Hello, and welcome. This is Systemwide Collaborations for Building OER California's OER Initiative, brought to you by the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges Open Educational Resources Initiative. We have five presenters today. First is Michelle Pilati. She's the faculty coordinator. She is also a psychology instructor at Rio Hondo College in Los Angeles and also at Foothill College in the Bay Area. Suzanne Joaquim is a regional lead for the OERI, also a project monitor and the discipline lead. She is biology faculty from Butte College in Northern California. Shagun Kor is a project monitor and discipline lead for the OERI. She teaches communication studies at De Anza College in the Bay Area. Jennifer Parris is also a regional lead and discipline lead for the OERI. She teaches early childhood education at the College of the Canyons in Los Angeles. I am Dave Dillon, a regional lead and the webinar lead for the OERI. I'm counseling faculty and a professor at Grossmont College in San Diego in Southern California. I'd like to take a moment to make a land acknowledgement. We acknowledge that this virtual session is taking place throughout the unceded territory of California, home to nearly 200 tribal nations. As we begin, we acknowledge and honor the original inhabitants of our various regions. We remember their connection to this region and give thanks for the opportunity to live, work, learn and pray on their traditional homeland. We also, I think, acknowledge that this is a virtual session. And while we all like physical in-person gatherings, that was not possible for this conference. However, my consolation is a virtual Zoom background of Taipei Medical University, where we likely would have gathered had this been an in-person opportunity. So with that our session goals for today, we will share with you training, support and advocacy for our OERI champions across a large public education system. We will share with you how we have found success and challenges in connecting institutions together. We will share with you how we build collaborations and really emphasize collaborations within desplins and across colleges and districts. We will let you know how we determined where OER gaps have been identified and then how we have gone about trying to fill those gaps. And lastly, we will share with you advocacy for OER from many different perspectives. A bit of alphabet scrabble acronyms that we use frequently, but folks outside of the United States or even just outside of California may not be as familiar with. CCC is California Community Colleges, CSU is California State University, UC University of California. And they previously mentioned ASCCC or ASCCC, the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, and our program that the five of us participate in the OERI, that's the OER Open, not online, Open Educational Resource Initiative. Many of you may be familiar with the geographical layout of California and our public universities. If you're not, this is a map that shows both the public University of California system in blue and the California State University system in red. And then this slide shares with you the whopping 115 California Community Colleges that exist to make up the largest public education system in the world with 2.1 million students. There are 115 California Community Colleges in the state, 23 California State Universities, and 10 University of California system schools, nine of which are undergraduate five medical centers and three national laboratories. Suzanne, I think this is you. So, yeah, our first question to answer when we started this project was, as you saw in the last slide, that is a whole lot of colleges over a really big swath of land. And so how do you connect all of these, all of these institutions that really have very little connection overall, and we don't generally have a lot of groups working together, except we do have the Academic Senate which was a real boon for our project. Because each college has has a Senate member and they need twice a year. So that was a good point of connection between all of our campuses. And so for that purpose when we took on the OER initiative and wanted to build connections. It made sense for it to come from the Academic Senate. So what we did is we identified a point person at each college, the OER liaison, we identified regional leads, so California is divided into five regions according to the Senate, and we have a lead for each region. And then we had one coordinator over the whole shebang. And, and that was kind of our setup. So the first thing to figure out once we had all of our liaisons in place is how do we support them, because some campuses have had OER projects happening in the past other campuses had had just started others I would venture to bet had barely even heard those three letters in that particular order. And so we had the full range of of experience in our liaisons. So the way that we chose to support them and help them build their OER projects on their campuses is we started with orientations for for new folks just to give them some introductory work. And in each of the regions the regional leads put together times for the liaisons just to get together and brainstorm ideas and this week we know from going to conferences right that's such an important piece of building connections is just having that unstructured time to just think out loud and and ask for help and ideas. The regional leads also had a main role in answering questions and yeah so we did a lot of that emails and so on and meetings, and we also went to campuses. So this is surprisingly effective, because people tend to listen from outside entities more often than from people inside their college for whatever reason. And so even though there were fabulous OER liaisons on campus is sometimes it helped to have somebody from the outside come in and talk about things. So we did offer a modest stipend and that was really helpful. Towards the end of this we'll talk a little bit about how you can build this sort of thing on your in your institutions and if there is funding a stipend is really nice, although I think a lot of our liaisons would have done this anyway because they're just fabulous people, and it wasn't a gigantic stipend so that couldn't have been the only motivation. So the next slide will show a little bit about those trainings and this is a short list. So this is just a kind of a sample. I'll show you where you can find all of our trainings in a little bit. On the right side we had trainings that were specific to liaisons. How do you find funding? How do you work with the bookstore? How do you approach your administration? How do you give presentations to your campus so that OER becomes something they're interested in finding allies, fostering engagement on and on? We also provide weekly webinars. So these are both for liaisons and also something that they can use to do outreach to their campuses. We can send reminders of here's this upcoming webinar. So it's a good way for them to engage with their campus in a really easy way for them. So the weekly webinars again covered the whole range of things from licensing copyright accessibility, some basics on you know why it matters, how do you find OER, how do you curate. And then at the very end is showcases, which I think was particularly effective where we had people share specific disciplines. What's in that discipline? What have they been using? Because as we know, faculty tend to understand their own disciplines better, right? So the best way to convince a math faculty to go to OER is to have other math faculty talk to them. So those are our trainings. And next slide, please. And we also had two way communication, which is really helpful. So we had, we asked liaisons a lot of questions about what do they need? We got a lot of input from them. We also shared out a lot of information in newsletters and so on, and specifically newsletters that they can share with their campus. Because again, part of what we were trying to do is help liaisons build OER movements on their campus. And as we know, you know, trying to build a movement is challenging. And so anything we could do to help them with that was useful, such as newsletters that they could send out to their faculty, right? So that was a pretty low entry point into their work on campus. Our webinars was something they could share with their faculty. And then from there, that's building hopefully a groundswell of interest and they can take that to the next step and start developing collaborations on campus. So lots and lots of regular updates. One place that we had a particularly robust set of resources, if I could have one of my fabulous co-presenters put that link. No, we're still, yeah, there we go. Put that link in the chat, please. So this is the website for our initiative. And there's, this is just a small sampling of what's there. So back one slide. Sorry. So this is the developer's webpage. And what we have here is some useful information that liaisons can share with their campus about if faculty are interested in developing, what do they need to know? Accessibility licensing. There's all sorts of information there. One of the tabs across the top says webinars and events. That's where you can go to see all of our previous webinars. They're recorded. There's slide decks. And of course, they're all openly licensed. So if you want to use those slides for presentation and your own institutions, you are very welcome to do that. And so there's all sorts of other useful information on the website. I'm not going to go through it. You're welcome to peruse and check that out. We also built a canvas shell that was focused more on a way to share information, but also a way to have liaisons and people within the same discipline have an opportunity to discuss with each other. Right. So campus as an LMS has some nice discussion features. And so we're hoping this is a more informal place for people to chat about resources. We also have, and I'm not going to talk about discipline leads because that's going to be covered in a little bit, but we have pages for each discipline where we're listing all of the resources for that discipline. So again, something liaisons can share out with their constituents. Excellent. And I believe this is the next section. Thank you, Suzanne. So as I said, we have set up the parameters for setting for two way communication with the liaisons on each campus and we had already talked about how we wanted to have them be supported and have resources for them. But one of the marching orders that we've got as part of this initiative is not only to help promote OER adoption, but also see where the gaps existed, and what we could do collectively as 115 college strong community to identify those needs and of course get around fulfilling them. Next slide please. One of the first things we did was, of course, as any good researcher does is see what's out there you need to build by first examining the lay of the land. And in doing so, we ran a series of discipline specific surveys which were sent out again as Suzanne mentioned through the wonderful network that's already started with the Academic State Senate. And for cohort one we invariably as soon as we started we had this done and we pretty much based it on members that were part of the leadership team and of course some preliminary requests we had started to get from our liaisons across the state. We were just getting off the ground. You will notice that cohort two had quite a bigger range of disciplines and this, again, speaking to the two way communication that Suzanne referred to this is very much informed by the proposals and drafts and requests we were getting. And anybody that couldn't be part of the initial proposal or project which I'll talk about in a minute. We wanted to first see what needs there were why were people putting in these proposals and then see if you could get some of those discipline faculties together so much of the cohort choices and much of the communication and much of our work was very much informed by the two way communication processes we had set up with our liaisons, and it was really coming from them and that was the work that was guiding us. So I wanted to provide a little bit of an example of what we some of the information that we learned from our surveys so the discipline leads that have been identified and that's a process that we're actually in the middle of expanding. Our surveys and tried to make sense of what we were being told by the faculty across our system and so, for example, child development so my area. We also call it early childhood education depending on where you're at. So over 60 faculty responded mostly from our California community colleges but we did have one from the CSU system. Most of them had heard about OER. Most of them thought they were using OER, but probably were actually using free resources and that was a discipline specific situation because there wasn't a lot of existing OER. And so there was a little bit of much longer story about the difference between free and open in the California community college system but those that weren't using OER, you know, identified the reasons why not having enough time to look or not knowing where to look or finding resources that at all or ones that met their needs so helped us see the challenges that we needed to help this particular discipline overcome. And for the most part we didn't have to convince them of the quality of OER there were only two people that didn't believe that it would be high enough quality. We looked at some of the other materials that faculty were wanting to use that would support whatever their course content was and again this helps give us an idea of what we might need to fund and what we might need to look for and what we might need to help support the building of in order for OER to be successful in a particular discipline. And so this was just one example of our first surveys. And it definitely helped guide the work that later happened that we supported in this particular discipline. Back to you Shagun. Thank you, Jennifer. So, coming back to what is guided our philosophy in this initiative from day one, but we are not closing off any channels of input or any channels of communication whatsoever so yes we were definitely doing these surveys but at the same time, we were also getting off the ground. There was a liaison webinars that Suzanne mentioned and those training sessions which of course gave us plenty of feedback so that to informed the disciplines we wanted to focus on or where the greatest need was, or as Jennifer rightly said what was getting in the way of having an OER adoption if there was a need for ancillaries or there was a specific need for, you know, PowerPoint slides, etc. We wanted to make sure that we got that in there. Thank you, Michelle. I know we love our acronyms. So, in terms of discipline leads, some of us, as you know, our discipline leads, we were also identifying and putting together resources on our own field following the TMC, which is the transfer model curriculum that Michelle just put in the chat. And using that as a framework to see where the gaps in a particular discipline existed so that we could see if they're interested in coming together and collaborating upon that field. I will talk in a minute about discipline specific gatherings which did have itself to purposes of bringing faculty like minded faculty together and also getting a sense of where the greatest need was and what we needed to do to push the envelope forward. The next fearless leader is going to talk to you later about collaborating with other state entities and kind of keeping that two way communication cycle open with advisory councils and other advice and help from other entities so that we were not recreating the wheel. There's anybody who's been in the OER community for a while knows that there's a lot of collaboration happening and there's a lot of interesting work happening all the time, and people are, the nature of OER means that we are by nature collaborative people who love to share resources. And so, a big part of the initiative for us, because of how big we are and how many colleges we support was trying to make sure that our energies were spent in the right direction that we were working to build on what had already been created by others and not duplicating efforts needlessly. Next slide please. Back to you, Jenta. So yeah, so some examples of what we just talked about and so I know that they're kind of small documents there but I just wanted to kind of you to see what that looked like so Suzanne mentioned that in canvas, each discipline that had a discipline lead built out resources that were used in the California community college system or had been developed for use in the California community college system for commonly common courses across the different colleges and we're very lucky that most disciplines have the TMC that Michelle put the acronym for, which corresponds with a common numbering system. So we all call our courses different things, we have different prefixes, we have different course numbers, but this gives us a way of being able to identify, oh, you know, this particular class relates to this class at this institution and this one and this one and so it gives us a little bit of a common ground in most disciplines not all, but those are kind of where we started. And so if you go into my discipline in our canvas shell you'll find eight courses that make up our transfer and resources if available for those eight courses. And then we wanted to put it into that same handout that the system provides for that that that degree that the TMC as we commonly refer to it. And so on the left you'll see that document where we actually have live links so that it's like a two page document that ideally so that the links are functional you would email it to someone or you would give it to them digitally. But it makes it really easy to coordinate what resources are available for which course. So we wanted to make it as easy as possible for faculty to find resources that are as close to ready to use as possible because we know that's one of the big challenges with OER is I have to be able to find it and it has to be ready for me to use or as close to ready as possible. And so that that's kind of an example and one discipline. We also wanted to kind of show you that. So some of the things that we've talked about there's money behind. And we know that there is not money for OER in many places and in these economic times. So what was kind of happening simultaneously with a lot of the work that we were doing and some of it even predated the OER is formal existence was this kind of grassroots collaboration efforts. And so it started out with me personally realizing with some of the work that I was doing. We need a common place for resources to be shared right we don't need to be going to 16 different websites trying to find resources and so I just created a Google group where people could post or go looking for resources and I tried to organize it by course. So very similar to what we've tried to do a little bit more formally with the OER. So the simultaneous grants that we're running and what we discovered through those grants is that some of the colleges that were awarded them were doing really similar work we had in the one round of funding there were five colleges that got money to work in child development early childhood education is that realized that we kind of had a community we just didn't know it existed. One of the things that we did was we decided to bring people together.  And so we were pretty I felt like we were like trailblazers, but we allowed people that could come in person so they were in driving distance. They could come for free, but you could also join us virtually and part partake in the entire day long workshop, including the working groups that were formed. And so that was really successful we had three that that image there on the left is from the first. And I think overall I'm trying to remember I should have looked up our numbers. But I think we had over 30 people in the room and I think we had, you know, close to 50 joining us virtually so that was really exciting to see that the interest was there we just needed some support and coordination. From that came the email list so it started with the evite email addresses and that list is grown to almost 300 people that I now have this running Google Doc that I use with my colleague who's not here today that also part of the OER I Amanda Tainter to reach out to share newly released OER or the next thing on the list of these regularly scheduled zoom conversations so we didn't want to lose the momentum that we got when we started collaborating and so one of the things that Amanda did was started biweekly zoom conversations, they're now monthly just time management. But once a month we get together we share what's going on we answer questions and we reconnect our community. Knowledge was one of the recipients of the grants and with our grant funding we created textbooks that didn't really exist for our discipline but I think the important thing that I want to share here with the mostly free point is that I housed them in Google groups. I don't have much choice but it's the one that I stumbled on so that people could share they could join the group and if they created PowerPoints or whatever ancillary materials. They, they particularly used and we're willing to share they could easily share those without having to submit them in some sort of formal process. And then of course we did a lot of sharing. So anytime we had a chance to do something like this we would, Amanda and I would try and, and reach as many people as we could to grow continue to grow that collaboration. And so while some of the things there was a cost involved, a lot of these could be done at no cost and so we did want to kind of share an example of how this could be done without a large funding source. All right, should be back to you. Thank you Jennifer. So, the, what all of this resulted in was of course, once we knew the gaps existed and we knew faculty were willing to come together and collaborate and share resources and even work on these resources. And the natural progression of that less led to RFP and again that's another acronym with somebody can put in the full form request for proposals. And we did the first round of RFP is almost very soon after we got set up as an initiative I'm forgetting the dates now. And we asked people to come together and submit requests for proposals and they were short term up to 20,000 I know the first time we did it, it was six months and it was definitely a challenge for everybody involved both working on it and the project monitors who were helping facilitate it. And of course, we made sure that our collaborators and our authors and people working on OER project had to demonstrate a statewide need it was important for us that they were not creating ancillaries or resources or any OER material that just served one or two campuses so they definitely had to demonstrate a statewide need. And we actually helped with this we had, we actually had assigned part of the leadership team to a group of the applicants and we helped them look for resources out there and see if they were gaps that that were already filled by another resource. And if the resource was not up to standard or did not meet the needs of the California Community College system then we were willing to work with them to see what how the RFP could be modified or change based on so that it would address a direct need that was that met statewide requirements. Some of us also provided training to help people assist in demonstrating that need and teaching them how to tap into state data to determine how commonly a course was taught across the 115 California Community Colleges. So for example, one of the courses I teach which is public speaking is something that is taught across all 115 California Community Colleges is one of the general requirements, kind of an important course. But there are others within my discipline that are taught at the select few campuses, maybe 15 or 20. And that is not to say that those campuses and their needs are not important but you know, given, given funding given time given all that we are juggling you know the priorities has to be given to courses that definitely impact have the maximum impact to the maximum extent of our extent of our student population or where there is such a big gap that stopped the needle from moving forward so in our feet to we did something differently. Again trainings and help and guidance but we also before that had by that time developed enough of a relationship for weekly webinars and these faculty gatherings that Jennifer talked about where we could bring discipline faculty together and help set up collaboration so we ended up having three or more campuses come together and collaborate full time or adjunct faculty and wanted to see how collaboration and working together on a project brought in different perspectives and multiple resources to the table. And these were a little longer they were spread over roughly about 11 months and they were up to 30 grand. Again, the funding was primarily to the faculty to do the work and as Jennifer said, and Suzanne earlier said money is never going to equal the work that all of us put into this but it's a nice way of getting some of the clearing some of the pathways for people. There was also extensive amount of training given to our RFP authors, be it through webinars on accessibility, be it on platforms that they could use whether the press books or library text. And each of them have one of the project monitor the site who is essentially the resource person their FAQ manual. They're good girls Friday if they just need to went about the rest of the team members or essentially the each of these authors lead people on the team have one of us directly in contact with them and since we are in touch with each other all the time it helps. It helps the resource sharing and the two way communication that has been, I think the base block of our initiative. Some of the projects that we are really excited about cover the whole range from PowerPoints to video to I think cooking videos was the one that got most of us excited to of course or traditional or text books to ancillaries. And the website that was put in the chat you can see a sampling of some of the work that has been created under RSP one we are still working on RSP to over to you Jennifer. So yeah so some of the takeaways and should get should already touched on some of these that we discovered through the efforts that we've taken so far and we're about halfway through our initiative, at least the current initial funding cycle. The importance of project project monitors and mentors right faculty don't know what they don't know. And the only way that we know what they don't know is to be involved in the work that they're doing and to identify those things as quickly as possible so that it doesn't create more work for everybody. And that is that fourth bullet point really having a formalized training system where we make sure that everybody understands licensing and attributions and accessibility and curation and all of those things that are really important to building a resource that is going to be able to be implemented and adopted across the system. We also know that collaboration across colleges is vital, especially as she said we have limited funding. We have to prioritize what's going to impact the, the most people. We want to make sure that we're ensuring local meeting local needs, local copyright attribution and accessibility needs most campuses don't have adequate resources for those so we want to make sure that we're supporting that as much as we can. One of the things that we've recognized through finding so a couple of things so if you're looking at TMC and resources resources resources and then there's a course or two that just have nothing. That is a targeted identifiable gap that we can create a targeted project for right so we know we need a book or course content for course XYZ right. So now we could put out a call and we're in the process of working on this now for the first time put out a call for that specific project. We also can recognize targeted resource opportunities when we have people that apply to, you know, put in proposals for very similar projects so if four groups of faculty across the state all want to create a resource around the same content. That's a great targeted resource. So instead of funding only one of those groups why not bring those groups together to create something and and and really formalize that collaboration. And so we're recognizing that all of the efforts that we're doing are a way to really formalize or in some cases and most cases start this statewide discipline collaboration. You know some colleague some discipline faculty don't even know their colleagues across the state some have organizations you know I know our organization has several different our discipline has several statewide organization so we tend to recognize some of the common people in our field, but not all disciplines have that and so this was one way for us to really create a way to foster that collaboration that we know is so important. And that's it first again a nice section. Thank you everyone I'm up and I was keeping track and you guys left plenty for me to say but I found myself wanting to go in a couple of different directions. One of the things that we haven't talked about at all is how coven has impacted our work and when everything started happening and all of our faculty across 115 colleges were moving to doing things completely online. Statewide Academic Senate really mobilized its resources to help faculty and we were part of that and so we, we did a lot around helping faculty see ways to move where we are move where we are quickly into a course shell if they were suddenly doing a something online that they have never done before so we were part of part of that effort. And in looking back some of the things that we had started to do in the course of our work. I think we're actually really really beneficial as a project that really was potentially touching all of our faculty. We started to make it part of everything that we did was talking about accessibility. And so we have faculty who may have been dabbling in OER and coming to the kind of trainings that we were offering. Who when suddenly they're tossed completely online without any planning, at least had an idea about accessibility they might not have had and so there were things that we were doing for the good of our system for the good of our students that were actually really beneficial overall. So I'm just talking about advocacy and which I think is a great topic because advocacy is one of those things that you don't have to have money to do it. You have money, you can do a lot more, but you can be an advocate with very little cost and so we're really focusing on providing statewide advocacy and then supporting those local advocates as well as supporting local OER efforts and supporting in in every way from and I think you got hints of this supporting local liaisons in solving problems as well as in finding resources and so a big part of what we do is bring those liaisons together so that they can talk through their issues and find solutions and so that's been really important and you already heard that we do lots of presentations. We do presentations. So often that we start to lose track of them have to remind ourselves, but we also now are holding statewide conversations about particular topics so that those those local advocates can come together to talk about what they're doing and to to work on problem solving so we're really trying to provide that sense of community at almost every level that you can think of from what you're trying to do from what discipline you're at as well as helping someone who's trying to build something locally to build it among their colleagues. Next slide please. So, as was mentioned, we came out of this. We are faculty working with faculty, and we're entirely a faculty organization working out of the academic Senate for California Community Colleges, which literally is the statewide voice of our faculty so because of that, we are. Our organization is known to our faculty and we have lots of ways to hook into those local campuses that really has been beneficial for helping us to get information out, as well as to bring information in. We were really lucky to get the funding that we have and I want to talk to us a little bit about the funding and how we got the funding but then also talk about things that don't require funding. The academic Senate had been wanting to do something bigger than what it had been doing in the OER space, having already had to respond to OER related legislation, as well as really wanting to have a mechanism for sharing OER with faculty and helping to move it forward. And so the organization formed a task force to work on this and to develop a proposal. And so we got very lucky in that we developed a proposal and it did in fact get funding. This was, it was at an opportune, it was at an opportune time. And we were also very lucky and it's more than luck but we were also very fortunate in that we had powerful allies to help us get that funding. And so the organization that supports, that represents our college presidents and our college trustees supported our work. So we literally had leaders from our campuses in Sacramento advocating for giving us money to do the work that we're doing. We were very fortunate with respect to that. But one of the things that you can see here is that we started doing a lot of work before we had money. So for almost two years, we were doing a lot of the things that we were doing now, but without any support to make it happen, working with a committee of volunteers, and so forth. Go ahead to the next slide, please. So, as noted, we're really lucky, even though we're big, we have an infrastructure that facilitates communication. And as you've already heard, we have some common language around talking about what we're doing at our colleges. We have the Academic Senate. We've always had a pretty rust robust community system with robust system of communities within our system, people who communicate with one another based on their roles. So based on the work that they're doing, they have networks for talking to each other, so that we are solving problems not alone but by talking to a community. And if you know anything about California, we have lots of laws and lots of regulations to deal with, and we try to deal with it together, which makes it, if nothing else, you're enjoying the pain with others. And we also have an infrastructure in place to support discipline based communication. And Jennifer mentioned the TMCs and underneath the TMCs are descriptors for courses that are commonly taught descriptors that were developed, not just by the community colleges but we're also developed in a very strong partnership with our CSU colleagues, so that we have a common understanding of what what does public speaking look like what does child development look like what does introduction to polystyle look like. And because of that we have listservs of people who were involved in those processes. And so we have for all of our basic disciplines, robust listservs that allow us to push messages out to specific faculty in specific disciplines, which is super useful when we are doing the different surveys, we can push them to OER advocates but we can also push them directly to faculty so that hopefully we're not missing anyone who's interested in who's interested. Had existing statewide OER and related efforts happening here in California. So when we came on the scene, the idea of OER and zero textbook cost was not something new. And so a big part of what we were advocating for is that we want to bring those efforts together. And we want to build on them. So one of the things that we already had, we had things happening, but there was no mechanism for collaboration. So one of the big pieces that we problems that we really want to solve was that 115 colleges, when there is a granting opportunity, there's almost no way 115 colleges are going to benefit from that. And so because we had the selected granting opportunities, we had some colleges that were moving far along with respect to developing OER developing ZTC. And then we had other colleges that were sort of left out. And so we really wanted to see wanted to see how can we bring all these efforts together and how can we ensure that across our 115 colleges. We don't have a system of have of haves and have not so how can we support the faculty at every college so that every college and students at every college can benefit from OER and everything that has to offer. Next slide please. So why this effort. Why, why do we exist. We thought it was really important to have a faculty led effort. Having administrators that are in favor and supportive is awesome, but you really need to have the faculty to help bring other faculty along and as somebody already mentioned, the best way to get a faculty member in a particular discipline to consider OER to adopt OER is to have them hear from one of their colleagues about what that looks like and why it's good. And so we really want to be able to provide that voice to provide that voice and that that discipline based advocacy at every step along the way. So I think that it was important to have something like this so that we can really focus on leveraging the size of our system and our state. So to make sure that we are bringing all the great minds that we have together, bringing them together in order to collaborate as I mentioned, our last RFP, we required faculty to collaborate. And this was, it's a lot easier to do things by yourself, but ultimately the benefit of doing things with others is much greater. And so we are really looking forward to our next step, which is bringing faculty together to do the things that we think that they need to develop, we've identified things that they should do. And then we're going to recruit the faculty and then provide the guidance for them centrally right now we have teams led by a faculty member who wrote the proposal and they're working and we're supporting them, but they're somewhat on their own and so we're looking at trying this targeted approach to development and in some instances, bringing groups together where we're not sure exactly what they need. And we're going to bring them together to figure out what they need and then support them in doing it and so we're really really exciting, excited about that. The piece of what we're trying to do is prevent duplication of effort. If you have a granting system that is looking at a bunch of different proposals in isolation, and you're focusing on supporting a college as opposed to supporting a resource to benefit all colleges, you can wind up at the same time supporting duplicate projects at different places and so we really wanted to get away from doing that. We're very very focused also on building upon what came before there are lots of things that have happened in our state that have led to the creation of resources that in some some instances are not being used and so we want to find ways to use those resources, as well as building upon all the work that has been done at our colleges, under the prior grants that are out there. So, a big part of our work we have, as was mentioned we have two guiding bodies. One is an advisory committee that needs to okay our work plan and give us input, particularly from the perspective of a local college, but probably the more exciting group that we have formed is a coordinating council where we bring together everyone in the state that is doing OER work or OER related work to talk about what we're doing and to identify points of intersection. So this includes our statewide online education initiative, which actually has helped us out a lot because one thing that simplifies our work is the fact that we're all using the same course management system. We're talking about creating resources that are going to live in a course management system, all 115 of our colleges are in the same system. We of course work with our chancellor's office, all of our money actually throws through our chancellor's office. We work with our librarians. We also have two national, international OER related projects that exist within our public transfer partners, the CSU with Cool for Ed, which is something that came about as a consequence of prior legislation that was actually asking all three segments of public education to public higher education to work together on OER, as well as Merlot and then Libra text is here in California. We also have CCC OER as they happen to be here in California so they join us as well. And then we have had a robust zero text, zero textbook cost grant process and community in our system, along with technical assistance providers who are also part of our coordinating council. So we're really coming together to talk about what we're doing to identify points of intersection and so that we can work together. Just to share with you briefly, we have had various legislation previously that are some of the things that we're building on. And we kind of came along as a lot of these granting opportunities were coming to an end. And so there was sort of work that was started that in some instances we were able to fund projects that went along with it and took it to the next level. So in 2015 we had the College Textbook Affordability Act that was one mechanism that started to grow OER in both the community colleges and in the CSU. We're very fortunate in that our CSU system is very well supported with respect to OER so our colleagues there are a great resource for us. Next slide. And then we have the zero textbook degree program that was already referenced that really helped a number of colleges really build an infrastructure for moving resources, moving their work forward and developing an infrastructure for developing zero textbook cost degrees. And so again, these are things that were sort of going away. And we were able to pick up on that. I'm know I'm talking very fast am I missing anything in the chat or we just quiet there. Nothing. Okay. All right, good. All right, next slide. So how do you attain funding so first of all I think it's really important that if you've got committed people, you don't need you you've got committed people that did not sound good. So you have people who are committed to OER. Yeah, there's a lot that you can do by harnessing their energy and their passion. And most of us are good, good chunk of us were involved in the non funded efforts back back in the day. And there's a lot that you can do before you actually get that funding and that's really advantageous. I want to point out that first RP we just put a call out very quickly and said, What do you want to do that you think's going to, you know, increase OER use in our system. And we were able to fund a lot of faculty who had not been getting any dollars for their efforts, or had started something and not finished and we were able to fund them to get to done so that was really exciting. But how do you attain funding. I think it's really important that you start doing something and start establishing an infrastructure and infrastructure before you have the money you've got to do some pre work, so that when you when you do get the money can be positive you know what you're going to do with it and you're ready, you're ready to run you're ready to get moving I think one of the most challenging things with lots of grant systems. Is you get the money and then it takes you a bunch of time to figure out how do you how you spend it and how you build that infrastructure to spend it and so if it's a short term grant. All of a sudden, you're supposed to have spent the money and you still haven't built the infrastructure to spend the money. So it's really important to do the pre work, figure out what you want to do and how you're going to do it before you get, get money, and recruiting allies is absolutely critical. The fact that we had another organization that was out there supporting with the academic Senate was advocating for, and literally walking the halls of our state capital with funding our work in this space as part of their message was huge. It's also important that you have a clear vision of what you want to do and how you're going to do it. And that clear vision of course can be part of what helps you to bring others along. So we're very clear about the importance of respecting the work that came before and seeing how we can build on that work. We've done that in a number of different ways work that happened under the two grants that we already mentioned. We also think it's important that you are proposing to do something that capitalizes on what you have to offer. What we have to offer is faculty across 115 colleges who are interested in OER and willing to do OER work and our organization is all about bringing faculty together to do good work to benefit their students. You want really in that vision want to identify both issues and opportunities and I think the lack of collaboration was an issue and the opportunities to step in and to really support what's happening at the local level was a great opportunity. It's also really important to think about sustainability to not just assume that you're going to exist forever and work on building structures that can live on. Our hope is that after our initial five years of funding that we will be able to secure additional funding beyond that that does not need to be at the same level after we have built things out over that first five years. But at the same time, if OER is going to continue and really take hold across our system, there's got to be that local will that local interest and so supporting those local liaisons is huge and our secret hope in supporting liaisons the way that we have been is that they will then turn around and be able to create an infrastructure at the local level to keep things going no matter what happens with us at the state level. So what can you do that's low cost or no cost pre work. Surveys are great. And as you saw we've done surveys a couple of times we have also prior to that prior to the funding mechanism that led to cool for Ed. The Senate had done a survey to get a sense of sort of the lay of the OER land and so we have a nice story that we can tell looking at faculty attitudes and awareness of OER over time. But when you're gathering data you're also letting people know about things. And so we have learned so much from from the survey process just as we also learned so much from the request for proposals process. The request for proposals process sorry that's not low cost or no cost but it's really important to to to share that when we put the call out for you know what do faculty want to do what do they need what do they think we need. You learn so much about which disciplines are already highly invested in OER particularly with within your state and aware of it as well as the ones that aren't aware of aren't aware of what's out there. So once you get a sense of the community that currently exists. You can establish lists serves for OER advocates are interested disciplines. I think Jennifer story about what happened with each child development is great. You can conduct webinars. We've been doing webinars now I think, at least weekly for about three years, if not longer. And so we are webinars predate our work. But and it makes it so we have this incredible library where if you know if you're looking for a webinar on something. Here you go check it out. We. One one thing that you can always do is add OER to the agenda whenever faculty are convened if there's an event happening at OER to have somebody there to talk about it that's that's easy enough. And of course, you can always educate others faculty colleagues and administrators about OER. So that is what we had prepared so I'm happy to open it up to questions and take this out. Take this in whatever directions anyone wants to take it. And if any of the other panelists would like to jump in with any thoughts I welcome it. I'm feeling guilty that I don't have California in my background but since you don't I guess I'm okay. This is a no guilt session. Thank you for joining us if you have questions. Please feel free to unmute yourself or raise your hand or type your question in the chat. We're actually almost at time I didn't, I didn't think I talked that long. Sneaks up on you. I have like just completely random out of left field questions from someone who's here. I don't think that Lena or Rory are in this session and Maria I don't know if you would like to speak to this but I'm curious how Canada might compare in some ways to try and figure out logistics for for OER across a large system. Thank you. Hi, this is Marie I'm joining in from BC and it's fascinating to see what you guys are doing it's such a large endeavor. We have smaller scale but similar problems I was especially interested how you were actively trying to prevent doubling efforts because that's what's definitely happening here with our best intentions and we have some coordinated. OER activities but a lot of them are very grassroots and so doubling happens easily. Did you guys encounter a lot of doubling despite you trying to prevent it. You know I think so because because we were doing we're doing request for proposals and we're putting it out and we're looking at everything. You would think that we have to some extent we can control that. But we did the first round accidentally fund to very sugar and smile and fun to very similar projects, but ultimately we were able to bring those faculty together to to to really take that you know to leverage those seemingly competing efforts. And so now, and with the second round, we were able to be much more strategic and part of what we did with the second request for proposals. We, in both both times we did a two step process. The first time, because we are timeline was so short before we had all the details of our request for proposal worked out we need to make sure we had faculty thinking about it. So we put out this informal letter of interest where they, they had to tell us they were interested if they wanted you know if they wanted to. We had to they had to tell us they were interested and tell us what they were interested in doing. And part of the advantage of that was that they had the ability to influence what the request for proposals look like by doing that. And so it also for us was a way to find out what people wanted to do to inform the proposal. And that and that worked I mean that works really nicely the second time around, we, we knew we wanted to make them collaborate. And, and so we did we did again a letter and this time we took all the letters that we got organize them by discipline, and then worked on literally connecting faculty across across the state. So that they could come together the one of the things that we discovered to there is that we had some faculty that were really really interested. But the nature of their discipline made it very hard for them to come up with a proposal that would be fundable. And so we mentioned that we're about to do some targeted work we're going to be working on assuming we get the faculty to step a biological psychology textbook. Let me if I get this wrong interpersonal communication. But we're also going to be bringing English as a second language faculty together to see what they could develop that would benefit ESL faculty across the state, recognizing that the populations they work with are incredibly different. We're really excited to see how that works. And we're also trying to bring nursing faculty together to direct them to the existing resources that are out there to see if there are resources that work for our faculty and if they don't to engage them in making those resources work and so we're trying to create those opportunities that leverage and bring faculty with interact with common interests together and try to get away from those one offs happening across the state. Yeah, no that's great. We have similar incentives we have a big kind of provincial so NBC provincial initiative through BC campus and it's also by subject area and organized sprints so we bring people together to create OERs. But just recently you know talking about textbook we I worked on Canadian edition of a psychology textbook that we kind of mixed and matched from multiple OER and then somebody in another province duplicated the effort so just when you think that you have at least you know one area covered. But yeah, you know having said that it's okay to have to first year psych textbooks. They're going to be different angles and them and people will have more choices so in the long run you know that's okay but you're kind of seeing the small amount of dollars trickling into. I'd love to continue that discussion and I think the platform is built to encourage us to use connect to continue to communicate and discuss and collaborate. And I also know that Walter and Luna are here. So I'm going to give the floor to them to get ready for the next session. Thank you again for joining us. We appreciate your support and participation.


Got it back Again, what is up guys we are back with another epic PSA return video And we are returning one of my most epic cards for the second time I sent in my ghost rare first edition black rose dragon and it got a nine the first time and I thought This card should get a 10. Okay. Check this one out. This one is in better condition it with those corners Please don't have damaged the corners. Oh my gosh Okay, check the foil out. Okay, the corners on this one look good Let's check the back. I mean look at those Those are those are nice There is like I think there was like a half print line in here somewhere the sintering is not great on the back But it is the back so guys I'm gonna legitimately be angry if this isn't it How is this one a nine what? So what did I do I? Did nothing for like a year and I decided you know what now's the time. Let's try it again Let's see if we can get a better grade this time also guys I'm going to be doing a new series called worth it or not where you post Your sealed product or your cards that you want to grade on reddit r slash ruxen 34 with the hashtag worth it or not And then you guys ask me do you think it's worth it for me to open? You know specific product that you have that you're thinking about opening or a card that you're thinking about grading Is it worth grading you got to put pictures if you do that though or videos or something like that So I can look at the card and determine is it worth grading so go to r slash ruxen 34 on reddit If you guys want to participate and be in the video actually post something there and I can review it on the video I think it'll be pretty fun It should be a pretty fun way for me to interact with you guys and I get that question all the time Like should I grade this card is it worth me grading this card when should I grade this card? Should I grade it for $200 $300 $20 whatever it comes back and then I always get the question Should I open this set should I not open this set and now we can kind of answer that question on video So everyone can see it and I'm not answering it over and over just like the single people that way it gets out to more people And you guys get more content so I think it'd be pretty cool But first we do have a giveaway and this one is a pretty epic giveaway We've got an entire dawn of majesty first edition box So if you guys saw the stream where we went to 90k the other day we opened up nine boxes of the set and pulled two star lights not just two star lights But the star light the second one we got was the one we were looking for the legendary Stardust dragon. Yeah, so if you've not seen that video yet I'm probably gonna have it in the outro soon because it was insane I posted on Twitter posted on Instagram go follow me at ruxin34 on those social media platforms because I'm posting tons of stuff Constantly I love interacting with you guys on there. So go follow me Okay, so we got this beautiful card which may or may not be part of a PSA submission soon Let me know if you guys think I should do a pre grade on it and then send it in and then see if we can get the 10 Let me know if you guys would want to see that and back to the giveaway This is from the same cases the two star lights full disclosure So you probably won't get a star light unless it's the most insane case of all time with three star lights But you can still get some good cards and it's free. So pretty awesome All you have to do is like this video be subscribed and let me know what you think about the new series worth it Or not. Okay, let's get into the big reveal The black rose dragon guys ghost rare first edition PSA 10s of this card are insane So we're really hoping that again at least gets a nine and a 10 would be absolutely nuts So let's open this up. You guys know how opening these packages is it's very difficult That actually went really well. I Cut that really well and then that okay, and this is the tough part. It's like where do you cut? I think it's right here. There it is Boom. Okay, did I figure it out? Look at that. Okay, we have one card. Let's make sure we don't spoil it So it's gonna be on one side. Which side is it? Okay, that's the back. Okay. That's the back Let's not let's not ruin the reveal Pull it out like this now. Let's pull out the card slowly, but surely There we go. Okay. We have the one and only black rose. Let's check the back first of all Looks like it is pretty decent. There's a couple speckles. I think those are just on the sleeve So I think we're okay there, which is nice. Nothing on the back. That's a good start All right back looks pretty good. Let's check out the corners. I Believe there is some sort of mini scratch in there somewhere. I can't remember though Totally where it was, but I thought there was a scratch when I looked over it That was like the main issue that was about it The corners look pretty good. The back centering is not completely perfect.  Hello guys But yeah, so let's cover it up The front check this out guys Centering's pretty good on the front foil Absolutely Beautiful, I mean just a beauty on the foil. It looks super good. Let's check out the corners Corner looks let's see. Is there anything going on? No, that's just part of the case that little dot you guys see Yeah, that looks good That looks pretty good and that looks good. All right Very strong car. What do you guys think you guys think it has a chance at the tin? I don't know guys I don't know. It's so tough to grade these ghost rare. So I think there's no telling what the tens are worth I think the nines are around like four or five thousand dollars. So nine's still really good Tens are Insane, they're super high. Also, I want to mention I use the super express for this because I know it's a real Expensive card if it got a 10 it would need to be at least super expressed So I send it in for $300 and they grade it in one day So if you do spend the actual big money for the big cards because you're technically supposed to because when the card is Worth a certain amount it has to be at a certain level. So that's what the upchargers are for it They need to put it in the correct amount or whatever So I had to spend $300 and it was super fast. So I was glad that at least if I'm gonna send an expensive card It comes back quickly. Okay Are you guys ready? I'm a little bit scared. I'm scared to look at this thing Like button for a lot guys. Here we go. Okay This is why this is why it was worth it So I retried this card as I said, but I graded it a very long time ago and I you guys remember that original video I was like this is a 10. I said it a lot of times. Oh My goodness, okay, so there was like when I when I cracked it out actually I didn't Lewis cracked it for me because Because I'm too scared to crack this kind of card But first of all, this is insane, but I saw I think I remember there being like a small scratch Is that it right there? That might be it. There was like a small scratch on the back So I was thinking I hope that might have been the original reason, but I don't remember that scratch. So That's pretty much it cuz like look at this look at this car guys. Wow guys that is Absolutely insane. Honestly, this could be my post-expensive card now Cuz right because it's morphing jar. I think right now actually Jenzo my other Jenzo because Jenzo it's gotten crazy in price. I Don't know what this is worth. I have no idea So put in the comments if you guys have any idea what you think this this car is worth in a PSA 10 first edition ghost rare I don't know.  We finally hit something big guys. Okay. I say that but we had a huge return But we finally hit a one card something big one card. There we go. Wow, that's pretty crazy guys That is nuts Alright PSA PSA 10. That's pretty cool. I do have some more returns coming up We have two from the legacy of darkness break and then the pharaoh servant If you guys have not seen the pharaoh servant video go check it out. It was crazy Everyone had insane polls and we're doing most of those cards are being graded and they're coming back Probably in a couple weeks. So that's gonna be a pretty cool return as well We got a Jenzo in there Buster Blader thousand iser straight legendary fisherman Imperial Warder all that stuff is in there So it's gonna be really good return. So uh look out for those We have some epic stuff coming up as well such as the special edition opening which you guys It's supposed to be here today the last special edition. We'll see if it shows up If it shows up today, I'll record this weekend I'll edit it throughout the week and you guys will see it next Saturday. That's the plan. That's gonna be crazy I really hope that happens. I also have a another big 10 opening coming up You guys might enjoy so hopefully that'll come soon as well So this was a crazy video I hope you guys enjoyed it if you did don't forget to subscribe to the channel because we are 10,000 subscribers away from 100,000 you guys know what we're doing there or retro pack 2 opening and more I'm so excited So that's it for this video guys. I will see you guys later Peace


The permanent secretary in the Department of Economic Development, Mr Claudius Emmanuel, has given the assurance that contracts for all enumerators and their supervisors involved in the 2022 National Census have been prepared and finalised. There was a slight delay in processing the contract documents for hundreds of enumerators and their supervisors. As one would imagine, we have quite a large number of enumerators, in fact some 670. And so it means that to be able to provide the necessary documentation on a contractual basis, a number of copies of those contracts need to be signed. There were prescribed procedures and accountability guidelines that had to be followed in preparing over 2,600 contracts for signature. Our financial management rules indicate that we need to do for each contract six copies. Further, four of those copies need to be original signatures. And so one can imagine the significant workload for the permanent secretary who is the person who is designated to sign those contracts as the accounting officer. And so you are looking at 670 multiplied by 4. That is 2,680 contracts that has to be physically signed by the permanent secretary. In the meantime, the Central Statistical Office has been busy preparing kits for distribution to hundreds of enumerators who have completed training and are about to visit homes across St Lucia. The kit contains recommended personal protection items, including hand sanitisers, surgical gloves, masks, face shields, and digital thermometers, all needed to ensure that the enumerators adhere to all COVID-19 protocols. These were detailed in a document completed by the Central Statistical Office. That document details and guides what the enumerator should do in conducting the interview in approaching a respondent. And it's very detailed and it's a document that has that we have used to inform and guide our preparation thus far. On Saturday, enumerators were presented with the kits, maps, and specially designed tablets, all containing tracking devices in case they were lost or stolen. Each enumerator has been issued with an ID card which must be presented prior to engaging a respondent. The 2022 National Population and Housing Census is the first paperless census to be conducted in St Lucia. The census runs from May to October 2022. The public is asked to cooperate with the enumerators.