[Anita Walz] So to those of you who are online, welcome.
We want to welcome our special guests
here today, including the one who is online,
Billy Meinke-Lau from University of Hawaii. Have you had a
chance to do a sound check yet? I did a good sound check [inaudible]
Okay, we can hear you so let's formally get started.
My name is Anita Walz, and I'm the assistant director for open
education here at the University Libraries at Virginia Tech.
I'm joined with six colleagues, five from here,
one from Hawaii, and if you just say your name and
what you do here at Tech.
All right, hi my name is Anurag Mantha, I am a
PhD student in civil engineering and I work with the graduate honor system,
the graduate student assembly, and I TA contemporary pedagogy, which is
a grad level course offered by the graduate school.
And then more recently I've created a group,
co-founded a group, called food access for students and we are
trying to improve food access for all students at Virginia Tech.
Excellent yeah good afternoon, I'm Ron Poff.
I'm a assistant professor of practice here at Virginia Tech
in the Pamplin college of business. This is actually my third year at
Virginia Tech. I started as an adjunct professor for two years and then
this is my full first full year here at Virginia Tech,
so 30 years in industry and so this is my third career I guess.
and starting out in academia. I'm very pleased, I'm part of a team that
teaches the first year experience course in Pamplin. So we have about 1100
students every fall and then about another 600 or so in the
spring that take a foundations of business
class and we actually have adopted a Pressbooks
book several years ago and perhaps we'll talk
more about that. I also within the department of
management teach in the entrepreneurship innovation and technology track here at
Virginia Tech and so that's a growing major and minor for us with the
investments that Virginia Tech has made and looking
forward to today's discussions.
My name is Larry Cox. I work inside of a group on campus called TLOS and I work
as one of the instructional designers. easing their way for that. I help a lot of the
faculty build technology enhanced and fully online courses and help them
incorporate any technology that they may want to use in that course.
Good afternoon, my name is Kim Filer. I'm the associate vice provost for teaching
and learning at Virginia Tech and the director of our center for
excellence in teaching and learning. This is my 26th year in education.
I spent half of that time in K-12 which is how
I got my start designing curriculum. I think I probably
designed my first longitudinal curriculum in '99,
so it sort of has come a long way. I keep bumping back into curriculum redesign.
The center for teaching and learning
thinks a lot about how do we help faculty make small
changes as well as large changes from complete
curriculum redesign to activity redesign or
thinking about resources and the open educational resource piece for
us has been a really it's interesting watching transition.
We work with a lot of faculty who have 30 to 50 years experience
teaching at Virginia Tech and they're master teachers and
they always build courses a certain way and
actually thinking through this idea that there's this whole other world
it is really interesting and it also helps
realize that it's not just about a textbook anymore.
So I'm very excited to be here and learn from my colleagues as we talk today.
Hello, my name is Jonathan Falls. I'm a sophomore at Virginia Tech,
double majoring in international relations and German with a minor in philosophy.
In terms of my academic past I've had
experience in large lectures from our FYE course in
political science, about 400 all the way down to small discussion
classes to 10 to 15 people. Right now I'm in a course, inaugural
course, in political science called global reflexivity
where we're actually uh 40 dedicated students in the department are
tackling some of these big questions about higher education pedagogy.
Outside the classroom I'm an at-large representative
on the student government association here at Virginia Tech. I serve on the
academic affairs committee. I'm also the student representative on
the commission on staff policies and affairs.
in the past I've had the opportunity to lobby with fellow undergraduates
in Richmond for state government and i'm currently writing
legislation uh in the body um helping to ensure access to course
grades on a more regular schedule over the course of semester so
I'm very happy to be involved in this discussion and hopefully I can
add some perspective as an undergraduate student of what
these implications have on us.
And Billy?
Hello everybody, good morning.
My name is Billy Meinke-Lau and I'm the OER technologist for the University of
University of Hawaii at Manoa. The University of Hawaii is a 10 campus
system across the islands and I work at the
flagship campus essentially supporting open textbook
development and design. I completed a master's degree in edtech
from our college of education i did an online course on program design.
After that I worked for Creative Commons, the global nonprofit that put out
free copyright licenses that made content legally open and free
and I'm also a PhD student here in the department of political science
studying alternative futures. And so my work with OER, it's really
interesting in terms of theory and practice and coming together
working with faculty on the ground supporting sort of bottom-up development
but also working with administrators and students to
figure out the most sustainable way to move forward with OER, so happy to be here today.
[Anita Walz] Thank you all. So our first question is
how did you get started in course material
development? Dr. Filer has answered that
in part, but the rest of you, how did you get started what and
uh what is your specific role in uh with regard to course materials do
you adopt them do you do you create them,
what place do they have in your teaching? well for me I started TA-ing in
fall of 2017 i was three years ago for a graduate level engineering ethics at the
public course and so in that course most of the
materials were essentially handed down to me by the
instructor and then i had to adapt it to the canvas
was just coming out at that point so i had to adapt it to uh canvas
friendly modules and stuff like that and so
that's how i got struggled and so i'm fairly new to this
yeah i would say my start is very similar right as part of a team of eight
instructors you know our class size i mentioned
earlier we have 11 to 1200 students but our class size is only 64
which is great for a first year experience class so we have a team of
eight that do that and obviously we have a
team leader professor steve skirpak many of us know
and actually has been recognized both here at the university level for his
excellence in teaching and also nationally so just a couple of
weeks ago at the washington dc conference he was
recognized and so for me currently was really working with
him as part of our team to make suggestions
um on course materials and even the work that we do in the classrooms
with textbook and other activities with that
being said steve will be retiring in may and i will
be taking over his role moving forward and so now it's a matter
of stepping back sort of reflecting on what has gone well
for the course which the course also has been nationally recognized
and so understanding that yes things are going well
there's awards things are going great but we can't rest on that we have to
really understand there could be gaps
there could be some innovations working with the different offices
and resources here at virginia tech to really take this course to another level
and so thankfully working with the university
library system here on some grant opportunities
and doing some cross-college collaboration
looking at ways to make the experience even better for the student
so my start might be a little bit different than most people while still
doing technology support i started pouring
about like 10 or so more years ago installing the technology so i actually
worked inside of a small school system putting together the email servers
putting together the computers that the students would use so
i actually assisted in assembling a room similar to what we're in now
providing that type of support to materials transition to where i am now
i still help them with technology but it's more so them approaching with which
ones they want inside of the classroom to access some of these materials
or in helping them convert some of their materials over into
canvas or other formats so we deal mostly with
how would you like to make the material what type of access do you want to
provide and in what ways do you want them to
manipulate the material whether that's a video
it is going to be a print based text based so some of that may be open access
so right now we're dealing with stuff in computer science where they're trying to
switch to some open access materials for the um
innovation campus so we'll see hopefully more of that coming up
and more utilization in the future
sorry to have a little introduction into how i landed where i landed but
i'd like to talk a little bit about the role of
open educational research resources to me
um i'm definitely not an expert our job is to partner with anita and bring
all her expertise in when we have a crowd of faculty who are thinking
through course design but i would actually
mention the one thing that really i think i was very fortunate is
when i very i started teaching right out of college i happened to work
in howard county maryland and what i did not process at
the time is they have a very progressive way of
designing curriculum even that back then um where they
they began with what do you want students to learn and be able to do
and then we were actually given three different textbooks
as a instructor and that our job was to pull them
in a non-chronological way to pull resources that actually accomplish what
you wanted to accomplish in a classroom and
what i did not realize is that was actually quite unique because i lived to
that for a long time and then when i came and i started working with people
who were like no we started chapter one in chapter two um i was so not used to
that idea and actually what i find so freeing about open resources
is it goes back to that idea that the core is the learning
and how can we actually leverage different resources
to maximize the efficacy of our instructional
approaches so i think really thinking about open
educational research resources makes it makes us so much more
creative and allows so much more autonomy and
creativity of a faculty member using resources in
their classroom with students
i think just by nature my experience is a bit different because i'm not an
instructor however i think perhaps it is unique for
an undergraduate student to be interested in these sort of issues
particularly because most of us are just here for four years and then we graduate
with a degree however my story
in terms of why i'm aware and interested in these issues actually stems back to
high school my high school experience uh where
we actually we had i experienced the most adverse effects i think
in terms politically of what it means to not have
access to course materials in general so i lived in a county where
there was a school board official who was a parent in the class was able to
use his position to introduce a bill or an amendment into a school
board which is appointed by board supervisors in any ways
it would have made it possible for one student one parent had issue with a
course material in the classroom for that material to be
pulled from the entire classroom and it was a result of the politicians
reservations about particular material um i was then a member of a student
group that formed as a result of that action
we were the newspaper that published that story was subsequently sued
by the politician of the libel the court case was thrown out
however that experience sort of opened my eyes to what it means
if the students live in a situation in which
material just period isn't made available to students
and so i i think experiencing that it's important to ensure that we have
the most open access um and in addition to that also the system's in place to
ensure that uh problems like that can't happen
either at a secondary level or higher
education sure um so i mentioned a little bit i
went through a master's program in dead tech and that included a lot of
instructional design um and then i was also graduate
assistants in the college of education and so i got to see sort of the back end
of how courses were put together and so learning about how things were designed
bottom up but also kind of seeing how the pieces spread out when you work
with instructors that was really eye-opening
um because i worked in industries so to speak for non-profit
afterwards in silicon valley i got a really good
idea of how open source technologies are being used because
you know facilitate all kinds of things being used by private business but
institutions um some living things are happening and
so um being at the university of hawai'i now
um it's it's been really good um sort of taking advantages of the
affordances of ovr and working with faculty to say okay
this is your course this is what students need to leave
knowing how to do like i've already mentioned
let's figure out how to make it more interesting what book are you using
what are your strategies and instead of having those discussions um
it presents the opportunity to ask questions of the faculty sort of about
their secret sauce how they do things in the classroom that they wouldn't
normally talk about except maybe among um other professors teach team course or
with their breaking community um and sort of uh getting getting down
low with the faculty and seeing what they do day to day and
then working from that to build content and then start
that with pedagogical strategies um it's really interesting you've lived
more of that with who we are obviously because the content is open
um we've seen essentially i came in a few years ago to uh
as a vr technologist i've received them working on traditional course design
and then when i started talking to faculty about what they could do
involving students in uh in the course materials having an
update through them having student assignments being
non-disposable things like that they looked at me and said i was
a crazy person sort of having trouble um but then when i started doing some
examples of how this was happening before the
other institutions were like okay let's try this so i worked with the faculty
that were either tenured um and interested you
know they needed something interesting to work on
or they were tenure seeking faculty that were trying to
make a name for themselves and i always told them i can't make you rich students
and stuff but i might be famous and sort of that that's all along
um helping faculty do more interesting things in your courses and with the
course design than we would otherwise do with those resources thank you
so what i'm hearing is a lot of strategy a lot of focus
on goals a lot of focus on learning and i'd like us to talk about where
are we right now and what are the issues that we're dealing with with the kind of
course materials that we're either using we're thinking about using we are
working with other people who want to use certain things what
kinds of um what kinds of issues are
are you seeing what kinds of decisions are
our faculty making and um
oh i'll put a third question in there if if you could could if there were things
that you wanted the instructors that you work with to
know um what would those things be so
um what what are the realities right now what are the issues
the realities right now and if there were
things that that you could change either among your peers or things you think
your peers
so um i'm not gonna call on anybody i want you just to jump in if you um if
you feel ready
i'll jump in because we actually started this conversation right before the panel
i think for me being a you know being new to education
um is to really spread the word about open uh you know about open education
resource the oer right we love acronyms um so the oer
and um you know and really having an having a open dialogue an open mind that
these resources are there if we choose to adapt them i mean
again this is just one element of a large
you know part of resources that we need in the classroom
so for me it's maybe it's my marketing right that's
that was my career before joining virginia tech was
sales and marketing so perhaps it's just really
uh spreading the word talking about the benefits and advantages
how it's working how it could work um in so many different ways
you know secondly i'm a hokie dad right so i have a son here at virginia tech
so as a parent there obviously are some concerns over finances financial pieces
i my office is always open and many of my students visit me and we have
discussions about finances and financial burdens and
things like that you know i have uh we do open houses for
recruitment and parents it's one of the top three discussions
about textbooks and costs and things like that
so i think there's also some awareness and education
for our for our families as they make decisions in that regard
i think the other part for me as far as how to use
open education resources is to also kind of take a step back and
how are our students learning today how i
learned right 40 years ago or 30 years ago
is much different and that's one of the takeaways for me from the conference a
couple of weeks a couple of weeks ago is that so many of
us in education sort of are perhaps
teaching the way we learned and maybe we need to step back and
look at things in a much different way for example video now has become
very very popular for students to learn anina and i've had this conversation i
would love to create a podcast for our textbook
using the students perhaps and having the student's perspective
um as they're reading the book or even reflecting on the book
uh even beyond just um you know an instructor
um and so is that you know it's actually again just sort of being an open
mind learning to listen and then listening to learn
i think is very very important
some of the issues that other people are seeing
so a couple of issues that i see frequently uh both from my experience
taking courses at virginia tech and being a ta is access in terms of
the cost which is prohibitive to a lot of the materials which are
recommended so the first two courses i took at virginia tech
way back in fall of 2014 uh both courses had recommended textbooks
right which means that technically you can go
through the course without buying that textbook but it was clear
like two weeks in that the entire course was set up
around those recommended textbooks where it was like oh
the assignment is go find the problem on page
number 79 and then solve it and it's like why can't that be just the
assignment like why does it have to be like go to that textbook and solve it
and so um and the total cost for uh the textbooks was around 600
and this was a time when uh i was an international student
not funded and my rent used to be 275 a month so if it's the choice between
affording two months worth of rent or buying textbooks
which option did you think i picked and so
i didn't do that well in my first semester lesson learned but
uh but this definitely contributed to it uh the other aspect is accessibility
so a lot of the materials which are handed down which are
uh you know excerpts of books articles out there that
instructors are using are usually not ocr compliant or not
uh are not accessible uh so if somebody's using the screen reader
they wouldn't be able to use those materials and so
i'll put in a plug for ally which is a software offered by the
accessible learning technologies office and if you are an interpreter of record
and of course they can prototype it right now and it really
opened my eyes to uh the kinds of materials that we were
using in some of the courses that i ta for
although i don't have the power to make those changes i will keep that in mind
in the future
um i would echo the the issue of cost that many people brought up particularly
i find it really interesting with these uh fye courses in which uh
it's first semester freshman i'm coming into university and
i was there last year last fall so i can speak to that pretty fresh in my mind
um but i found you know you're coming into a new system
and for many students the first document you
see from an instructor is facilities um and
at least in my experience and last so last fall
when i was a freshman i paid about 800 for textbooks in total um which was
the most costly so far um on the syllabus for that fye course
which those textbooks amounted to about four hundred
dollars and it was the first document i ever saw
from the university about what materials i should purchase
um and it was interesting and i've had subsequent instructors that have done it
differently but this instructor only included you know houston link for
the bookstore and i never really thought hey perhaps i
can go to an off-campus location or amazon which in many cases is much
cheaper um so i would you know my message to
instructors is make those options available
some do it some don't it is especially problematic for freshmen
who haven't had that trial and error and when it comes to money i don't think
you know if there's an alternative you should be forced to
have that trial and error um i think the issue too of
recommended versus required is interesting
um because oftentimes before a semester opens up
and before canvas opens up which is a online
learning system uh students are able to view
the books on the bookstore website and for many courses either as a result of
design or instructors there's no distinction
between recommended and required books and whether or not they're recommended
or required is another issue um but if that's your first uh
if the students if that's the first option you know to get the books ahead
of time and they're not able to see whether a
book is required to recommend it um that's problematic i've bought books
before because of that that were ended up being recommended but
weren't used at all
so i'm going to talk a little bit about a amazing experience i had a few weeks
ago so i was invited by the world bank to spend some time in kenya as they are
reimagining and redesigning their higher education
system and when you're with a group of
very motivated people who are thinking through
higher education as the source of the future of
economy um the future of health in a country the future of peace in a
country and actually talking about this i the idea of a massive scale
of students that have access to higher education
with many many hopes and dreams but very little infrastructure
oer was prominent in the conversation and so i think we've talked here a lot
about access but we often have access within the lens
of privilege where there actually are books and there
are learning management systems and there
are internet access um versus in other spaces
um even in some counties in virginia where a large percentages of students
and their families do not have internet access and to think
about what does that mean and how can oers really
provide access to information and materials but in a way that
has a a bit of a box around it so it so it's not something where students are
out having to surf the net and find their
own resources as well but one thing that happens for
me when i'm in another space in a very different culture i'm
always challenged to look within and say well what could i do differently
how does it change my lens and the one lens that it really changed is actually
who's at the cutting edge of some oer structures in nigeria
on the continent and what it really made me think about is
we need to really have a global perspective when we think about oers
and how much it could actually open up for our students at virginia tech to
have a very global perspective and culturally different material source
materials if we were to think a little more
broadly beyond our own borders to start working
with others in a very global context about what does it mean to learn
calculus and apply prop problems of calculus both at
virginia tech or if you're thinking about global
agriculture and what that means for communities or
the idea of transportation challenges which we have in many
different countries in many different spaces and how we can actually apply the
learning in a very traditional sense to
real-world problems and then the role of resources from
different global contexts so that is one of those eye-opening
moments where when oers resonate with a country that actually has the
opportunity and the challenge of redesigning their
higher education system you know that it's a powerful space it's
a next step um the one issue i'm going to mention
though because we work with faculty that's our main stakeholder group is how
much time it takes for faculty to actually it takes a lot
less time to actually go to your textbook and pull out question number 27
and say go there and how do we help faculty navigate that and prioritize
what they're seeing so that they can actually get to the most effective
resources in a shorter period of time i don't know
the answer to that but i do think that's a challenge we're
going to have to address well some of this makes my job a bit
easier because the technology access already came up
and then also the time on task for faculty to develop
one of the other ones that i know our group deals with is sometimes
getting faculty to let go of ownership and how do you get
either a program or a department to utilize the same book
so it's great if you have one faculty member in one section of a course that
wants to adopt the oer but if i have 10 sections how do we get
the rest of them or if it's in a department
like engineering where they have a panel that approves a textbook
and a question a process because i have to go and take a professional exam
how would you then get them to use a resource like that so that's been
one of the problems because we've had faculty come forward that were very
interested in using these type of resources but
within either blocked or found difficulty when trying to go back to the
department to pitch this or we spent a lot of time
redesigning every vamping one of these only for them to hit a roadblock
once they got back to the department so trying to
create a culture inside of universities and programs to use
oers i see is probably one major issue
and i'll add to that um you know similar things what's already been said
we initially started the oer program to deal with
the cost issues with curriculum and we pulled students um about three years
ago and found out that four out of five of them have skipped applying the book
in the last year we found out that most of them do that even though they know
they'll get their performance we know that the cost of textbooks was
delaying um time to graduation they were avoiding
certain courses things like that and so um knowing that um we began
working with faculty and offering small grants up to five thousand dollars to
offset faculty time to develop the resources and that's worked out really
well we're in our fourth year at that program
and really the the two things we're trying to do is save students money and
we've done that um a number of our courses are in the
hundreds of thousands of dollars state which is really nice and faculty
they love that they use that um in their dossier
in particular for pushing things like that um but also inspiring like you know
innovation doing different things with the materials and so um
we interface with our learning management system folks who use
our own homegrown version of sakai called kohima
but you know folks use linkedin websites that use wordpress websites
i offer press books to all my faculty i individually support
press books we have around 130 books in development right now
but really it's coming down to the instructors meeting them that they are
i will say about curriculum decisions at our institution
um decisions about which books or encourage them to use
always rest with the instructor but a lot of times there are cultures inside
the department or through them committees that make that decision
and so like was already said if you convince one person to adopt a book it
may not be received as well when you go back to the department
um so one way that we begun trying to sort of scale up um i don't like that
term too much but scale up and scale out our um part oer is to involve faculty
from both campuses and so we held a couple different sprints uh where
faculty family get together over a few days
and sprint on content together and we have you know
half of the campuses in our system together um with their lead instructor
all getting buy-in on that material and it's open and shared
then we're seeing that as a good starting point for oer
and flowers but um you know three or four years it is still kind of early
days um we have moved from the off-the-shelf
adoptions to the adaptations of content and now we've
begun publishing which in the box which is
really nice it's a progressive thing um and i would say the most fun i have
is working with faculty and talking them about how they work with students
um a lot of times i could really enjoy it and one time
so i want to talk about some of the alternative
sorts of things that are out there and billy this is
mainly directed to you um we see a lot of um
we see people wanting to take a lot of uh sort of
shortcuts to lower-cost materials um you see not so much here but i know
that these sorts of things are happening where a commercial entity wants
a monopoly over a particular section department or series of courses
um let's talk about that what what kinds of
drawbacks um first what kind of benefits does that bring what kind of drawbacks
does that bring um and i'd love to really i know you've
learnt the expertise in the areas of privacy and
data collection but we'd love to just hear
briefly your your thoughts on some of the drawbacks of of those
those adventures sure so i think what we're talking about is
commonly called inclusive access um and it's a pretty common way um
to basically get a discount on digital course materials
and it's a broad uptake across many campuses institutions
across the u.s so we have a program at uh and it's called
idap and it's put out by the bookstore but it's essentially auto building
students for course materials when they sign up for a horse
and in that they ensure that all students have access to materials but
they also come at a fixed price students don't have a different way to
give materials often the opt-out procedure if they want
to go pursue their own materials i'm not sure if they're actually going to be
used that has been mentioned um that's really
difficult to do um and so we're sort of getting a
because of access for any discount on what otherwise would have been a pretty
expensive textbook but you're only getting the additional version and it's
a rental and so at the end of the semester um the
book and your notes and your annotations and they leave the final piece to this
is that i'm i'm a doc student in political
science um and i study surveillance and privacy and policy and
i've done some work on the terms of service and the practicing policies
related to these inclusive access programs and forcing students to go
online for a book and log in and it's worrisome to stabilities um data
capitalism is a real thing and i see things
programs like implicit access forcing students to walk in
auto making it difficult to get out not as a way to address the affordability
issue of textbooks um but rather as a way to sort of uh
corner the market and inform them and sort of lock in
place the publisher's sort of position with
institutions or are other people seeing things like
that
and seeing small thoughts yeah i mean i guess i wouldn't go that far but i have
seen more and i don't know king of fusion as
well more utilization of publisher uh versions of the course
materials so we're looking at um like hoffman or
griffin or like different ones wiley and others that are
creating their own versions of lms's that they're then getting faculty to
sign up for in order to get access to their books so
it's all the course material the assessments the assignments are being
housed inside of their version of an lms that they're trying to report
and send students too so i don't know if they retain their
material or if they're able to download their notes but i have seen more
utilization of those types of resources
how about jonathan are you seeing trends in those
though any of those areas um materials um i know you're in your
second year and i don't want to assume you you
know the whole scope of what all of the student experience
is here i i certainly don't um so i don't want to pretend that
i do um i really haven't seen much of what was just described at least in the
departments in which i'm studying however there was a point
brought up about the program at the university of
hawaii that could be implemented here would be
potentially problematic at least in foreign language um
so in a german department uh in which we do have some very extensive
textbooks uh one of the interesting features
especially in the grammar courses is that some of the
textbooks are used um so if there's a 31-15 and then 31-16
or if there's a lower level than an upper level grammar course
uh the textbooks for each of those courses are the same
um so i'd be interested in you know if you have a system like that
which of course is opt out if it's not an opt-in system
whether for a course like that would you be required to
um to to to to get the same ticks but textbook again whereas
when that when i was in those courses the textbooks were expensive they're
about 500 in total however um
you know it came down to 250 every semester which is still a lot
but obviously it's more manageable than having to pay that sum
two times so
i mean we're definitely seeing that i mean uh you know
the publishers are visiting our offices every week
right or every month uh certainly and the
the sell is a value added plugins add-ons um you know really trying to
help the experience thankfully here at virginia tech we have
telos and we have other offices that um perhaps we need to
utilize more as an instructor and community so
that we can you know build the course and have
additional course materials beyond the textbooks that then gives us
that equality to perhaps the commercial
versions because right now it is a competitive advantage
for them that's what they're there to do is to
to sell that and to sell it for not only the students
but quite frankly for the faculty to make it
to make their lives easier and so here it becomes a collective
community right it's the libraries it's telos
it's the you know um office of you know to help us uh teach better and
instruct better um so i think i think that's where we
have to sort of leverage too and explain that we have that now
obviously not every university has those resources right
and we have to you know certainly be able to
understand that and empathize with that but for us here
at virginia tech we obviously can do that and i think
for us to to step back and understand what the gaps are what the
students needs are perhaps even what the curriculum
trends are and then be able to adapt and adopt
that would be the important piece i'm pretty proud we have another member of
our hamplin team that's going to be uh
training tomorrow on how to utilize press books and this
is another instructor team that has
collaborated and agreed upon um that they're going to go to an open
education resource in an open education textbook
so very very proud of that that's a management strategy class that
all pamplin students have to take so it's not just
three or four hundred students we're talking about you know 1500 students
so i was gonna add to that so from a more institutional cultural standpoint
uh this might be a more engineering focused
issue but i don't see why there is of this focus on
uniformity of ensuring uniformity of curriculum instead of uniformity of
learning outcomes among likes different sections of the
same course uh so i think the answer to that is
you know my bet accreditation and all those things but
those translate down to instructors not having a lot of flexibility on what they
can change so we put in a lot of effort here at
virginia tech training students and young faculty to think
outside the box when it comes to pedagogy and
then they go back to their departments and they are assigned
i don't know cee 3104 which has 10 sections and then there are
a set set of things that students are expected
to take out of that course and so they're assigned week by week
power points and they're they're they're told that basically
change your name and then and then go with that
then that obviously limits what instructors can do
uh to pursue some of these organizations open education resources
and to build off of that i would just say the instructors who are
interested in oer are the ones who are more connected to their curriculum
they're the ones who understand the learning outcomes but of course most
often they're the ones who understand the needs of the department
um they're they're sort of like the stars they get it and they want to be
there to do it and that i've found often times that folks that
do choose to do a digital rental instead of look at what we are
or stick with for the tried and true book those are the ones uh instructors
who are less connected with the materials
um and sort of just kind of write the book as it goes but that they don't
necessarily tailor it to their course and obviously with with all copyrighted
content you can't do anything like that um
so i'm just going to talk about what i see as the wild wild
west of business models around this space um
mainly because i'm not an expert but i do get a lot of vendor phone calls
and i sometimes if i have extra time i'll say yeah so
tell me how this works where do you source your material and so
forth and there is kind of an interesting
space where there are companies making money off of materials that faculty
develop and then are charging back to their universities and i find that
just interesting in so many ways but then the
other space where we i think we have a
challenger i i see i see there being a challenge for us to
like virginia tech is we have very very diverse unique and
deep programs and so there's often quite a bit of high
quality source material at the very first level of classes
so when you think about introduction in chemistry
you know that that's happening at community colleges across the nation
at universities across the nation with some different flavors but overall
there's some consistency so your your ability to pick and choose source
materials is wide but very quickly we specialize and
i think the options become much more limited
and the very fascinating space for me to watch nationally
is this idea of subscription services and subscription services
in a space like virginia tech where actually faculty and departments have a
considerable amount of autonomy compared to centralized systems even
compared to university of hawaii um
we can't keep we can't charge our students a different subscription
service every class they're in and so it's i
think that there's this push and pull that i think the market
hasn't settled to understand business structures but
also it's really picking a path and helping
our faculty understand that there's pros and cons to
every path but as a university what do we feel the
best path is for high quality material in a way that's a sustainable business
model so i don't know a lot about it but i'm
always shocked at the next business model every year
that seems to come out around resources so
so there i will tell you in the library environment
that there is very strong interest in community-owned infrastructure and
community-owned content and that coupled with the university's
land-grant mission is very very exciting if
we can we can leverage the things that we're developing
and share them course materials do not make the whole course
um an instructor and students and the many artifacts of a classroom
um make linked of course there's a process of it's not just about the stuff
but the the reality of of being able to um
to share what we have and what we're developing
due to the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of
the instruction that's here i think is a is a huge potential
um yeah it's a really exciting potential so we'll see
um so we have people here in the audience and i'm wondering if
for us in the audience and ask questions if you do there's a microphone so
we'll he's um here
can i ask a question all right so i'm gonna ask the question
to bridge off of what you just shared um so from your perspective thinking about
land grant um being at a in a state that isn't
highly centralized but many schools are working on this um
as well as nationally what do you see as the most promising
future structure for where virginia tech should be going
with their open resources future
structures structure community based but what does that really
look like you know what does that feel like let's say in five years in 10 years
i would love to see interdisciplinary i'd love to see
disciplinary networks growing to be a lot stronger
so for the past two years grunt and can also talk about this
i've led a few different sprint style events
we brought together nine faculty from different institutions
around virginia to write almost 400 questions for
an internet business testing i have no idea how
powerful it would be for people to meet their counterparts in other institutions
and to have a place where they can talk about their
instruction and could work together and could um peer review each other's
work and i stumbled on this
and thought i'm doing this this is really amazing we have people at
community colleges our ones comprehensives um
from all over virginia and as well as north carolina and
i o and the possibilities for for professional development were really
great so i know that's beyond virginia tech
that's not not just an averaging attack kind of
thing but i see a lot of i see a lot of promise in that i also
see that as a sustainability strategy for these
kinds of materials if you look at the open source community
you see for better or floors sometimes
open source projects live or die by their community
so i think that here departments need to own their open source projects their oer
projects that larger communities need to own
their their collaborative projects
in an ideal world i would love to see this be faculty driven
but i also feel that there so many people tell me this isn't part
of my job i don't have time to do this my
my department head doesn't um support this or they they support this
but it's lower on the priority level and so i would really love to see more
emphasis on teaching and learning and on moral rewards for
for engagement with these practices which i believe are high impact not only
when the practice student um student savings but their
engagement strategies for faculty i believe the students are more engaged
when faculty are more engaged your example of question number 56
um it tells me that you know that the instructor did not put
in the kind of time that i would i don't
feel valued by that so when a student feels valued because
an instructor is investing in the course
and investing in the learning i think there are huge
impacts for students so um i would love to see more
prioritization generally um how to structure that i think
collaboration between groups like like hours and
further conversation about what what the university's commitments may be around
these kinds of resources and this approach
is a place where there needs to be no discussion
yeah on and on but yeah and i would agree with anita i think
she she has led an incredible sprints the last couple of years
you know we use the word collaboration so often now
and what does that mean because it's become such an over
used word and really what we did for those two sprints was truly
collaboration we came in there was no egos we checked the egos at
the door um we talked a lot we thought a lot but
then we did something right and got something done and
i think uh to be this point uh what could virginia tech do
and i think we're trying to do that and that is to lead
be one of the leaders in this space so we can utilize
the talents the knowledge that we have here
and be able to leverage those throughout not just you know the us
but globally as what you mentioned earlier right we could be good stewards
in that piece you know the other part that kind of comes to mind
is the fact that um you know this this textbook that we're
using has been downloaded over 500 000 times which is an incredible
incredible number um and that has to be downloaded in
parts of the world that we don't even think about
right and so we have a responsibility to maintain that
continue the efforts that we've put into that and
to um to make that grow to anita's point there's obviously
limitations um you know it's it's not in the it's not in a typical eight to five
job to work on an open source textbook
that's why saturdays and sundays become good times to work on those types of
things right you know or before school or after
school but you know so because there's you know
you hear it from faculty that it is difficult
to find those times um you know it's uh but it has to be done you know and
especially in order to maintain that so that's why i've picked up
several copies in the back of the room of the openstax books and
those are on my in my home office and i'm going through them and
trying to make some some new updates for the fall but i do you know to
anita's point to her credit um leading that is an important piece
and we can't stop i mean that we have to continue moving
forward with that and and really make the word
collaboration real
so saturdays and sundays
um i wonder what um for each of you what would you like to
see the future look like and and then we can talk more about how
to get there but what what's your dream
um this is sort of the last of the last question as well
um one of the things that i hear from a lot of my peers
not only in the college of liberal arts but also across the whole university
is that students speak highly of courses uh in which the instructor
or instructors use canvas or other online learning systems
when they use them robustly and often um and however from faculty you also
hear that well canvas doesn't weight grades
properly it's difficult to use there's coding issues a whole plethora
of problems however you know students insist
that uh they like it when the online learning system is used um
because it's freely available in most cases um
and relatively versatile so i think you know universally moving forward
uh sort of to re-examine canvas to improve it to partner with
others and work with faculty whether it be through training
awareness of how to use it um and you know if canvas isn't a viable
option when you're possibly examining other accounting systems
um a second thing too i think especially as the university continues to expand
in political science in particular i think it's important to
include not just faculty um but uh phd students who are
instructors as well in these conversations um a lot of
instructors in my courses of phd students um and i think it's important
you know i'm sure others can speak to that uh more but but to include
them in the conversations because i've had
classes taught my phd students that have been among the best in terms of
versatility awareness of learning styles so that's important and then the third
thing i think more broadly with the university is
make sure that we continue to have these questions
especially as i think administration and as a whole we grapple with this
question of how do we remain viable as a rural campus um and for many
that comes the answer to that is the renovation campus
and i would just say when we have these conversations
not to just be focused on the future but make sure we are
continuing to be reflexive and aware of where we are now
so this is a little selfish but i would love it if
our oers was like shopping at the online bookstore
where you could see you could even things would be tagged
right you would have conceptually things you want students to learn and they're
tagged and you could search by those tags and then you could sort by textbook
activities problem sets case studies um you know i know that
when we're in a community and we're sharing freely those things
may not be possible um but i think that for me would be
an unbelievable dream i love this speaking of the future right and the
future
so we'll have to sit down and talk through what some officials like oh your
comments um does there isn't granularity
in terms of learning objectives because a lot of
materials in higher education are not aligned to a standard
um but i would love to talk more with you about what that could look like
oh mine is pretty simple and that's going to be
compatibility a lot of people can spend time creating these sources but
if it won't work in my system as far as like technology compatibility
it's all for not if there's a great book i want to adopt it but it doesn't work
in my system or the technology that my institution
uses doesn't work with it it's kind of hard to still push a
conversation to get more people to use these things so
having common standards for development and common formats i think
would be pretty good which sometimes can be a problem
especially with open source projects when if you're unaware of other projects
and how they're actually creating you then you may create your own standard or
standard may no longer be compatible with the operating systems
or other tools available so trying to make more things like legacy compatible
especially for assistive technology because a lot of them don't change and
update as fast so they need some other legacy systems in order for it to work
keeping that in mind all these new tools and things come
about i think the future for me is to continue
to get better right from a personal standpoint
i hope five years from now ten years from now i'm better at doing
what i do for not just for myself but for the students
i think secondly from a technology standpoint i'm hoping that students
actually um feel comfortable enough to uh perhaps
even challenge the instructor on have you ever thought about open
education resources this is something that you could think
about and perhaps adopt or adapt i would love to see that obviously in a
very respectful manner right but certainly i'd love to see that i
think beyond that too it's um it's really looking at kind of
what ken mentioned and you know a textbook is just one part so
it's experiential learning it's projects it's cases um you know it's
in the classroom dialogue um you know it's it's all of those things
and more that's where i see the future uh going i
think beyond that then it's also just technology in itself
being able to be where the students are whether that's
by video by mobile app by drone perhaps in the
future but being able to be sure that our
obr keeps up with the technology which of course is changing
so rapidly
the future i would like to see a future where we have more of a focus on network
learning so in both network learning in the sense that
we're all connected to each other in some form over technology
but then also in the form of creating a learning network in the classroom
whether it is in the physical space and both both
within the class in the physical space and outside and
so that would empower everyone to contribute
without empowering everyone to participate and take ownership
of the learning sure um i apologize for settling from i
had to uh pick up my code for center though you know there
there's no one future there are many futures there are many different
directions this could go and one might be one that's dominated
continually by the publishers we sort of follow their lead and follow
whatever prices they said and the conditions they set
um and then there's another one that being more optimistic where
uh institutions begin you know trading coursework oh you have this let's do
this you can have mine you know and press books and better technical
interoperability up there um and then there's you know a part of a
couple different features might be more formal um credit and
sort of factually getting credit for their oer work which is very important
but often not rewarded at least not equally across all campuses so um
you know i'd like to see oer um be more easily found that's a big issue right
now but really just broader uptake um credit
for doing it and then you know above everything else
um student involvement i think that we represent a lot of
opportunities for student agency and even learning that is to some degree
directed by students you know they get to choose where the course goes
you always need to you know touch the um the cornerstones of the course so they
can be successful in native courses but having students be a much more
integral part of the learning process not just with affordability but with the
design of the course and out there that's what i see as a interesting
feature
well i think we will i don't see any questions online
are there any online questions um i think we're a little close with
that and so i'd like to thank our panelists
to thank the participants here and um thank you for bringing your child
right future librarian professor well thank you so much for
um for being here today for this conversation i do look forward to
continuing um with each of you about um so thank you very much