again, to be honest with you, I probably would have started at that place in terms of remixing it with another material instead of starting from scratch and authoring my own open textbook. Because it's a lot of work. It's definitely a lot of work. Oh gosh. I was speeding on Zalas. So it took me four months, but I wrote pretty much every single day. And that was over the summer with exception of weekends, yeah. Yeah, it was pretty intense. Rewarding at the end of the day. Nevertheless intense, yeah. All right, here, can you guys see this okay? Yes, so here's just a quote from again, a faculty member kind of a testing to some of the benefits of using OER for their particular classroom experience. The key words that stick out to me here is that this professor was able to customize the text, manipulate it to their liking, and more importantly, making it relevant to their students. And I know I've said that a lot, but again, moving away from the cost savings argument because I feel like we already know that, okay. What is it in for us as faculty members? How is this going to enhance the learning experience of our students? That's what we need to kind of focus more on in terms of talking about OER. I'm gonna stop here. Paul, is there any questions? So far.  I'm just curious. Sorry for always speaking.  Classroom? For the classroom. I don't lecture, right? I'll give them the introductory material, have them read it, come back to the class and would do the labs. With online, you can't do that, right? But whereas I'm actually asking as a part of an assignment to have each student to do a video recording of a particular topic and have them teach me. Show me that you have an understanding because learning how to teach it, right? Yes. Of course you don't learn the subject matter. So I did that, okay. Show me 15 minute video on this particular topic. And so I did that. How would I do something like that, where they can either write a video recording or do something incorporating to those texts? How would, is that possible? Yes, absolutely. I think that's possible. I'm still a little hesitant to speak to that only because that's not my respective expertise. I'm not sure if anyone else can, yeah. So we were talking about this yesterday and there's interoperable features within press books that seems like where there will be this potential to add features like that. So this is where I was talking about the course management system versus the open textbook because the course management allows you to do that right now, system, course management system. But the textbook seems like it's heading in that direction also. So there's kind of like a, they're heading in the same direction with different features. Yeah, I'm like partially to have some sort of a seamless winding of the open text in Martin Management. I don't want to replace Martin Management with grade books and a lot of other features that I'm adding in the open textbook, but I don't want the students to go out and mention multiple platforms. Right, that's a good thing to be using. I think there is an option where you can embed open, especially the textbooks that are through press books embed them through your LMS. And so that's also an option to where like it streamlined a bit. So yeah, yeah. Yeah, realistically. I was just reading yesterday that there is a potential feature where you can have, embed like chat rooms and things like that within different systems. So it will, but I'm not sure if it functions within this at this point, but as it evolves, I think we will get to that point. For those who are interested in modifying or editing a current open textbook, not starting from scratch, we do have a resource for you through the open textbook network. Actually, it's available for anyone if you just simply Google this, there's a PDF that essentially takes you through that process of modifying an open textbook, especially depending upon the file that it's used in. I'm not gonna say that it's easy, right? To modify an open textbook, it really depends upon the file that you're working with, but you do at least have this resource for you to kind of take you through that process. And it seems like you guys have the support here at Roger Williams University to also help you with editing or modifying, excuse me, an open textbook.  There is also a resource available for you guys that are truly interested in authoring your own open textbook. And again, that's simply stated, authoring open textbooks through the open textbook library. And this PDF is available in my slides. So again, Lindsay will forward this information to you all. All right, and the last thing I wanna talk about, second to last thing, open pedagogy. We kind of discussed this earlier. It's OER enabled pedagogy where there's more emphasis on the student or the user contributing to that content creation process. It kind of disrupts the model of expert student or teacher student model and more enhances that community model in a university setting. Here are some examples of open pedagogy projects. I'm just gonna show you guys a clip from this webinar that kind of talked about a project that attempted to use open pedagogy. And it's actually easier than I think some faculty members might think. So I wanna go ahead and, yep. And it's starting, this particular part of the webinar, this individual was just talking about a project where a professor used a student to modify a textbook that he was using in the classroom. But I think that another thing that goes along with accessibility or ease of use is the information easy to understand. Can students digest it? Will it stick with them? And I think that our team has done a pretty good job of that. We worked on a water technology textbook, Water 32. And sure, actually, I'm gonna try to pull it up right now. Great, so this is our textbooks page. And this is our water tech textbook. So I wanted to actually show this page first because this is a diagram that was created in Photoshop by a former COCOER assistant named Natalie Miller. So for this water tech textbook, there needed to be a visual diagram of a water bank. However, at the time of this textbook creation, no water bank diagram existed that was openly licensed. So Natalie had some tech backgrounds and tech experience and she went into Photoshop and created this diagram specifically for this textbook. And that's I think what I'm really trying to get out when I say ease of use is that this student collaboration OER, when students at a community college get to work with community college professors, we get this cool kind of collaboration where people from a tech background or an English background or a history background, they bring their skills to the textbook. And yes, the professor is writing the content. The content is definitely coming from the professor. But the COC student can bring in a tech skill like this and create something that is very unique and very specific for the COC students that are gonna be reading this water technology textbook. There, general thoughts about that.  I think it's extremely exciting in terms of advancing education and what students can do to show that they are learning. I think one of the 21st century skills is gonna be this idea of creating and synthesizing all of your knowledge to create these transformative items. And I think that this is just an example and it's really exciting. And it makes students more intentional, I think, about their learning experience as well. I just wanna go ahead, I'm sorry, professors have even empowered their students to empower them to create test bank questions. That's also another popular open pedagogy project. I'm not gonna get into detail about that for time's sake. But again, going back to that intentionality, how are having students think really carefully about what constitutes a good exam question. I think that's fascinating, so. All right, so I'm gonna go ahead and breeze past this in terms of talking about the efficacy of OER in terms of the impact that it's had on students' academic performance. So there's a meta-analysis and I believe there's actually another one that's in the works, took 13 peer-reviewed studies, basically examining the efficacy of OER. So essentially what kind of impact is OER having on our students? Within this meta-analysis, it looked at almost 120,000 students. There's a lot of students that we're talking about here. And then this meta-analysis found that for students who used OER in the classroom, they had the same or better outcomes compared to students who were in classes that used traditional textbooks. So I think my point that I'm trying to make here is that research shows that we're not putting our students to a great disadvantage when we're using OER. And I think that's a really legitimate concern that we have as faculty members. If we're using OER in the classroom, free resources that are not peer-reviewed in the traditional sense, am I really adulterating that quality here? Am I really having a negative impact on my students' academic performance? And again, a lot of research is showing that that's not the case. There's this really popular study out of the University of Georgia that looked at the impact of using OER to at-risk students. So you guys can see here from this study, for students who used OER in the classroom, they performed better. There were lower Ds, or reported Ds, Fs, and withdrawal rates. And this particular impact, I'm not sure if you guys can sense this here, was particularly prominent for Pell-eligible grant students. So again, the ones that are most at risk to drop out of college if it had not been for some type of financial assistance. Yeah. In terms of access, I can access that material from day one. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I can't, so in other words, when I'm assigning OER in my classroom, I'm leveling the playing field. And I'm not in some implicit and unintentional way telling a student that they don't belong in this classroom because they can't afford this $120 textbook. Yes, yeah. Yeah. Day one, day two. Exactly. Week one, everybody's moving. Right. Two to three weeks, people stop showing up. Yes, yes. Absolutely, absolutely. And then here's some open-ended feedback that you can kind of read to yourself to a bit about banter. General thoughts, what are some key things that you guys pull out from this quote from a student? Any key ideas? I got ideas. Yeah, right. Okay, yeah, absolutely. It's a different climate. It's a very different climate from when we were in college. Right, right, right, absolutely. All right, so what can you all do in this room? So we would love if you take a look at a textbook that's in, again, your respective discipline for your particular class. We're not asking you necessarily to adopt. That would be great. But just take a look at what we have in the Open Textbook Library. Of course, if you do adopt a textbook through the Open Textbook Library, we will be really, really happy about that. But if you decide, hey, this isn't really for me. Thank you so much for coming from Ohio Jasmine. But yeah, I'm not sure if it's for me. At least talk to your colleagues about this, because even though I feel like more and more faculty members are at least somewhat aware of OER, I still think that they conflate OER with digital resources. And so if you can maybe communicate to them that it's not just that, you know, through that open license, you aren't able to do a lot of different things through this resource. So we would really appreciate if you could at least say that to some of your colleagues. And then I think Lindsay can kind of speak to this a little bit more, but you will be receiving an email with a link to review the textbook that you've been assigned to review. The review is with an open license. Your name will be on the review as you guys might have seen when you looked at the Open Textbook Library. So make sure you check for spelling, grammar, and punctuation. And as a result for a token of appreciation for you guys taking out your time and resources to do this review, there is a stipend for that. So ooh, where do we get the funding? That's a great question. A lot of different places. Yes, yes, yes. Well, you know, and again, I think this is becoming more and more of a priority. And I'm not trying to go through the doom and gloom rhetoric here, but we are in this bubble in higher ed. At least I believe we are. And that bubble is gonna burst pretty soon if we don't do something proactively about some of these issues. As a relate, not only to costs, but the actual classroom experience that our students are having. I think in general as a society, we are making constant value judgments about the role of higher education, right? And so I think a lot of funders, a lot of people are trying to proactively figure out a solution to some of these issues that we're seeing to answer your question in a long-winded way. Yeah. We had somewhere that, maybe Bill Gates will call on you in the library, so I think we might be funding something. Yeah. Yeah. The issue that you mentioned is they're really my classroom. They're always questioning about our education. Yeah. Why am I paying for this? Right. And I don't blame them. I don't blame them. I don't have an answer for that. Right. I can make the course experience better for that. Yes. So I can do the role of you and have your questioning. Yeah, especially when higher education is supposed to enhance social mobility and oftentimes depending upon the background that you come from that can actually exasperate social mobility a lot of times. So yeah, going back to, they're constantly asking those questions. Why, why, why? And I actually find that really refreshing about students in general. They're holding us accountable to making this make sense to them if that makes any sense. All right, and so I just kind of want to leave you guys off with this quote here that I was asked a question from a reporter at the Columbus Dispatch, a major newspaper in Columbus, Ohio. And she wanted to know basically if I could sum up why OER, in my opinion. And so this is essentially what I said. I said, if you're unaware of OER, know that this isn't just a textbook issue. I love, love, love OER because of course it can address that student-centered learning that we're supposed to be all about, enhances faculty autonomy, and it can address some of these institutional issues that we're facing in higher education. And so I had a lot of fun with you guys. If you have any questions at all for me, just talk to me after the workshop. Here's my email address. If y'all are active on Twitter, I am. You can tweet me or any form of content that you guys are most used to using, go ahead and do that. So thank you so much, I appreciate it.


There's nothing in Reddit's help section about the emotional distress caused by their awful redesign. I guess facts don't care about my feelings. Feelings are hard.  And then you realize that you just forgot to drink your morning coffee. The traditional way we think about emotions casts them as fundamental building blocks of our mental landscape. Raw, unprocessed, automatic features of the human psyche. Tap someone's knee with a mallet and their leg jumps. Cut them off in traffic and they'll feel angry. Jump out of a bush at them with a scary mask on, they'll feel afraid. Fear, anger, happiness, lust, all of these emotions are automatic, pre-programmed responses to appropriate environmental stimuli. You can sometimes do funny things with those circuits, but when everything is working normally, stuff happens and sometimes that stuff trips some switch in your head that makes you feel feelings. Along with emotions, psychologists sometimes highlight a related phenomenon they call affect, which is a sort of general vibe on two axes, pleasant to unpleasant and excited to calm. Imagine being content, pleasant calm, versus ecstatic, pleasant excited, versus bored, unpleasant calm, versus murderously angry, unpleasant, excited. Many emotions are associated with certain physiological responses according to where they land in this schema, a display of affect caused by the triggered emotion. If you're feeling anxious or guilty, that causes you to sweat or knit your eyebrows together. If you're angry or jealous, you might narrow your eyes or grit your teeth. The emotions as discrete modules in the brain model is very useful. It readily describes the subjective experience of feelings as we feel them, but as with many models, there's some weirdness around the edges that maybe cause for some skepticism that that's really the beginning and end of the story. For example, there doesn't really seem to be anything like a rigorous objective way to determine someone's emotional state from the outside. It's no surprise that different people express the same emotions in different ways.  Those differences are compounded when you compare emotional reactions across cultures. But even with very sensitive measurement tools like fMRI data, galvanic skin response, or electrodes on the face or scalp, there's a lot of evidence suggesting that no two people have enough brain architecture in common to verify anything but affect. Forget looking in a brain scan and saying, this person is anxious, that person is depressed. The best you can really do is say, these people are not super excited and not loving it. To make things even more complicated, the same person can experience the same emotion with an entirely different network of neurons firing. Being angry that you burnt dinner might look totally different than being angry that your laptop died. Even for gross evaluations of emotional states that we'd imagine ought to be dead simple to identify, humans are very easy to trick if given the wrong context clues for what that feeling might be. Take the same face with the same expression and change the background, maybe frame it with a colorful story or some moon music, and you can easily get someone to confidently identify the wrong emotion. That's kind of fun, right? But even more interestingly, it's not particularly difficult to get people to misidentify their own emotions. Forgetting your morning coffee and being pissed off at the world is an example of what's called a misattribution of arousal, confusing a couple of emotions that happen to share the same general affect. Maybe you felt like the world is ending when you're really just hungry, or if you drink too much coffee, mistaking your racing heartbeat for a feeling of imminent doom. It takes many years to teach children who are otherwise inclined to throw a tantrum that they're really just tired if the primitive emotional response model were true, if our brains contain hard-wired circuitry for feeling depressed or anxious or delighted, and our bodies responded to these emotions in reliable ways, we'd have to find some way to excuse or discount these discrepancies. Or, if you're up for it, we could try something a little more unconventional. Lisa Feldman Barrett's Theory of Constructed Emotion flips the script on the traditional interpretation of how emotions work. Despite how instantaneous and direct the things that we call anger and sadness and awe feel, according to the theory, they aren't really raw elements of our psychological landscape. They're interpretations, conceptual labels that we hang on certain combinations of affect in certain contexts. According to Barrett, when you feel something like terror, what you're actually feeling is a specific set of physiological sensations tied to a certain affect. Your muscles are tense, your body is quivering in a state of high arousal, maybe flooded with adrenaline, your heart is pounding. That affect might be due to your situation, you see a person with a knife and believe you're in danger, or maybe something else, like maybe you're breathing a higher than usual concentration of carbon dioxide. To make sense of those sensations, your brain is combining them in real time with context clues about what might be causing them, like features of the environment or memories of similar events. Feeling out what makes the most sense in that situation, then stamping the whole mess with some emotional label as a description or name.  Fight or flight is certainly still happening, your body will get itself revved up to deal with a potential threat, but this emotion called terror is a conceptual framing of the situation, an interpretation, a useful way to think and talk about feeling revved up and bad in a specific context of mortal peril. In constructed emotion theory, that label is, at least in part, a cultural phenomenon, a feature of your language and thought, picking out that particular expression of affect in that particular situation. There's a large amount of overlap in these emotional labels between cultures, as we might expect, but there's also some differences. English doesn't have a word for a pleasant calm affect in the situation that something bad is happening to someone who deserves it, but Germans know when they're feeling Schadenfreude as a specific emotion, and once you incorporate it into your vocabulary and way of thinking, you might feel it too. We probably wouldn't go delving into neuroscience looking for a Schadenfreude circuit in a brain, but oh, they did do that. The predictive processing model of cognition also comes into play here. As we described in episode 130, there are good reasons to suspect that a large part of how our brains make sense of the world is through successive layers of prediction, with noisy sense data at lower levels and abstract concepts at higher ones, each level trying its damnedest to only communicate the most attention-worthy stuff up the chain, and directing lower levels in what to expect. If your visual cortex just expects the image it's getting from your eyes to blur when they snap from focusing on one thing to focusing on something else, you're not actually going to see that blurred image, because it's going to get processed out of the signal before you're aware of it. Barrett asserts that emotions are subject to the same prediction-noise-reduction sort of process, that the reason they feel so immediate and urgent is because your brain is scrambling to slap the most likely label on a wave of affect before it gets to your conscious mind, so it's not unexpected or weird when it gets there. Oh man, there's a puppy. We always get an excited positive affect with puppies. The emotional state we associate with that affect is adoration. Okay, cue it up. Three...aww. Interestingly, this framework implies something that has been part of clinical psychology for a long time, the power of reframing. When someone gets into a rut of negative emotions like sadness, anxiety, stuff like that, their brain is doing its best to anticipate and categorize the bodily sensations that accompany, or in some sense, cause those emotions. By paying conscious attention to those sensations, it might be possible to cast them in a slightly different light and adjust that interpretation to something more useful. Are you nervous about an upcoming test? Well, you're bouncing your leg a bunch.  Rather than nervous, could it be that you're excited? Eager? You feel miserable. This day just couldn't get any worse. You're moving slow, not a lot of energy. Maybe you're really just tired. Of course, clinical depression and anxiety are a different can of worms, but if Barrett's theory is right, the only actual difference between these states is which predictive model your brain is using to explain your affect. And if you can encourage it to use a different model, you're literally changing what emotion you're feeling. You're not at the mercy of some hard-coded anger response or shame circuitry in your brain, the right interpretation of the situation and your body's response to it can shunt you into a totally different emotional state. Barrett's model also has implications for how we conduct research about emotions. There are mountains of data that have been gathered in search of some objective neurological basis for emotional circuits, the seemingly elusive signatures in the brain of happiness, fear, and so on. There's also a great deal of work built on models of the emotional experiences of animals, attempts to develop useful insights and interventions for humans by observing animals and characterizing their behavior as signaling something analogous to human emotions. If emotions are constructed, as Barrett suggests, this kind of research is kind of doomed to failure from the outset. No matter how hard you search, you won't be able to find a configuration of neurons or a mouse model that will give you insight into any individual human's anger or anxiety, because their emotions are unique to them. Of course, as with many high-level psychological models, the theory of constructed emotion is fascinating, potentially very useful in many situations, and exceptionally difficult to either verify or falsify. The evidence gathered so far around the idea doesn't disprove it. Some studies support his claims, some undermine them. Also, as we discussed in episode 190, link in the description, a theory developed to address the deficiencies in some standard theory is always going to start off with an advantage in explaining those holes it's supposedly patching, provided it's not transparently stupid. It can take a while to analyze a new idea to figure out if it fully explains all the evidence better than what we already have. But it's certainly something I'm going to think about the next time I forget my morning coffee. What about you? Does Barrett's theory about how feelings are built out of affect and predictive interpretation ring true to you? Where can you see a model like this being useful for working with emotions? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and don't stop thunking.


Everyone and welcome. This is Melissa Armell and I own the stocks, whoosh, and I'm here to announce the last big class special. The new website is launching October. If you've been following me for a while and you've been considering doing the class, I've done specials now and again to help people get started in their trading. This is going to be the last big one. So if you're ready, if the timing is right for you to do the class in October or even if you want to sign up now by the deadline, you could do the class in November. That's fine too. But the deadline for the special is October 5th. So if you're interested, if you want to sign up and if you know that you're ready, finally get in and jump into trading. The fall is a good time to trade the market. Earning season begins in October. There's going to be a lot of stocks that are having a lot of momentum and a lot of volatility and gap. And that is what I focus on and that is what you learn in the Golden Gap course. So if you'd like more information or you want to sign up, email me at Melissa at the stockswush.com or you can call me at 929-3200 Gap and you can feel free to follow me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Skype. So the class for October is the 6th and 7th. It's from 9 to 5, Saturday and Sunday. Cost of the class is $5,499. Email me if you want to sign up. What is the special? The special is you will receive the live trading room free for one year and the options letter free for one year. And this is the deadline. October 5th is a deadline. There will be no exceptions, okay? You've got to sign up and register and pay by the 5th. Whether you do the class in October or later on, that is the deadline. So don't delay because I've a limited amount of spots. And if you have seriously been considering the class, I would take advantage of this because this is a huge savings. It really helps you getting all the options, trades, you get those emailed to you and then being a participant in the live trading room every day, which you have to be a student of the Golden Gap course in order to join the live trading room, which is open every morning from 8.30, usually until about 10, 3, 11 o'clock, depending on how long we're in a trade. So if you think you're ready, if you want to do this, particularly if you want to be trading most of 2019, because we're into the end period here in October of 2018, this is a great opportunity for you to take advantage of this. So this was one of the really nice movers that occurred recently. It was FDX, it was a nice gap. And it fell rated per my system. Again, what would you learn in the Golden Gap course? You'd learn how to find what stock to trade each day, like FDX or any of the other ones we did. You'd learn how to find them, pick them and play them and rate them. And it tells you before the open whether or not it's going to drop on the day if you're going to short it or rally if you're going to go long, but we focus on the shorts mostly. The stock gap down, closed tier gap down fell. This is a big move. This is a huge move. It's a monster move. High of the day up here is around 250. Low on the day was around 241. Broke that even. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful move in this stock. And it even followed through for the secondary day down. So you will learn how to play this in the class and how to find this. And if you're in the live trading room, you get my calls, which is very beneficial. And trading is a skill. So I've developed a skill. I've been doing this now for 10 years. So obviously my focus has been 100% on gaps, and that's why I'm so skilled at gaps. And it's one of the reasons I've called the market so well because I read the gaps in the market. And if you've been following me, if you're on the market report, if you've read any of my emails, if you're on the distribution list, you know how you've seen how I've called the market. I've even called it on national television. So it's a skill set that you would learn from me, and then you develop the skill set by learning what I know, the knowledge that I have. And that's how it all comes together for you. I mean, at some point, you have to understand that if you're looking to trade the market and you're following these indicators or buying systems that are computerized things, you're not gonna make money that way. It's not gonna last.  It's not consistent. Those things don't work. You really have to use your mind and gain the skill, but you have to know what to look for. And that's what you learn in my class. So one of the things I teach people to do is to prepare. Preparation today leads to success tomorrow. So the preparation is you do my course. You get up early in the morning and rate the gaps and prep before the market opens. Market opens at 9.30. I'm usually looking at things 7, 7.30 in the morning. Again, room opens at 8.30, but the more prepared you are before the live day of picking the stock you wanna trade, guess what? The more money you're gonna make. So the class is called the Golden Gap course. It is October 6th and 7th from 9 to 5 p.m. It is a full-on class for the whole weekend. Class tuition is 54.99, class is online. You could be anywhere in the world and take it because it is online. And so I also teach a trends course. You can do the combo. Combo saves you money because you do the trends class which is about long-term trends and swing trades. And October 6th and 7th is a day training class on the gaps and how to rank them. So you'd learn everything together and save if you signed up for both the classes, it's 59.99. Again, email me if you wanna sign up and then you would too if you'd sign up by the 5th, you get the trading room free for a year and the options letter free for a year. That this is the best value here, this combo. So again, what is the deal? October 6th and 7th is a Golden Gap. October 22nd is the trends. It's 59.99 for both those. Or just do the Golden Gap, it's 54.99. But the deadline is October 5th, no exceptions. I will not be doing this last big, this special like this again. That's why I'm saying it's the last big class special. I'm not gonna be doing ever giving the trading room for one year or the options letter free for one year again. So if you come back and you ask me for this and I know those people find me for years and you wanna do it anytime after October 5th, no, the answer will be no. So things are changing. You will go to the website and if you wanna sign up for any of the products and services or classes when the new site's done, that's how it will work. There will be no specials. So if you wanna do it, if you have questions, you can email me, you could come in for a trial. There's two weeks before the class and if you are serious, I suggest if you really are think that you might be interested in this, then email me for a trial. You can come in for a two week trial and allow me to two week trial for this to see. You can sit in and see what it's all about. But many of you already know me and you already know what I do and it's just a matter of deciding if the timing is right for you. If you're ready to commit yourself to trading or if you think you are going to be ready anytime between now and really even 2019 because you get all the year free in the trading room from the time you sign up and that's most of 2019 in the options letter two. So even if you can't start trading actively till January, February, this is worth it. It's a great deal. And again, like I said, you can do the class in the future. You just have to sign up and register by the 5th. If you have questions, email me. Do not hesitate. I'm here. Fall has begun in New York. It's a wonderful season. Things are going extremely well. 2018 has been a big year for me. I've learned a lot. I've grown a lot. And I think that has shown itself in my trading and with the mentoring that I've been giving people. So reach out if you have questions, call me, don't worry about, if I don't pick up the phone, just leave me a message. I'll call you back when I can. Phone number is 929-3200 GATT. And I hope everyone has a wonderful day.