What's going on everyone Jake here late sports cards ripping a personal for Christopher T We got one box of 23 topscore black baseball hobby for you. Good luck Christopher We also have Sam tomorrow morning Group breaks as well. Got Miguel Vargas on the base rookie Shane Bieber to 199 on the refractor Luis Castillo just talking about him on the base for the Mariners Pasty and our auto Spencer steer on the rookie auto rookie base auto for the Reds Spencer steer. That's a very nice rookie auto Part of that young core over there in sincey. We'll see what they do this year Very nice All right, Christopher, that'll do it for your personal appreciate the order man get that right out to you


The Urban Diorama Sueta Elizabeth Joseph, Nikita Kumar and Shul Malhan Stylized cars labeled autonomous vehicles travel through a digital environment Avoiding people protected by virtual borders called pedestrian envelopes The vehicles create organic pads based on urban activity and share urban status with other vehicles The cars avoid one another while traveling through the futuristic landscape like icons in a video game Vehicles travel along paths laid out by bending lines drop requested A vehicle stops near a gathered crowd And an avatar gets out Two vehicles plot overlapping routes When no alternative path is identified the first vehicle requests a reroute And the second veers off on a courtesy path to avoid a collision Art Center UCLA architecture and urban design supra studio


The cycle of the book is financial inclusion for poverty alleviation, issues in case studies for sustainable development, and the book was co-edited by my colleague Dr Zanibah Basha Oravushi from the Swiss Helper Thass Intercooperation. But first, let me take a moment to explain what we mean by financial inclusion. What makes this book different from the current discourse of financial inclusion is the fact that at the moment financial inclusion is understood as either simply having a bank account or having access to microcredit. In this book, our view or approach towards financial inclusion is much more wider and more holistic. What we mean by financial inclusion in the book is that financial services and products need to be affordable, usable, and at the same time suitable. So what this means is that a number of people, particularly low-income groups and marginalised communities, I'm talking about almost 3 billion people of the world population do not necessarily have access to suitable and affordable financial products and services. And I think it's very timely now that we talk extensively or hold debates and provide platforms for people to discuss about the importance of financial inclusion now. Financial inclusion has received increasing attention by development practitioners and policy makers as of late. A manifestation of that is the fact that financial inclusion is identified as one of the key targets in the system of development goals as a vehicle to enable people to propel themselves out of the poverty trap. So essentially the way we understand financial inclusion has to be just beyond microfinance and opening bank accounts. We need to A, understand the heterogeneity of those users, in particular the low-income groups and marginalised sections of the society do not necessarily have access to a number of services such as land, education, etc. We need to understand the key constraints that they face today and our financial products and services need to be able to cater to the needs of these groups. Essentially what happens most of the time is financial services and products are designed in the same fashion that they are designed in the high streets of London or Paris or New York but it shouldn't be that way. We need to understand the reality on the ground, particularly that these poor people face and tailor our financial products and services in such a manner. The second element that we need to look at or need to understand is the fact that even though people are financially excluded it does not necessarily mean they are financially inactive. People are able to save, make transactions or even spend money or manage their expenditure etc. So financial exclusion doesn't necessarily mean financial inactivity. They are in fact financially very very active groups of the society. However the lack of access to such kind of in a inclusive financial services and products has forced them to depend on very expensive or extortionist financial service providers and as a result they have not been able to attain their full potential in terms of not necessarily with the standing shocks be it economic or climatic but also to be able to prosper and permanently be able to propel themselves out of poverty. Most importantly one thing we need to understand is financial inclusion does not happen in a vacuum. We need to have the right institutions in place that enable financial inclusion to happen. For instance we're talking about about three billion of the world population who do not necessarily have access to financial products and services. This is a significant opportunity for the private sector to be able to provide suitable and affordable and usable financial products and services but for that to happen I think the role of governments or institutions to provide incentives for the private sector to extend their services to these groups is very important. Also equally important is when we talk about financial inclusion we need to talk beyond just providing the service but also improving the financial literacy of the section of the society as well in terms of you know how do you manage risk for instance or how do you manage expenditure or how do you manage you know debt servicing etc etc. So I think we need to look at the entire financial ecosystem just beyond the demand in supply. We look at the entire financial ecosystem which looks at institutions, local power structures but at the same time the capacities as well such as in financial literacy and risk management all these elements need to be looked at as one entity as opposed to simply focusing on the demand and supply of financial services and products.


Test negative. That's me.  We are back. Oh man.  I'm COVID negative. Yeah. So Instagram, Twitter. Instagram, Twitter. Thanks and Patreon, follow us to the account, subscribe if you haven't yet. Like button. It was, I told you this. I was, it was a joyful ride, wasn't it? My stars.  I was, I went to the same clinic every day. Once you're past your symptoms, there's no reason to go get tested until your symptoms are starting to go away. So you do the five days of quarantine. This is for the fully vaxed. So if you're fully vaxed and if you're fully vaxed and boosted, it's the same protocols. You stay in quarantine for five days and if your fever's gone and symptoms go away, you can start testing again, which is exactly, first four days were miserable. I couldn't taste anything then days four, five, six. But after the afternoon of day three, you count day zero the day you test, right? After that three days, the three days was miserable. Like the worst flu you've ever had. I had a great three days. Sure you did. But then I got, I went to the clinic so much for the past like 10 days every morning that they knew be my, every time I pulled up, hey, Rick. And then today, no joke. She pulled up and she went, Rick. I said, yep. She said positive again. I said, yep. Hopefully this is the one. And he was. It was, it was. Yeah, thankfully. But anyways, yeah. If you're not vaxed, get vaxed kids. I feel like I'm the only one on earth who hasn't had COVID yet. You may know my dad. Oh yeah, does that. My dad has not had COVID. He doesn't go out. That's smart. Anyways, today we got, this is actually an informational video. This is called Made in India Hyperloop. So it's a song. The song, Made in India to a, no, I'm kidding. I was gonna say, what, what? You danced for that song when you were younger, didn't you? Oh yeah. Rick hates that song so much. Stop. But you didn't, you didn't like that song. I didn't like it. You thought it was a stereotype. Yeah, the video did have it on a stereotype. I just didn't like it. Anyways, this is, you know how Elon Tusk, the owner of Twitter apparently, you know, he's trying to hyperloop, right? He's been talking about that for a long time. You know about the hyperloop though. Yeah, I'm sorry. You said his name. I'm not a fan. I know. This is not him. Okay. India has their own apparently that they've had in the works apparently for a long, long time. This was just released. So there's a little information about India's. I've actually always been super interested in a hyperloop. I would love like one from here to Vegas. Yes. Well, they've talked about having at least something comparable to that here from Frisco to LA, which, come on. And clean I assume. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like being in a basically a vacuum. Yeah. It says two times faster than a plane. Which would put it, you speed is beyond the speed of sound. No, it's not. Cause planes can go four to 500 miles per hour. Sound is seven. Math is hard, Rick. I don't know. Are they talk? Oh, I know it faster than planes. Cessnas, they're referring to Cessnas. That's true. Here we go. If you know any information about it, please let us know. Yeah, please let us know. Mr. Urban, Urban Meyer. Johan. A dream that many Indians like us saw. Hyperloop didn't materialize, at least not in India. But the matter did not settle yet in the government level. Our Indian Railways is finally able to develop India's first own Hyperloop. India has shown constant efforts to develop a technology rather than importing one from a foreign country. When it comes to railways, you have a lot of examples. Training team, coverage, metro rails and many more. Now, India will be competing with the rest of the world in the race of making its own Hyperloop. The Indian Railways has partnered with IIT Madras to develop a main in India Hyperloop facility. The project involves a test track and a prototype Hyperloop pod estimated to cost around 8.34 crores. A group of 70 students of... When it gets up into crores, I can't do the math. An effort to develop India's own Hyperloop. They ranked globally in top 10 in the SpaceX Hyperloop pod competition in 2019. The only team from Asia to do so. They were also awarded the most scalable design award at the European Hyperloop Week 2021. As they approached the Indian Railways in March this year for an investment, the ministry immediately agreed to collaborate and bear the cost for this prestigious effort. Railways will collaborate to develop a contactless pod prototype and also the first of its kind Hyperloop test facility at its discovery campus at Thayur. In 2017, India's then minister Shuresh Prabhu expressed... Yeah, I was like, how are they going to... Maharashtra, Exe, Devendra Fartnavis and his team even started working to get a Hyperloop in India from Mumbai to Pune and Virgin Hyperloop started working on... Yeah, Virgin's a big player in the Hyperloop game. ...and developed a track between these cities. But nothing moved since then. But the center has been closely monitoring the development on Hyperloop, expecting one to develop in India. Under the project Aviskar Hyperloop, we will get a test facility that is at work with the Virgin Hyperloop in the United States but would cost much less. The Hyperloop's low energy requirement has drawn the Indian Railways towards the project. A technology that can help to... Gotta have more seats than that though, right? For more updates on India's infrastructure, subscribe to our channel, MRB. It's so confusing new technologies like this because obviously if planes were a new thing, I wouldn't know how they work either. No, and I would probably be someone who's like, you're telling me we're going to sit in there and go in the air and not fall out of the sky? I don't think so, buddy. Obviously there's way smarter people. Yes. That knows how this technology works. I have zero clue except for, I understand it's basically a vacuum and that allows no resistance and obviously to go at greater speeds and all that kind of stuff. And I'm assuming the environmental would be equal to or hopefully less than that of a railway? I would assume so. Because it looks like it's just on poles. It looks like it's on poles so it's above ground. Yeah, and so they don't have to, not a lot of environmental damage. Just poles on the ground versus total tearing up and concrete. And then it looks like, they didn't get into the technical specs as far as the actual speed or some of the other things as far as the powering of it is concerned. Yeah, they get real fast. But it looked like you could do, if not all of the power, a majority of the power with solar paneling on top, which makes a lot of sense. Obviously you'd want to do it completely clean. As clean as you can. There's no point in developing new technologies if they're not clean because then they'll be obsolete extremely fast and way too caught. No, it excites me because I think we're living at a transitional generation where in 25 years, we could see some dramatic changes that take place that take us away from fossil fuels and make us in a position where we're living cleaner, the planet is getting better. We're not, first of all, the main thing that we have to do is get rid of all the greedy assholes who are getting richer and richer oil companies off of the fossil fuels. But they know their days are numbered. That's why they're trying to break in as much as they can now. But I can't wait for all of these to go up everywhere. Yeah. You gotta wonder when it's actually gonna be ready to be. I'm thinking max, I mean, the soonest is like 30 years, I'd say, before these are like regularly available. I think it could be 25. You think so? I think it could be 25. Because obviously it takes a lot of work to do. If they're trying to combine cities, it takes a lot of work, a lot of material, a lot of man hour, a lot of money. And so obviously full governments would have to be putting money into this. And I know that Elon has been trying to get people to invest in, because he's been. And Virgins obviously were two brands. Virgins is I think probably the biggest player in the Hyperloop game, which is funny because they're like a budget airlines. Maybe they're just trying to get in front of everybody so they could be the top person in the next thing. Well, I'm glad to hear more about Hyperloops than I am space tourism, because for me, the whole space tourism thing is ridiculous. I mean, obviously it's space exploration and maybe colonization, but that is not gonna be in our lifetime sadly. No. So there's no point. Not even, I like, remember when space exploration was for just the discovery of new things where we wanna go to Mars because we wanna discover what's going on there. We wanna go to the planets in our solar system. This whole thought of, well, we have climate change, so we're gonna go find an inhabitable planet. No, you're not. I mean, we can barely, we don't even have a manned mission to Mars yet. Not, it definitely won't be in our lifetime. No, there's other livable. It won't even be in your kids' lifetimes. Yeah, yeah, there's other livable planets, obviously. Oh, that was sure. Absolutely. Billions probably. There's probably billions of them. But not within our current technologies in the reach of our lifetimes or our kids' life. Or the timetable of what they say needs to be done to reverse the impact of climate change. So it's like, all that money should be, in my opinion, directed toward this kind of technology. Yeah, I do hope we're able to do stuff like this. So obviously America has always been way behind in terms of the high speed railroads and there's many reasons for that. Agreed. But, yeah, yeah, essentially. Yeah, like in California, we've talked about this before, the only reason we don't have a rapid transit system of any kind where we really do need it because we're such a huge city is because car manufacturers and dealers didn't want it. And now that if we're, obviously, California's been trying to do high speed rail for a long time, but now it's just so expensive as opposed to if you would have done it decades ago. So funny, Disney put in the monorail system at Disneyland how long ago? And I remember every time I'd go to Disneyland, I'd look at it and go, why isn't this all over Los Angeles? It's clean, it's quiet, it's above ground, and that's because car manufacturers and oil companies don't want that. And now it's just way too expensive to do exactly. Anyways, let us know if you know any more information about this that we need to know down below.


Everybody Matt here for Layton Sports Cards ripping one box of 2022 Panini one football hobby. This is for Patrick E. Good luck Patrick This is rookie patch auto 16 of 25 Drake London Yeah, it is nice patch on that Nice patch like nice colors The red foil Trying to get the light to hit that a little bit right there you go Patrick. That'll do it for your box Appreciate the purchase. We'll get this shipped right out to you


All right. Good morning or good afternoon depending on where you're located. And welcome to Open Education Week. This is Una Daley from the Community College Consortium for OER. And we're so happy that you joined us today for our webinar on OER degrees emerging in Maryland and Texas. And I'm just very pleased to have four wonderful speakers with us this morning who are part of the ATG OER degree program. We have folks from Austin Community College and also from Montgomery College in Maryland who are going to tell you about the real experience of developing OER degrees over the last nine months. And in just a moment we'll get a chance to meet them. I did want to mention that we're using the GoToWebinar platform and we're relatively new to it. So sometimes things don't work quite the way they did in the past. We ask all of our attendees to use the questions area of the control panel to ask questions and make comments there. And we'll do our best to answer those and move those questions into the chat area so that you can also see them as they come in. So we do want to hear your questions and comments so please do share those. And our agenda today we're going to meet our presenters here in just a moment and have our usual brief overview of the Community College Consortium for OER. And then we're going to get right on to the presentations from Montgomery College and Austin Community College. Hi, Unia. I'm sorry to interrupt. It's Gay Lynn. We lost the slides. You lost the slides. Okay. We're back. Thank you for letting me know. Okay. How's that? There we go. They're back. Okay, perfect. Thank you for letting me know. All right. So first up, I want to introduce Dr. Gay Lynn, who is the Associate Vice President of Academic Programs at Austin Community College. She's also the lead for the OER degree at Austin Community College and also for the Texas Consortium, which is four different colleges, slash districts in Texas that are working on general studies OER degree. Dr.  Thanks, Unia. My name is Gay Lynn and Scott is the last name that confuses people sometimes. I have been at ACC since I started as an adjunct faculty member in the late 80s. And I was eventually hired as a full-time faculty member. Political science is my home discipline. I've been a department chair. I've been a department head. We had different organizational structures. And then I spent the last 11 years as Dean of Social and Behavioral Sciences. And in December became the Associate Vice President for Academic Programs. That's a very quick overview of my history at ACC. Great. Thank you so much, Gay Lynn. And next I'd like to introduce Kari Gitz, who is the head librarian at Austin Community College and also has been running a lot of the training faculty development work around the OER degree. Would you like to say a few words, Kari? Sure. Hello, everyone. My name is Kari Gitz and I'm one of the head librarians at Austin Community College. We have 11 campuses and 11 libraries and I'm currently overseeing two campus libraries, Rio Grande and Highland Campus. And I've been at ACC for about six years. I've been in a variety of institutions over my career as a librarian. And I'm very excited to be part of the OER grant team at ACC. And very excited that the libraries are involved in this initiative. Thank you, Kari. And yeah, we're very excited that the libraries are involved in this, too. They're such an important part of bringing OER degrees to fruition. All right. Next up I'd like to introduce Dr. Michael Nils from Montgomery College. He is the VP of e-learning, innovation, and TT excellence. And he, along with Samantha Venerusu, are the co-leaders of the OER degree at Montgomery College. Michael? Or Mike? Thank you. Good afternoon. I, as Tuna said, I'm Mike Mills at Montgomery College. I've been here for a little over eight years. I came from a school in Delaware. And I'm excited about helping lead our OER efforts on a college-wide level at Montgomery College. We've got some wonderful innovative faculty and it's exciting to work with them. So I'm excited to present our ideas and looking forward to any feedback that you can have that will help us down the road. Great. Thank you, Mike. And last but not least, I want to introduce Samantha Venerusu, who is English faculty. She's also the chair of the General Studies and she's the co-lead for the OER degree at Montgomery College. Samantha? Hi. I'm really happy to be here today. I'm looking forward to hearing the conversation and to hear what kind of questions you guys have. I've been at Montgomery College for about 14 years. I was previously at a college in Texas in the Lone Star District. And as I've said clearly, I'm an English faculty as well as the chair of the General Studies program. I'm also the former chair of the English department. Great. Great. Thank you, Samantha. Fun to see that you have a connection with Texas as well. So I just wanted to mention the Community College Consortium for OER. Here's our mission. We are celebrating 10 years. We started back in 2007. So this is really exciting. And over the years, you know, we're all about promoting the use of open education to enhance teaching and learning. OER degrees is really a very promising emerging trend in this area. And we're so happy to be the community of practice around this. We have many resources. In addition to these monthly webinars that we do, we have a website that you can go to and find out a lot of information about OER in general and also OER degrees. We have case studies from these pioneers. And we have a community email list. So if you're not on that community email list and you'd like to get on that, go to our website under Get Involved and please join us. We have over 250 colleges that are members in 21 states and provinces. Many more of you join us on a regular basis. We do truly treasure our members, which help us create a sustainable open education project here. And as you can see, we're around the country. And if you're not a member, we'd love to have you join us. So you can also do that from our website as well. All right. Just a quick definition here for those of you who may not be currently involved in OER degrees. So an OER degree is a complete pathway where faculty have redesigned existing courses to use OER rather than publisher textbooks. So for students, of course, it's a huge cost savings. Estimates are as high as 25%. It may depend on the major and what your tuition fee is at your college. But very big savings there. From a faculty perspective, it can be an opportunity to redesign your course, customize it to your students' needs and your learning outcomes. From an institutional perspective, it can be quite a major transformation as well where you have many of your departments. Really all of the departments and divisions that touch a student as they go through their degree program are potentially stakeholders in this.  But your library, your instructional designers, your student advisors who are directing students to these courses, of course, your administration that's supporting it, and so many others on campus who are involved in delivery. So I'm going to say no more about that and let my speakers tell you their story and how they have transformed things. And let's see. Mike, are you up first? I am. I am. Thank you. All right. I will turn this over to Mike, and I'm going to try and give Mike, yes, keyboard and mouse. I think you should have that now, Mike, so that you can move the slides. Super. Thank you. Good afternoon again. At Montgomery, we're focusing our OER efforts on serving students. We want to make sure that our students are getting not only the best possible education that they can get, but at the cost savings that they deserve. And so as Samantha and I talked about our work and the project that we're involved in, I think those two areas should come to the forefront. A little bit about Montgomery College. We are three campuses located in the Washington DC suburb of Montgomery County. We have about 25,000 students across our three campuses, 25,000 credit students, 60,000 students total, and when you include non-credit. And there on the slide, you can see the big breakdown of part-time females, all the demographics that you have access to. And as we're looking at these numbers, one of the things that I think started jumping out at us is, how can we do a better job of retaining students that we're losing? We're really focused on completion. We know that we're losing students because of textbook costs. They're taking their Pell money and using it for living expenses instead of buying textbooks. So that was one of the initiatives that we wanted to focus on as we entered this work. There we go. So a little bit about the project description. I'll let Samantha talk about the general studies degree. But our overarching infrastructure is an initiative that we're calling MC Open. And it's focused on the goals of improving access, success, and affordability for our students. So while we're working through the general studies that we are degree, we also have within MC Open a number of other Z course or Z degree initiatives that we're engaged in. And the goal is to involve as many faculty as possible, reach out to our students to engage them in this process, not just for the general studies degree, but these other Z degrees as well. And while we're talking about access, success, and affordability for our students, MC Open is also focused on the collaboration between faculty members amongst faculty members within disciplines and then between the discipline. So we're hoping to engage faculty in sharing not only with their own colleagues here at Montgomery College, but becoming part of that larger OER community. And that's been one of our challenges that we'll get into shortly, but we just want to make sure that our faculty are aware that they're part of a larger movement that's not just isolated at Montgomery College. Samantha, you want to talk a little bit about the general studies degree? Sure. Thank you. So when Mike approached me about doing this grant related to general studies, we had been doing some other OER work. We started with a fellowship specifically around redesigning some courses for the new general studies program and infusing OERs in it. The general studies program serves about 9,000 students at the college, between 9 and 13, depending on how you count each year. It's a really large, I mean almost half of our students end up in our program, it's the largest program at the college, but it is a typical general studies program in that it is designed to help students transfer into other institutions. Transfer in Maryland is not particularly straightforward and every institution tends to have its own particular transfer requirements. So the general studies program provides a lot of flexibility, but it also wasn't providing a lot of focus or cohesion. So part of our redesign was to create more focus in the program. And doing this OER degree or Z degree, it was designed to model pathways through for particular transfer options that students have. So we focused in on psychology and English because they represented two separate pathways and they represented two of the higher interest areas. We also wanted to hit our, we wanted to reach our populations that were often underserved throughout the nation. Our school is really focused on how do we be radically inclusive, how do we ensure that everybody has an opportunity, and developing this degree seems like a really non-questionable way to be radically inclusive because it provides so much opportunities for students. I noticed there was a quick question about the difference between the degrees and OER degrees. And I just, we're using the term somewhat interchangeably right now, but the grant requires us to focus specifically on materials that are openly licensed, whereas in some Z courses it may just be that they're free and openly accessible, but they may not be licensed openly. Our degree as the requirements for the grant focuses on all the materials must be openly licensed. Michael, I can go back with more project description. Well, and just to piggyback on that within MC Open, the courses are identified as Z courses, not necessarily OER courses. As Samantha said, we have a number of faculty who are teaching with free materials, no textbooks, but they're not open education resources as defined by the Creative Commons license. So if we talk a little bit about our motivation for this project, we've touched on the first two items. So I want to jump down to the third and fourth bullet points if I could. The focus on various learning styles, we are all aware that our students come to us with different learning intentionalities. Some enjoy reading a text, some would prefer to hear it, some would prefer to see it in a video. And I think as we progress through this project and our other Z efforts, we're seeing that faculty are able to pull in materials that touch on these various learning styles and it becomes a true focus on universal design. And so it isn't just capturing one individual learning style, it's working its way across the spectrum. As a result of that, what we're seeing, and I'll share some data near the end of the presentation, we're looking for increased student engagement with the material. Not only with the material, we're looking for increased student engagement within our Blackboard LMS, between students and faculty member and then amongst the students themselves as they're engaged in discussion questions and helping create some of this content by finding links that the faculty can then incorporate into their class. And our preliminary research shows that the engagement is certainly there and I'll share that as we go through. So as with any project, there are challenges and one of our biggest challenges that I think everybody faces is the finding quality open content. And I'm going to talk about that as well as finding that some of the content, the licensing is very complicated. So I can speak from my own experience because I'm also designing my own course to teach in the fall in introduction to literature. And so finding really good open content around instructional pieces for literature is actually fairly difficult. You can find stuff that it's not necessarily licensed appropriately to be able to use or adapt or to really tailor to the class that I want to create. It's also difficult in terms of finding openly licensed texts, teaching literature, finding texts that are appropriate to the audience that we have because if I'm limited to public domain, then I have a fairly narrow range that I can introduce students to. And those are not bad things. They're just things that you have to sort of adapt to. I think in some of the other areas, depending on the specificity of the course, faculty are finding difficulty finding content that they're really comfortable with. And so I think people are finding that they're developing more than they necessarily expected. And that's challenging because there's not a lot of time to do that when you're also teaching and doing the other things that we do as school-time faculty or part-time faculty. We've also run into the problem where licensing on materials isn't entirely clear. It's either inaccurate or it's incomplete or it's just complicated for folks. So for instance, we have a faculty member who adopted a text and on the outside of the text, it was a fully mature text and he was going to add some resources to it as well, but he really liked the structure of the text. On the outside of the text, it said CC by without a problem. But when you dig into the text, the majority of the content was actually linked out to all rights reserved materials and that actually created a problem in terms of how open the course actually was. So that kind of thing has been difficult for people. We've had other issues where faculty don't really understand, you know, at what point do they have to adapt the license to say that this is now adapted? Like what's the level of change that you make where you re-license it? There's been, you know, questions about where do you put in those? Like at what point do you add in the new licensing? If you've adapted material, do you just do it at the beginning? How much description? What's the format for doing those kinds of adaptations? So those are two of the big struggles that we've been dealing with and we've been working through and finding solutions as we go. Sustainability is another one that we're looking down the road toward. We're going to have 30 courses up by next spring and that's great, but all the content's going to need to be maintained. We're also concerned from the standpoint of our focus is a lot on... A lot of times when we hear about it, the easy door that people step through is, oh, we're just trying to give students affordability options. We're really focused on the cost. And from a sustainability standpoint, unless the focus also shifts over to pedagogy and to how having open content goes toward changing the way you teach and the way you engage students, we're going to run into problems, I think, with sustainability because the emphasis is going to be in the wrong place and publishers are coming to us already and offering us more affordable solutions, which is good on one side, but also at some point maintaining those materials, we have to figure that part out. We have...  We have over 500 full-time faculty. I don't even know what the numbers are for the part-time faculty, probably 600 or 800 part-time faculty on top of that. And so having faculty collaborate across three campuses and really agree on materials and really try to create some courses that they can all draw from and everybody replicating their own individual course requires time and it requires opportunities for people to get together. And that's on the timeframe that we have for this grant. That made that a little bit challenging. And then finally, part of what we were trying to do with this is model some academic mapping and model some pathways and trying to create optimal schedules to invite the cohort population, the target population in, has been really, really challenging because we're working across so many different disciplines and so many different campuses. And so that's been another challenge that we've kind of been faced with. Mike, did you want to add anything to that? Yeah, I think you covered it. Wonderful. Okay, so as part of our project implementation, we put together a cross-functional team that includes deans and chairs and faculty members and librarian and instructional designers, our director of faculty development, the registrar. We've had schedulers come in. We have some marketing people that come in. We have representatives from one of the target groups that we're looking at, which is our ACEs population, which is a program that we're doing at the college. I'm missing, oh, our transfer articulation specialist. We tried to, oh, and our counselors. So we are counseling faculty, our faculty, so they're part of our faculty group. We've been trying to be as inclusive as possible and to have as many different perspectives and voices there. And that's been really helpful because it's allowed us to spread the word a little bit but also quickly adjust some of the things. And some of the successes that we've had have come from having those people in our room. The cross-functional team, we might monthly, smaller groups, smaller meetings sometimes take place if there's particularly target issues that we're trying to look at. We focus on the academic concerns, the student concerns, research efforts, and then our infrastructure needs. Our elite folks, that's our office of e-learning and excellence in teaching. They work on, they focus on professional development offerings and we run open labs. They run, you know, sessions where they help people find content. They run sessions where they help people think about licensing and how do you do that licensing and how to just redesign their courses and think about that. They're both formal workshop offerings as well as open labs. And then the faculty champions that are part of this group also offer open office hours for faculty who are working on the project to just come and sit and talk through the kinds of things that they're struggling with. One of the things that we wanted to really do was create a community at the college. Mike mentioned this earlier. There's, you know, there is resistance among some faculty about this move. And so having a collaborative community where you can reach out and say, hey, I'm struggling with this. What do you think? I'm getting a lot of pushback. You have somebody that you can go in and that's your same peer group that you can rely on. And so you're not feeling quite so isolated. And I think that that's been a really important piece of this as well. The other thing that we've had to do is really have regular meetings and regular sort of going out and taking a road show out and telling, you know, hitting all of our governance groups. Mike meets, has met regularly with the student council. We've met, he's done some work with the administrators council. We've done some stuff together at the administrators retreats and things like that. And then we've also, you know, when I'm at the chairs group, we do regular presentations with the chairs group. We, you know, go to the various governance constituencies and talk to them as well. And so that's been another really big effort that we've tried to stay focused on to raise that awareness. Anything you want to add to that, Mike? Yes, just, just briefly, one of our biggest wins and one of our easiest wins in all of this was a surprise. I think when we were able to, without hardly any resistance, get the Z designation within our student information system. And I know that's been a challenge for a number of schools. We've heard that as a challenge from different schools, but we were able to, as a result of this cross functional team, work with our registrar to get that Z designation within banner. And so when students go to register for classes, they can filter and look for those courses that are identified as Z. And so for us, that was a big win. It was an early win and it helped propel us to the success that I think we're now having. So some of the results that we've seen are, you know, obviously a greater awareness of how we are a lot of conversations about what's the difference between open and free. You know, what are the limitations? I think we have a new policy that's coming out about copyright usage that's a lot clearer for faculty to understand and for staff to understand in terms of how they use materials. And so I think it's engendered a lot of conversation about what OER is, why we might go that direction. And really, I think it's starting to edge into that question about how we teach and why we teach the way that we're teaching the other pieces that we've really been able to scale infrastructure. And Mike just mentioned the, you know, really early and relatively not hard win of getting to be able to designate courses of the courses and, you know, how many sections just immediately popped up. And again, the not necessarily OER and we're not making a distinction because on our from our perspective for students, it doesn't matter really much to them whether the content is something from the library that they can that only they're allowed to access or whether it's something that is coming from an external source that is openly licensed. So that scaling of infrastructure I think working with the bookstore, we were able to really scale that relatively quickly. And I do think that a lot of that had to do with that cross functional team, and having people be able to go out and and work with their constituents these pretty quickly. So those are I think two of our really early results. Anecdotally, I've heard from a number of faculty who are trying out out their materials this semester so they're they haven't finished the licensing process or things like that but they're already teaching with their materials. I've heard overwhelmingly positive results that the students are happy with the materials the faculty are more engaged with their ability to make changes into really shape and adapt the courses and not really be restrained by a textbook. And it really speaks a lot of what I've heard from the faculty who are currently doing this speaks toward the ideas of open pedagogy and really moving toward more intentionally toward the emphasis on open pedagogy and open pedagogy and pedagogy pedagogical practices. So Mike. This semester this this was our first semester, having the Z designation in RSIS so that students could register for the courses that they wanted based on one Z. We have about 3400. Enrollments in about 200 sections across the college, which you know we're thrilled with we we weren't quite sure what the expectation was going to be. So instead of identifying these courses as we realized we've already had all along faculty and disciplines who were not requiring their students to have a textbook. And so this provided an infrastructure for them to identify that for students and the students responded and with the 3400 enrollments. And what seems to now be the acceptable average cost of a textbook of $100 that just this semester alone we're saving students about $340,000. And the goal is for them into the hope is that they take that money reinvested into their education, which speeds up the time to completion. The other benefit that we're seeing is increased student engagement within our blackboard system and this chart is a little difficult to see, but you can see the it compares interactions within ethnicities for all courses. All Z courses and then the final two boxes are all online courses compared to all online Z courses and across all demographics all ethnicities, the engagement within blackboard is up. On one average, so we know that students are going into the system and whether it's engaging in the content or engaging in discussion groups, engaging in emails to the faculty member. There's a lot more interaction taking place within blackboard as a result of these Z courses. We're in the process now of breaking that data down by discipline. So I had some data yesterday run for me on English and the numbers are are really, really encourage. Now the one thing that's missing from this is final column, which focuses on student success. So our hope is that we see not only increased engagement, but comparable or increased student success in the Z courses. What we don't want to see is more engagement and less success. So we're excited by these numbers. There will be follow up articles that we we provide based on the the grades and the student success measures that are are going to follow at the end of this semester. And here's some links that talk a little bit about a little bit more information about Montgomery College and you can you can check those out. As you do please. And if you have any questions, Samantha and I will be glad to answer them in this format or, you know, through through email. And there's there's our emails addresses. Okay. Thank you so much, Samantha and my family. Very comfortable with the work that we're doing. Appreciate you share some challenges about. And at this time, we're going to go ahead and go directly to our next session because we're just running a few minutes. If you have additional questions, please enter those in. Somebody. Excuse me. So we're going to go directly to our next panelist, but we'll answer the questions for the chapter. All right. Hey, Lynn, would you like the keyboard? I think Kerry's going to drive for me and I will just talk. Okay. We'll do that. All right. Kerry, I think you've got it now. Let me just move you. All right. And now we're going to have Dr. Gay Lynn Scott and Kerry gets from Austin Community College. Thanks again. I'll very quickly run through the first couple of slides and tell you a little bit about ACC. We are a one a single college district. So we are accredited as a single college, but we are spread across 11 campuses. Our campuses run in size from maybe 2000 to 10,000 students. So they vary in terms of their capacity. In addition to our 11 campuses, we have eight early college high schools that are still fairly new. So probably 700 students there and we have, I just double checked. We have 5500 dual credit students in our dual credit programs. Across those campuses and programs, you'll see our district size on the next slide. Or you might not. I'm not sure it just went black. But we cover six counties, approximately 7000 square miles. We tell people that our service area is about the size of New Jersey. About 40,000 credit students this semester, or you could also say we run about 60,000, 76,000 students each year. Our student population is 80% part time. It's 32% Hispanic 55% female and the average age of our students is 25. ACC opened its doors in the fall of 73. So we are sort of a middle aged college. And then one of the things we always have to brag on is the accelerator. The accelerator is a 32,000 square foot high tech learning lab. You see a picture of it there. 604 computer stations, not just for, we sort of envisioned it as primarily helping students in math, developmental and credit math. But it's also where you can get academic coaching, you can get supplemental instruction, you can get tutoring. We run courses in there from our success course to computer programming, to motion graphics, to a theater course, to a geographic information systems course. So we're very proud of our accelerator and so we always have to brag on it. But I'll get to the point of what we're talking about today, which is open educational resources. As Uda mentioned earlier, I'm the director of the Texas consortium that received a grant from Achieving the Dream to develop an OER degree pathway. The consortium includes El Paso Community College, Alamo Colleges, one district but five separately accredited colleges, and San Jacinto College as well as ACC. So in my role as director of this consortium, as you can see, the first and most important thing I do is communicate. I communicate with Achieving the Dream, I spread the word to the leads at each of the colleges. We engage across those colleges in the work that we're doing. I mean, the vision that we put together for our consortium is that across these colleges we would share in the development of courses. I believe we put in the grant that we would develop 26 courses. I think we're up to 31 because we're so excited in the work that we're doing. So in essence, we came up with a model where some courses would be developed by one college and then faculty in the other colleges would review those courses. The review isn't just providing feedback. I don't understand this or I have a question about that or have you thought about this, but the review involves actually teaching with those develop materials in a pilot semester. So across the colleges in the consortium, development and review is occurring over the next week. We started last fall. We launched our first courses this spring. We're continuing to develop. And so I expect we'll launch most of the rest of the courses this coming fall, maybe one or two next spring. And just to give you a little feel for what we've done here and I may be jumping ahead a little bit, but we have run some pilot courses this semester. We're offering 11 OER courses that were developed under the grant, 29 course sections, and we have about 700 students enrolled here at ACC. So it's been a very fast-paced grant, which is another reason why you see that my primary responsibility is to ensure that we really communicate effectively. You'll also see on the screen there it talks about recruitment because we have this model of shared development and shared review and engagement across those consortial colleges. Part of my job in the summer was just to recruit faculty to either engage in course adaptation or development or to engage in course review. And then I have to, of course, track all of that. Did you actually complete the review? Get faculty assigned to the sections and how's it going? And are you continuing to offer feedback to the course developer? All of those sorts of things, just practical, logistical issues. And then as you might imagine, it's a grant, so I have the responsibility for making sure we spend the money appropriately and wisely. And that's a very quick view of some of the key elements in my work. And then I'm going to let Carrie talk about what she's doing in support of this work. So the librarians have been involved, sorry, I'm getting a little feedback. The librarians have been involved kind of since the grant proposal stage. We had input on what was going forward. And so as soon as the grant came forward and we were part of ACC was part of it as a Texas consortium, one of the first things that I did was kind of deploy out the live guide and make it available for faculty to consult to sort of get a little bit more information. About OER and what it is, where to find information, a little bit of understanding about Creative Commons licensing. So from the beginning, we've sort of played the role of the curator and the educator to put information out there to make it useful for faculty. A couple of the other bigger roles that the library and the librarians have played is both researcher and collaborator. We have put together a small team of librarians across our 11 campus libraries to sort of serve as the main lead OER librarian. So this team of librarians has worked together with me to sort of educate ourselves about OER so that we can work one on one with faculty. We've participated in faculty training with instructional designers. And so we've sort of done a two tiered approach where we've gone in and taught faculty development sessions on everything from finding OER and then also looking at Creative Commons licensing, how to create the attributions, how to evaluate, but then also turning it over to the instructional designers to help them work through the Lumen Learning Platform and also the integration into Blackboard. So it's very much been a team collaborative effort and then also involving the faculty. The librarians have been involved with one on one consultations with faculty that are reviewing and developing the courses. So whether they're stuck on a certain point with some of the licensing questions or they need help finding additional OER sources or even just understanding some of the licensing information that's out there. We've been invited to attend various department meetings. Some of them have been areas outside of the grant, but a couple of them have been in areas like philosophy and developmental writing to go and talk to the faculty about OER and the progress of the grant and also to point them in the direction of resources that they might find useful. And then some of us have spent a great deal of time assisting faculty with kind of going through those course maps and helping them identify and vet the information so that it does meet the requirements of the grant. So depending on the subject area, I know Samantha talked earlier about her struggles with finding English literature resources. And so I spent a great deal of time with one of the English faculty members earlier this year, you know, going through the public domain content and verifying some of the licensing on other resources that were found. So we've played a big role in just assisting faculty because as we've all found out in this process, it is a lot of work, even if you're just adopting a course to sort of align this new material. So it's very much been a collaborative effort and we sort of supported it in a variety of ways. I'll start with some of the surprises or the unexpected things that have come up. One of the first things that we realized was just sort of a overall broader understanding from both the librarians perspective and also the faculty perspective on OER as a whole. And so just, you know, the improved conversations and the more frequent faculty training that we've been able to provide in the one-on-one sessions, you know, just that broader understanding of the creative comments licensing, what OER is and what it incorporates, has increased and improved the creation and adoption and definitely the collaboration across the college and the consortium as well. I put this example in here about faculty realizing they might have already been using OER because in some of the conversations that we've had with faculty as they're developing and reviewing the courses, they've said they've made comments to the effect that they have incorporated freely available resources in their course content over the years. But now they have a broader understanding of what it means to find material that meets that OER requirement, but also to find it and be able to adopt it and adapt it. So they've been using course material that's freely available, but now they have a broader understanding of how to implement it, where to go and find it, and the different ways that they can incorporate it into their course material. And then another unexpected benefit, or perhaps it's just a greater benefit than we expected, this model that we created across four community college districts in Texas from El Paso over to Houston and in between, it really relies on faculty across those institutions collaborating, and that has just been a wonderful opportunity for a history faculty member or the whole history department here at ACC, you know, to look to see what's going on with the San Jacinto history folks and the kinds of materials that they've developed. And that collaboration at the discipline level with faculty has really been a lovely, lovely benefit of our approach to this Achieving the Dream grant. And then we'll go to the flip side, which is the challenges that we have encountered here in this work. And let me just say the first challenge is both good and difficult. We're having a little trouble with the slides, but as in this grant we here at ACC agreed to be a research partner. We are engaged in a quasi experimental design research study to try and really dig into not just the question of course level student outcomes, but if we're trying to design a degree pathway, what are the outcomes on that forward movement of students? Do OER courses help students maybe take nine hours instead of six hours because they're not spending money on course textbooks? Do OER courses because students have the material available on the first day and they have the benefits of open pedagogy? Does that mean they keep moving forward? Are persistence and retention rates better? Are completion rates better? So we're a research partner looking at some of those questions. And what we've done is designate three of our campuses as treatment campuses and three of our campuses as control campuses. We couldn't really do a historical control group because we've made so many changes. We're doing pathways work and a lot of other things here. So I find myself in the middle of this work supporting and cheering and encouraging OER sections at the three treatment campuses, but then trying to tamp down interest in offering OER sections at the control campuses because we don't want students contaminated. We want this to be a really good research study. And that's an ethical challenge, shall we say, as well as just a logistical challenge. You have to ask faculty if they can teach at another campus if they want to use OER until the research study is concluded. And you see other challenges there on the screen persuading the reluctant. That would be a challenge with a lot of initiatives. And so I'm probably preaching to the choir on that statement. The logistical issues, the communication issues. How do we help students understand what OER mean? What that means in the course schedule? If they see and know how do we help students understand the broader elements of this work? And I know we're sort of watching the clock, so I'll move on. A lot of OER course materials are good in terms of quality and rigor, but they don't always come with the ancillaries that faculty members want. And so that's a challenge that we need to address. How do we ensure that the development of these courses includes test banks and slides and assignment suggestions and all of those sorts of things? Quality and rigor, that's an ongoing question. Some of these courses have been adapted so quickly that faculty who are reviewing them have some concerns about some elements and think that more work needs to be done to ensure appropriate quality and rigor. And of course we're getting a lot of phone calls and emails from proprietary textbook publishers and vendors who want to work with us on all of this. And we have to navigate that. What does that mean when they say they have OER courses? Well, it's a much more restrictive license and probably includes a cost. And then one other thing real quickly at ACC, textbooks are adopted at the department level. So our psychology department meets across the 11 campuses and those faculty decide the approved textbook list. So part of the obligation of a course reviewer under this grant is that if they find the OER material or the OER textbook to be appropriate and viable, then they take it to their department and ask that it be adopted as an approved textbook on the list. And so that helps kind of spread the word and help more faculty understand what OER is all about and what we're doing in that way. And then I think I'm throwing it back to Carrie. So when we talk about what's sort of coming next and the next couple of semesters in the life of the grant and beyond, looking at how librarians can support faculty further and work together with instructional designers, there are lots of great models out there from other colleges that have OER initiatives. So sort of taking a page from their book. But looking at, you know, we have 11 campuses close to 30 faculty librarians, including the head librarians, each with their own subject area. So how can we get the librarians in those subject areas to work with the faculty one-on-one or collaboratively in those disciplines so that the OER work can be kind of shared across the area? So that's one thing that we're thinking of and looking at further. And then I think we mentioned at the outset that I'm in a new role as Associate Vice President. And so directing this grant is my second job. And at some point we really need faculty leads on this, right? Not just the instructional or the librarian faculty, but instructional faculty who can take over some of this work and work with their colleagues in supporting what we're trying to do and moving it forward. So we haven't quite figured out if it's going to be a faculty lead or some other sort of position, but that's something on the horizon. And then of course we need to figure out our policy around all of this work. We've saved that conversation until we got a little further into it, but we do need to figure out what our rules and policies might be in terms of development and adoption of OER. And we also need to figure out Montgomery College has already gotten it done, but we need to figure out how we're going to tag OER course sessions sections in our registration system. We need to figure out the sustainability question. Are we going to maybe just embed a tech fee into the student fees that they pay or a course materials fee because as has already been mentioned, sustainability has to be part of the design of this work. The repository of the OER materials, how they're adopted and adapted and revised and how you ensure that licenses are still correct. And if you want more faculty to develop more courses, you need to find money for release time or stipends for that work. We are in addition to being a research partner in this grant, we're also a cost research partner. And we're going to try and look at not only the costs that are obvious, that is the time and efforts of the faculty members and the librarians and the instructional designers, but the less obvious costs. We're looking at cost savings to students, but costs to the institution, the kind of early costs to really get this going that would presumably decline as you get your repository of OER courses. So a lot going on on the horizon. Carrie and I have been engaged in this work since last summer. And we were at a conference last week, we're asked to come up with a headline for what we're doing here in Texas. And we decided the best headline was Texas two step quick, quick, slow. And that's kind of the nature of this work. You can move forward and then you have to sort of stop and then you get some more forward movement. But we appreciate the opportunity to get to tell you all about what we're doing and to answer questions if you have some. And you'll see our contact information on the next slide. And I think that's it from the Austin Community College crew. All right. Thank you very much, Galen and Carrie for sharing that story. It's lots of benefits and challenges and thank you for sharing that. At a very honest level of what you're facing. And I'm looking at the questions right now. And I haven't received any more questions. I'm going to ask my backup moderator, Mary Lou forward. Are you seeing any questions in there, Mary Lou? So this is our time to answer some questions while we're waiting for those to come in. I just wanted to mention a few things this week that are related to open ed. Of course, this is Open Education Week. And thank you once again for coming to our webinar this morning and hearing our amazing presenters. If you're attending the open ed conference in October, submissions for presentations are due this Friday. So do get those in if you want to present. And I know many of you are doing really exciting projects. So we really encourage that. In April, April 12, which is two weeks from today, we will be having a webinar on the OER degree research. So this is early research on the OER degrees. We will have FRI International, which is working with the Achieve the Dream grantees. They'll talk about their methodology. And in particular, Galen just mentioned the cost analysis. This is something that hasn't been done on a very wide scale. Tidewater did do a little bit of research on this, the cost to the institution of developing OER degrees. They looked more at what was the benefit, potential revenue benefit. So some of you may have seen Tidewater's research article on the potential benefit of tuition retention. But this is a much wider cost analysis of what it costs the institution to produce these OER degrees. And I don't know, Galen, would you like to elaborate a little bit on what that cost analysis is? It is a lot of work. That's what it is. They are looking at personnel costs. For instance, Kerry is, and I am, and anybody who does this OER work, we're submitting time and effort sheets every month. They're trying to get us to sort of document hours spent on particular tasks, right? They are looking at, they're trying to get information from our bookstore. It's not our internal bookstore or proprietary bookstore. Obviously, the time and effort that faculty members are putting into this or instructional designers, they're trying to understand our tuition and fee structure and get some baselines. So it's a multi-pronged effort to really dig into the institutional commitment that goes into creating an OER degree. Thank you, Galen. And yes, this will be, yeah, Mike, would you like to? This is my, I would. We're also a cost partner with Austin in that study, and I would echo the same challenges that Galen has expressed. One of the challenges we find is identifying the amount of time we're spending on this particular project because, as Galen said, we have other jobs as well. So we go in and out of roles. So trying to figure out how much time you're spending on this one particular project is not an easy task. And I think our faculty are also struggling with that. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that, Mike. We had another question come in from Brenda Teal at Prince George Community College. And she would like someone to explain the difference between the courses and OER courses. And I don't know, Carrie or Samantha, would you like to grab that one? Sure. Sure. This is Samantha. I can do that. So for us, a Z-Course would be a course that is free to the students. This is for our definition of a Z-Course. There's no instruction cost for instructional materials. They might have to buy goggles or they might have to buy, you know, basic supplies for the course, notebook paper, whatever. But there's no cost for instructional text materials. That may be achieved through using library resources or other resources that are sort of protected and used by the institution or paid for by the institution. But those things may not all be openly licensed. So when we talk about openly licensed or OER courses or OER course materials, those are things that have been licensed to be able to be adapted or used openly by faculty anywhere. So the difference between Z and OER has to do with the licensing. Thank you. All right. I'm looking for other questions. And at this point, I think that was our last question. And we are just hitting up on the hour. So once again, I want to say thank you so much to our presenters today for sharing the work that they're doing, the challenging work that they're doing, but also the benefits that they're seeing at their colleges. And developing these OER degrees. And we're hoping to hear back from them over the next year about their further progress. Any final comments from my panelists before we end the webinar? No, just thank you for the opportunity. We appreciate it. Same as for Montgomery. All right. All right. Thank you. Thank you all for coming. And thanks once again to our amazing presenters. And I hope that you all have a great rest of your week and go out there and celebrate Open Education Week. There's a number of other events happening later today and Thursday and Friday. And hope to see you on April 12th. Bye-bye.


Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were in the last century He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were With Don Lemon getting sued and Fredo Cuomo losing his mind for the world to see it appears that their low ratings are finally taking their toll I mean did this guy seriously just compare Donald Trump to the world's worst communist dictators? This guy who appears to be either falling asleep or really drunk provides zero evidence to back up his insane claim and to make it worse Brian Stelter just sits there and doesn't challenge any of it We'll get right back to this media meltdown But first let me just take a quick moment to thank this video's sponsor ribtea.com guys I know that we all need to constantly replace our t-shirts and underwear because we buy them cheap in bulk and at department stores I'm here today to implore you to consider stepping up to a higher quality and immensely more comfortable choice Not only are they American made but ribtea is a company that values free speech and YouTubers like yours truly if you need new t-shirts and underwear And I think we all know that you do Treat yourself and try something that will not only feel amazing and improve your mood But will also outlast anything that you bought from a department store head on over to ribtea.com Drone tech and make sure that you use the promo code drone tech to get 20% off most items If you would like me to give your channel or your website a shout-out Simply make a purchase at ribtea.com Forced drone tech and send me the proof of purchase. Thank you Has anyone else noticed the shocking rise and batshit lunacy from the Democrat media ever since the Russian collusion hoax died? The New York Times even admitted that after the Russian collusion hoax has died They need something else to bash Trump over the head with on a daily basis Basically, they're gonna do that by focusing on how horrible America is for slavery and how that somehow trumps fault and they're calling it the 1619 project this slide into psychosis that we're seeing on both CNN and MSNBC Seems to be related for example Stelter's refusal to refute the completely insane claims made by his guest Apparently comparing the current US president to the worst communist dictators in history is just fine But watch the fuck out if you give Sarah Sanders or Shawn You can't dice the spice spicer a job in the media that I think is why this does deserve outrage and backlash Obviously Sanders going to Fox is not surprising. There's been a revolving door between Fox and the Trump White House for several years First off Let me just point out how absurd it is that Stelter references the quote revolving door people on the right and folks like Me have been talking about the revolving door for decades now But when we talk about the revolving door, we're talking about Democrats going into the media and then back into politics Democrat politicians going into the media has been going on forever and Stelter even admits it at one point So I'm not sure why he's trying to manufacture outrage this despite the fact all the Clinton and Obama former officials We're all picked up by the Democrat media people like George Stephanopoulos over at ABC who is a former Clinton official who? Famously attacked his accusers as bimbo eruptions How about David Axelrod or former Obama Press Secretary Jay Carney all of these people hired by the Democrat Party media Are we really supposed to believe that these people weren't constantly lying or how about Jim Shudeau who was an Obama political appointing on foreign affairs? He was hired by CNN no conflicts of interest there come to think of it didn't CNN just hire a disgraced liar and Former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe and let there be no doubt that big shiny elegant gold-plated Opportunities gorgeous opportunities to wait those who deceive the country on behalf of President Trump is Sarah Huckabee Sanders Now where can you go after lying repeatedly? daily Hourly I don't know about hourly but often So it appears that Cooper's never heard of a press secretary that wasn't a hundred percent truthful strange because I remember before Trump and before Trump it was always commonly accepted that politicians lie. Okay now. Don't get me wrong. I'm not defending or excusing lies I think that politicians should all be truthful, but let's be real here. Yes press secretary's job are to be spin doctors That's what they do just to show you that it's nothing new that press secretary spin the truth Here's an article from the Washington Post a left-leaning publication in 2014 the article is about Bill Clinton's press secretary Mike McMurray and Describes the job as a hard-charging super political spin doctor. Ah, but you see these people have to constantly rationalize their Contradictions and double standards all they're doing is redefining lies as spin in the cases of past press secretaries ABC has George Stephanopoulos who was at the White House of course during the Clinton years as many examples of this the difference Of course is the Trump White House's Record of misleading the public all administration spin this administration lies consistently again Like I said earlier, this is a tactic that they've been employing since day one of the Trump administration Hyperbolicly spinning common things as outside of the norm. We've got an important question now What does it mean to be a mainstream? Republican getting candidate for governor or Ralph Abraham is that with a new TV ad this week making incendiary comments about gender As a doctor, I can assure you there are only two genders Making incendiary comments about gender. Did she just say that an undeniable scientific fact is incendiary? What is it that we've heard from the Democrats and the left for the last decade that the Republican Party is the party of Anti-science which I always found weird because I've always loved science But now we find ourselves in a time where Democrats and left wingers are Claiming that there are an infinite amount of genders and that men can have periods too They're even running headlines declaring that men are having babies, which we all know as a biological impossibility the largest and most consistent body of scientific work shows that gender is a result of paternal hormones Well, yes, there may be 1% of people who are born intersex You don't just go and make up whole new genders based on a genetic defect a defect that results in the expression of two genders by the way and those people who are intersex Typically choose to be either one or the other gender It's almost as if the Democrats only care about science and as far as it allows them to push their political agenda They have to we have to collectively in essence burn down the Republican Party We have to level them because if there are survivors if there are people who weather this storm they will do it again You know how sometimes you can just look at somebody and know they're not right in the head Well, take a look at exhibit a clearly they've done some makeup work to hide a little bit of that crazy But that's after fuse only lasts as long as she starts talking about burning down a political party and leaving no survivors I often talk about how the Democrat Party and their media have two completely insane goals One of them being eradication of all opposition the other fantasizing about the death of their opposition But in both cases you see it all leads to just them being in control with no dissent or opposition This is another manifestation of that fantasy and of course no fake Democrat journalists would be complete without a heaping dose of hypocrisy with Ruben's constant insistence that Trump's rhetoric is gonna lead to trouble of course when she fantasizes about the Eradication of her political opposition. It's completely different. No doubt this insanity is gonna ramp up the closer We get to the 2020 election and I'll be right there to call them out on it Please please please go ahead and hit that like button Subscribe and you might as well hit that Bell notification while you're at it while my channel may have been re monetized YouTube still demonetizes the vast majority of content that I upload I still need your support and if you would like to support this channel and help it to survive and grow Please consider subscribing to me on patreon or subscribe star for just a dollar a month You get access to an exclusive video every week or if you'd just like to send me a donation You can do so on PayPal you can find all the links in the description or in the pin comment. Thank you


Felly, can I remind members of the Covid-related measures that are in place and that face coverings should be worn when moving around the chamber and across the Holyrood campus? The first item of business is general questions. In order to get in as many people as possible, I'd be grateful for short and succinct questions and answers to match. At question number 1, I call Faisal Choudry. wyf? A what guidance has it issued related to the funding of ventilation in schools? A Scottish Government funding package of £10 million for the delivery of CO2 monitoring in schools was confirmed with COSLA leaders at the end of August. That was in addition to the £90 million of funding that was previously provided to local authorities for Covid logistics, which was made available for use for a range of purposes, including improved ventilation. Funding to local authorities is set out of the popping out system. The additional £10 million shall only be used for the intended purposes in line with Scottish Government guidance. Those comprised of the purchase of an installation of CO2 monitors, funding of associated additional staff chaining or consultant resources requirements and the cost of any remedial action required that has been identified by outer monitoring. I think that the cabinet secretary for the answer. Can I ask the cabinet secretary, will the Government publish the criteria for each inspection, which informed whether a classroom had adequate ventilation? The guidance is quite clear on this issue, and it is a matter for local authorities to work with the professional staff that they have in that area to ensure that the monitoring has been undertaken correctly. That will, obviously, vary depending on the type of monitor that was chosen by that local authority, but we are supporting local authorities to ensure that they are using the monitors correctly, and local authorities are indeed supporting each other. The matters that will then happen following the monitoring are, of course, again for the local authority to undertake any remedial action that is required, but, again, that will depend on what the monitoring actually showed up. It very much is on a case-by-case basis, but certainly the material from the Scottish Government on the allocation of funding and on our guidance, I am happy to make available to Fousal Chowdry in writing if he has not already seen it. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will bring forward the date of 2024 for requiring zero direct emissions heating within new builds. The Scottish Government recognises the crucial need to take rapid action to reduce emissions associated with heating our homes and buildings. We recently reaffirmed our commitment to introduce regulations for zero direct emissions heating within new builds from 2024 within our heat and building strategy. That is faster than the UK is moving, it is faster than some expected. Our current review of building regulations for 2022 also includes provisions that will support those planned changes coming in 2024. Does the minister share the concern of local SNP councillors in north-east Fife, who were recently powerless to prevent gas boilers being installed in 13 new affordable homes in the village of Springfield? They will be powerless to act for another three years if the SNP Government refuses to change the rules. Why is the Government waiting until 2024 when there is a climate emergency now? As I said, we are cracking on with this work as rapidly as we can. I am glad that Willie Rennie is enthusiastic to push us further. If we were to say that we would complete the work by tea time, some people would still be outraged that we were not completing it by lunch. I hope that that is not what is happening here. What is necessary to achieve this work is not simply passing a regulation. It is working with the supply chain, working with the skills involved, so that we can go from a few thousand installations a year to hundreds of thousands of installations a year by the end of this session, and also working with our electricity networks to cope with the increased demand on electricity networks. Our heat and building strategy has been well recognised, is more ambitious than the UK's, both on zero emission heating and on energy efficiency, and we need to do both as fast as possible. Earlier this week, the Prime Minister said that new homes and buildings will be required to install EV charging points from 2022. Does the Scottish Government have similar ambitions? I am sure that Mr Johnson wants to respond to our consultation on the reform of the building regulations. He would be very welcome to do so, and we will give his suggestion all due attention. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide an update on its progress with implementing the recommendations of the Grasmawr management review group. Implementing the Grasmawr review recommendations remains a priority for the Government, as our 2021-22 programme for government set out will bring forward legislation in this parliamentary term. Since publishing our report, ministers, officials and NatureScot have met stakeholders in developing proposals for a licensing scheme. NatureScot has established a task group to progress recommendations, including on licensing and mure burn, and that group met on 23 November. We have commissioned a report on the impact of medicated grip, which was published by CIPA in November 2020. We have been engaging with the bodies involved in monitoring and regulating its use, and we will continue to do so. Can I thank the minister for that answer? It is clear that the work has now started at long last on this important work. Can I also ask about the related issue of extending the powers of the SSPCA to enable them to tackle wildlife crime that we are seeing in many areas of Scotland? It has been now 10 years since that was proposed. I believe that the minister is now the seventh minister to consider action in this area. When can that work begin? Mr Ruskell is aware that we have legislated for a task force to consider the scope of the powers, and our house agreement ensures that that task force will be able to report. Any recommendations that we agree to, which require legislation, will be reported in time for that to be included in legislation for grousmure management. A key concern on grousmures is the scale of trapping of other species through snaring. Can the minister tell us whether the animal welfare issues on the use of legal snares will be included in the snaring review, and when will that review report? Recently, I was in the chamber answering a question about snaring in response to one of Mr Smith's colleagues. I have made clear that, when the rules on snaring, which in Scotland are currently the tightest in the UK, but when they are reviewed at the end of this year—I think that it is all the while correct that I am wrong—I will see that the scope of that is extended to include a potential banning on snares. Ffyrgus Ewing. In thanking the minister for recently meeting with myself and senior members of the Scottish Game Keepers Association, I could ask her to reaffirm to Parliament that the Scottish Government recognises the value to the rural economy of country sports carried out professionally, as it has been, and will continue to be with the excellent professionalism of gamekeepers in our country. I am happy to confirm that the work that we are undertaking in grousmure management is not intended and will not put an end to grousmure management in Scotland. Mr Ewing knows that, because just in the months of September and October alone, having met with the League Against Cruel Sports, One Kind, BASC, Revive Coalition and the Scottish Raptors study group, I sat down with Ffyrgus Ewing and the Scottish Game Keepers Association and we discussed those issues at length. I feel very strongly that you should pursue policy and consultation with those whose lives and livelihoods are affected by it, and I will continue to do that. To ask the Scottish Government what plans it has to support the funding of flood mitigation schemes. We are committed to providing an extra £150 million over the next five years for flood risk management, which is in addition to the £42 million that we already provide annually to local authorities. Miles Briggs. I thank the minister for that answer. Residents in areas that I represent in Stockbridge, Cymru Bank, Ravelston and Craig Leith have been hit by significant flooding in recent years. That has actually been because of urban waste water issues. Specifically, the Scottish Government funding mechanism does that on the basis of river flooding. So, could I ask the minister whether or not the Scottish Government plan to review that funding mechanism to make sure that Edinburgh is given a fair funding deal to do some mitigation projects to prevent future flooding? The flood risk management strategies, which SEPA coordinates on behalf of all bodies responsible for flooding, consider all those matters. They consider whether it is urban, the rurality of the area, but they also consider sources of flooding risk, be it that from river, be it from the sea, but it suffers from water. That is embedded in the work that SEPA is doing, and the Government is committed to funding the priority projects that SEPA puts forward in the flood risk management strategies, so long as they are valuable. To ask the Scottish Government further to the laying of MPF4 whether it can provide an updated timescale for the consultation on phase 2 of the strategic transport projects review 2. STPR2 will create the evidence base for future transport investment decisions in Scotland for the next 20 years. Given the link between land use and transport, it has been fundamental that STPR2 takes cognisance of the spatial strategy that is set out in MPF4. Work on STPR2 is proceeding well, and the intention is to move to publish recommendations for investment in the new year, followed by the appropriate statutory consultation period. That will be done in a way that it can be concluded before the local authority pre-election per the period begins. I thank the minister for his answer, and I look forward to seeing more detail in the weeks to come. Does he recognise the need to promote freight transport by rail, particularly for long distance journeys in terms of reducing transport emissions? The member will appreciate that, given the processes that we are going through and out of respect for the stakeholders, I will not get involved in too much detail at this stage. However, there is absolutely no doubt that getting freight on to rail is going to be a priority as we seek to decarbonise transport, and that will involve investment in infrastructure. In phase 1 of STPR2, the Government pledged to carry out an audit of all lorry parks and rest areas near to trunk roads in Scotland. Can the minister say what progress is being made on that and if there is going to be any investment for improvements? I will write to the member with details on the first part of that question, where I will say to him that we are in detailed discussions with the freight sector. There is just now a variety of subjects, and that includes the location of lorry parks and the appropriate charging infrastructure that might be needed for those. The MPF4 includes a statement that all local development plans should manage the use and development of land in a long-term public interest, which is the accepted purpose of planning. However, the draft framework does not set out steps to apply this public interest principle during the decision-making process when planning applications are actually being decided. I would like to ask the minister if the Scottish Government will set out a process for decision makers to deny planning permission if they deem that a development would be unacceptable on the grounds of public interest. In the context of SDPR 2, there is a very clear set of criteria deployed, and those are the criteria that we use. To ask the Scottish Government whether it will provide further details of its plans to entitle all children whose skill start is deferred to access-funded early learning and childcare in their deferred year. Minister Claire Hawley. Positive progress is being made to deliver the commitment to offer funded early learning and childcare for all children whose school entry is deferred. The legislation will take effect from August 2023, as per the timetable approved by Parliament on 3 February 2021. A pilot programme is already underway in five local authorities to support local authorities in preparing for full implementation. We are investing £8.9 million to enable five additional local authorities to join the pilot from August 2022. The Scottish Government is commissioning an evaluation of the pilot approach, and that research will support local authorities with full implementation by evaluating approaches to policy implementation and parents' perceptions of the process. We anticipate that full evaluation findings will be published in spring 2023. Fulton MacGregor. I thank the minister for that response. Is she able to provide any further information on how the pilots are progressing? Also, could she outline how the Government intends to communicate the change in order to ensure that all families are aware of their rights around deferral, both in the pilot areas and moving forward? The pilot is progressing well with all participating authorities supporting families with their new entitlement. The new pilot sites were announced recently and local authorities are leading communication at the local level. Our parent club website has been updated to give parents and carers clear information about their rights around deferral, both for those in pilot areas and those in other authorities. We ask local authority to consider parental communications when applying for the year to pilot places. It is a key priority for our deferral working group, which meets on 30 November. We will be using it as an opportunity to share practice and to support local authorities with their local communication plans. That will also allow us to gather useful practice to share more widely ahead of the full roll-out in 2023. To ask the Scottish Government what progress has been made towards the R100 commitment to superfast broadband for all. Cabinet Secretary, Kate Forbes. The R100 commitment is being delivered through our R100 contracts, the R100 Scottish broadband voucher scheme and on-going commercial coverage. Despite telecoms legislation being reserved to the UK Parliament, which is something that I think is often forgotten, the Scottish Government is investing £579 million in the R100 contracts, the UK Government contribution being just £33.5 million and work is well under way across all the contracts. Jackie Dunbar. I thank the cabinet secretary for her response. I have been contacted by a number of constituents within the Aberdeen-Donside area who are not expected to be connected to the superfast network prior to the 31 December 2021 deadline. My constituents have been advised that they may be connected in 2022, however they have received no guarantee when this may happen. Over the past year, we have seen how important a superfast connection is. I would appreciate it if you could provide assurances that the Scottish Government will engage with residents in affected areas who have yet to be connected to ensure that they are aware of a timescale for this work to be completed. Although contract delivery for some premises in the Aberdeen-Donside constituency is scheduled to take place after the end of this calendar year, the R100 Scottish broadband voucher scheme offers a voucher worth up to £400 to enable constituents to secure an interim superfast connection, ensuring that everyone can access superfast broadband by the end of 2021. Where our online address checker currently shows a delivery date of 2022, it will be updated to reflect greater detail on delivery timescales once the survey work has been completed on the ground. We will continue to engage with communities across Scotland as part of the R100 programme. The Scottish Government, whether it will allocate funding in its 2022-23 budget to enable social care workers to be paid at least £15 an hour? As a member, we will know that the Scottish Government budget for 2022-23 is currently in development and will be published on 9 December. We are fully committed to reviewing pay and conditions for the social care workforce. Can I thank the cabinet secretary for that response? The Scottish Government has received some £4.6 billion in extra funding from the UK Government for this next budget. The cabinet secretary and I have discussed pay for social care staff in the last budget, and at that time she was concerned about continuing revenue funding. Given that that is no longer a problem, what is stopping the Government from increasing wages for low-paid social care staff? Accept a Tory press release when it comes to our budget. As the member will know, this year's budget is as challenging as ever in light of the fact that there are no Covid consequentials. In fact, the allocation does not accept that Covid continues to have an impact on our health service, on our education service or on local government. When it comes to social care workers, I agree with her on the importance of valuing their work, which is why this year we have provided funding of £64.5 million to deliver the living wage. Last month, we committed funding of up to £48 million to lift the hourly rate for social care workers to take it from £9.50 an hour to at least £10.2 per hour. That is sharp contrast with what social care workers in England and Wales face, most of whom are paid the national living wage of £8.91 an hour. That concludes general questions. Before we move on to First Minister's questions, I invite members to join me in welcoming to the gallery his Excellency, Mohammed Sarwar, Governor of Punjab.