We just started our recording.
So happy Open Education Week to everyone, and thank you for joining us for Open Education Course Tours.
My name is Beverly Rebar, and I'm with the State Council for Higher Education for Virginia, otherwise known as SCHEV, and at SCHEV for the Coordinating Board for Higher Education in Virginia and one of our
main duties, overarching duties, is to create the strategic plan for higher education in Virginia.
We call this plan Pathways to Opportunity and I'm gonna be putting a link to some information about the plan in the chat after I finish my introduction.
But the three main aspects of the plan, the cornerstones of the plan, are that higher education should be equitable, affordable, and transformative, and we believe that open education practices are important strategy
for all three of those parts of the plan. We're going to go through a couple of slides here in my introduction.
I think we need to advance a slide. Just a little bit of graphics, showing the benefits of open educational resources and practices for teaching learning and research due to the characteristics of open education. Really, it affords a lot of
benefits for higher education that we recognize and want to promote.
On the next slide, there is a definition of open educational practices which really shows it incorporates a lot of different policies and practices.
You know that's what we want to embrace, and why we have what we call the Open Virginia Advisory Committee, and these are a wonderful group of people who come together and help advise our Council and our staff on how
to promote open practices and it's been working since 2015 to to highlight best practices, and look for ways to show what innovative and impactful things are going on in open education and Virginia institutions where we've done a
lot of events through the work of these wonderful people and then I mentioned they're all volunteers who come and help put on these events, and we've done a number of them in the past.
I'm sure we'll do more in the future and i'm sure you will get a lot of good information about the one we're gonna see today, and we have some great presenters.
So I would like to again, thank my committee for their dedication and thank you for attending, and I'm going to turn over the program to Jimmy Ghaphery from VCU.
And he will be your guide for the rest of the program.
Thank you. Hello, everyone, and thank you Beverly, I'm Jimmy Ghaphery from Virginia Commonwealth University libraries, and currently serving as the chair of the SCHEV OVAC and welcome everybody and happy Open Ed Week for this meeting.
Today we want it to be a good experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity, expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, race, age, or religion.
We were committed to harassment-free experience.
This is our code of conduct. We've adapted this from the VIVA code of conduct.
If you're feeling unwelcome or unsafe please report it privately through chat to myself,
Beverly Rebar, or Judy Thomas, she's also on the SCHEV OVAC and will be co-hosting the event.
I also want to thank VIVA for their code of conduct that we've adopted from, and they've also done the Zoom coordination for us.
A couple of other items of importance. Captioning is available through zoom at the bottom of the zoom windows.
Please chat any of us if you're having trouble activating that or finding it. The slides and the recording will be available to everyone after the event.
Once we polish up the recording and make sure it is captioned.
So look for an email that we'll send out. It will also be deposited in the Virginia Tech repository VTechWorks
In Open Education Events which is where you can find all of our past events.
This is our anticipated schedule of what we're looking at really excited program.
Three different speakers from 10 to 11, and some questions and discussions.
We hope to have about a 10 min break. and then we'll come back for 3 more speakers, both course tours and looking at the state of open education in Virginia.
So i'm going to stop sharing at this point and introduce our first speaker, which were thrilled to have Liz Thompson.
Yes, I stopped sharing. Sorry about that pause. Liz Thompson is the open education librarian at James Madison University.
She coordinates programs and services to facilitate the discovery, adoption, adaptation, and creation of open and affordable course content.
Liz has also been part of a statewide group that have created and implemented a Virginia course materials
survey of students, and she's going to be sharing some of that work with us this morning.
So welcome, Liz. Good morning, everyone. I could just get someone to confirm that
you can see my presentation on the screen. Thank you. Fantastic.
I am Liz Thompson. I am the Open Education Librarian at James Madison University,
as Jimmy pointed out, thank you. I chair the Virginia Course Materials Survey task force.
So I'm going to give you just a brief overview of some of the fantastic information we've gleaned from from this survey. so in case you're not quite following, VIVA is
Virginia's consortium of academic libraries. So let's get into this. the idea for the Virginia Course material survey.
It's a student survey began at a VIVA steering committee planning meeting in August of 2019, and after a great deal of development and planning, the survey was conducted in the fall of 2021.
We were very pleased to have more than 5,600 valid
student responses from 41 institutions. This is a strong population from which to draw statewide conclusions.
There were 2 overarching research questions of the survey which you can see on the slide. But in the interest of time today I will only be talking about the first one.
What is the impact, Of course, material costs on educational equity among Virginia students.
The full survey instrument is openly licensed and available on the Viva website.
I know there are some folks here that have participated in the task force and the survey distribution.
I'll share some links in the chat at when I I finish the presentation that feel free at any time to put questions into the chat, and i'll try to follow up on those.
So getting into the survey. Viva has 4 institution types, public public, doctoral, 4 year and 2 year, and private, nonprofit, and all of these types are represented in the survey responses.
The majority of respondents were seeking bachelor's, degrees, but there were also many other degree in award types represented survey demographics did a good job of meeting statewide metrics for race ethnicity and
gender distribution. We asked a simple but important question: How worried were you about meeting your course?
Material cost this semester. Not only were 16% of all student respondents extremely worried about meeting their course material costs, but 78% had some level of worry.
This spoke volumes about the stress and anxiety that course material costs cause students.
We also wanted to know how course material costs might affect students, academic careers in the big picture.
Specifically the selection of their major minor and is institution. We almost didn't ask this question, because it seemed that only a few people might have said Yes, but we were really so glad that we did the question showed that 16% of
students considered the cost, of course, materials in selecting their major and 30.
2% of them considered this in selecting their institution, we are still a packing.
With this means, especially for institution selection. But the quotes from the students who took the survey that you see here really have illuminated the choice of Major.
However, showing particular concern with stem major costs as Virginia, and it's institutions want to encourage students into these majors.
This is an important finding of the survey. We included one question forbidden from the openly licensed Florida student textbook.
In course materials, 2,012 survey. and the question is shown here in the graph in your academic career has the cost of required course materials caused you to.
And then the responses are: Take fewer courses, not register for a specific course, drop a course, withdraw from a course, earn a poor grade, fail a course or not, purchase the required textbook the
Florida Survey maintain this question for a number of iterations.
Most recently in 2,018, and the results from our survey that Virginia surveys show the deep impact.
Of course, material costs on Virginia students, academic careers in a variety of ways from progress to opportunity to success, and and the results really validated that these are concerns across higher education.
As the Virginia results were closer than we would have expected to the results of the 2,018 Florida survey.
And you can see here that the numbers were really similar across all 7 categories.
To drill down into the question about the cost, of course, materials.
We had asked students if they never seldom, occasionally or frequently experience these results of most concern would be the students who frequently have these issues, and and it was clear that there were smallest substantial students here 4% of
All students, taking the survey, for example, had frequently earned a poor grade because they could not afford the buy.
The textbook, a quote from a student responded: Here puts the problem Very well.
Those 21% of students who frequently do not purchase the required textbook because of cost, are at a severe disadvantage.
They are already behind. From the beginning many of the questions also included an option for respondents to share their experiences via an open field. There's a plan to do a comprehensive qualitative review of the
open-ended question data, the announcement will be iterative.
With the first phase focusing on responses related to the question about how costs have impacted educational progress.
An early review of the themes emerging from this question have been included or have included.
I'm sorry that students experience basic needs and securities their mental health is vulnerable.
That accumulation is a serious concern and access. Codes are experienced as a pain point.
The task force approached the question of educational equity by asking a wide range of demographic questions, and in the initial analysis that we wanted to focus on specific areas of concern that would based on the literature and anecdotal
evidence be more likely to increase challenges for students. The task force picked 7 areas described here on the slide.
And you can see 3 of these related to funding sources where students were using pell grants, education loans, or have a full-time job to fund their education.
Then 4 of these concerns related to social aspects people who selected something for race and ethnicity other than only white.
Those who identify as first generation students there's taking care of family members, and those who identify as having a disability.
We also don't hear that over half of those who identified as disabled, said that their disability affects how they use course materials.
The task force was also interested in the compounding effect of these areas of concern.
Would. Increasing numbers of these concerns also reflect increasing challenges with the cost of coarsement materials.
So that was one question that we were really really interested in learning more about
So, for example, a person who works a full-time job takes care of failures and is a first-generation student would be defined as having 3 areas of concern.
So, in order to analyze this, a simple count of areas of concern was tracked as a processed variable.
And that's what you're seeing here the compounding effect of multiple areas of concern turned out to be a very real issue.
First generation disabled student using Peel Grant funding.
For example, would be more likely to be extremely worried about meeting horse material costs than a student without any of these areas of concern.
23% of students with 3 areas were extremely worried compared to only 7% of students with areas of concern.
If you add 2 more areas of concern, such as being non white only, and having a full-time job. Woody increase.
This likelihood further is 37% of students with 5 or more areas of concern.
Were extremely worried, said the effect of multiple financial and social areas of concern.
Seen in the question about worry carried 3 to academic career impact, said the more areas of concern.
The more likely a student was to frequently experience. These difficulties do, at least in part, to the cost of required course.
Materials. Students with 5 to 7 areas of concern, for example, were 10 times as likely to earn a poor grade due to course material costs and 6 times is likely to not register for a specific course the parallel climbing increases
in challenges with the number of areas of concerns. was both consistent and alarming.
This has been a very, very cursory dive into the results of the course material survey that was just conducted in the fall.
We continue the analysis. we hope to have a more formal report available later this spring, and we're definitely happy to take questions.
And if you write to viva and i'm gonna add the email address to the the chat here, you'll get to a number of people who were involved with the survey, so if you do have questions that's a good place
to start i'm gonna stop sharing my screen and I think we're going to take questions after the course Tours.
Is that right? that's right. gosh list thank you so much, for that is really powerful.
Go in their report. Thank you for sharing this important group and everybody that's been been working on this it's.
Gosh! a powerful, powerful call for kicking off this this session.
And we will be taking questions at the end of this, after 2 more presentations. Our next presentation is from Katie Finlandson, who was an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Mary.
Washington Katie, also the founder and former director of Mary Washington Center for teaching, and she's a former member of Ovac.
And we, O Katy, credit for this innovative idea of doing.
Course tours in this webinar so it's fitting to half, or present the very first course tour of the day by taking a look at her world geography.
Course. so welcome, Katie. feel free to share screen.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Jimmy thank you all for being here.
I'm so excited to see you all and to talk with you this morning.
Thank you, Liz, for that very insightful data I feel like I'm gonna have to be chewing on that for a while.
It was really interesting. Well welcome as jimmy said i'm Katie can listen. I teach a course on world regional geography that I'm gonna be taking you through today and I actually teach it today.
In a little while, so i'm gonna have to tuck out early.
I apologize, but i'll try and leave a couple minutes for for questions.
I've included my email address on the slide I will put it in the chat as well.
So please feel free to email me there's the link to the textbook that we'll be talking about and there's my email address.
I'm very happy to answer any questions about open and very passionate about open education.
So today i'm going to be giving you a tour of my textbook that I wrote for my world regional geography course, and also the course itself, which is fully open on canvas comments so a little bit of background about
the course i've been teaching world regional geography for about 10 years, and it's a notoriously hard class to teach.
One faculty member described it as kind of like teaching the encyclopedia.
It's a 100 level course mostly non majors take It mostly it's, you know, students take it for a Gen. Ad.
Basically. And so back in 2,016, I was searching for a new textbook that would help me.
Kind of modernize the course you know echoing liz's statements.
I found that a lot of students weren't buying the textbook. It was quite expensive, and it wasn't perfect And so it seems silly to assign this incredibly expensive textbook that didn't even really match my course
goals, and I look through. I spread out all these textbooks on my desk to try and find a textbook that would work, and they were all kind of the same.
It was the same basic approach. they're all again, fairly traditional, And so I was looking through my notes and again.
I've been teaching the class for you know over 10 years, and I had a pretty substantial set of notes, and so my idea originally was really just to string them together, and maybe give that to students in lieu of a
textbook, but in in putting them together I realized you know if I added a bit more of a narrative actually have a textbook.
And so that's really how it came to be so i'd like to start by talking about the textbook kind of writing process itself, and then take you through the canvas course I have chat open, So if you have questions as
you go. I don't mind being interrupted questions at all.
So again I included the link to the textbook and the chat.
So feel free to peruse. But again, when my when I originally set out to write the textbook, my plan was wrapped really right in textbook, was just to kind of collate my Notes, and so I started a originally with just
a Pdf of kind of a basic textbook on my website, and I found students loved it.
They often printed it out, which surprised me. I thought that they would just access it electronically and also through surveys.
I found out that a lot of students were using it on their phone.
So the Pdf. you know is not super accessible it's not super mobile, friendly, either.
And so, a few years ago, I switched over to press books and press books is really the most common repository for for hosting open textbooks.
What I like about press books is that it shares all of wordpresses, accessibility, features.
So if you use pressbooks, for instance, if students use press books, they can change the font size.
It's compatible with screen readers and it's mobile, friendly.
So the textbook looks just as good on a mobile device as it does online.
Downsize a press books. it's not super customizable So if you're someone who you know really, you know, is particularly about the look of your book press books only has so many templates.
But for me that was perfect. I don't need a 1,000,000 choices.
I just need 5 i'll pick the one that works for me So I've been really happy with pressbooks, and really, you know, with the course textbook writing process I don't want to minimize the amount of work that goes
into writing a textbook, but it was a lot easier than I would have expected, and you might think about your own courses.
You know how much notes do you have from teaching these courses especially if you've taught it a few times.
And I know for myself I really like writing a lot.
And I have to write quite a bit for my academic career.
But I don't like being judged as I think many of us can share the same sentiment.
So what a great writing opportunity right I don't have a publisher telling me what I should or shouldn't include.
I don't have peer reviewers telling me Well, you really should be looking at this.
It was just me right for my class, so I found it to be an incredibly enjoyable and kind of freeing writing.
Experience. Had I known how much the book would take off, I might have been a little bit more nervous, but I really just thought it was going to be a book for my class.
And so that was that was the audience for it so if I click on the link here.
I'll pull up kind of what the textbook looks like and again. you can, you know, click the link in the chat and peruse It's a fairly traditional book, and it's a approach.
So, for instance, we're talking about Sub-saharan Africa today, so it has learning objectives again like a fairly traditional textbook.
I have sections. All of the imagery is open source as it should be.
So you know. Be mindful if you're publishing openly that you're including open content.
But you know there's tons of open content online I was really shocked at how much open imagery and maps there are Wikipedia Commons.
It's a great repository for that flicker is also really good.
You can sort on flickr by copyright. So I found some really cool imagery.
Pressbooks allows you to use a classroom feature.
So I actually have a classroom with my textbook but again it's fairly traditional.
You'll find some really, really cool open textbooks that have videos embedded.
You can embed, you know, like quiz questions and things.
If you teach a math course you can embed statistical notation to. So there's a lot you can do with press books. But, again, I was. I was kind of taking a more traditional textbook approach.
With it. So since then I have written 2 other textbooks.
I wrote an open human geography textbook, and then I partnered with a faculty member at Gmu to write an open quantitative methods.
Lab manual for geography and so that's quite a bit different.
But it's been again a very pleasant right and experience, and it's It's been a a neat experience to meet other open authors in geography.
As well. We actually had a national conference a couple weeks ago, and I was on a panel with several other open authors, and we were all laughing, saying, You know we're really competitors right?
Like we wrote. We all wrote kind of competing textbooks and so you know i'm on the panel.
I wrote a world regional textbook. Another guy did as well.
There was a team who'd written an amazing human geography textbook that is super interactive has all these cool videos.
And so we were like fans of each other, and we said, You know how unusual that is.
If you around a panel. of authors first of all you probably wouldn't find a panel of authors from all different competing traditional publishers.
But it's been really inspiring, to be part of this community that that seeks to lift each other up and is again kind of fans of each Other's work.
So that's the textbook side of things again you know I would encourage you to if you're if you're at all thinking about writing an open textbook. you don't have to necessarily start with the entire textbook.
Just write maybe a chapter of a topic within your course, that you're excited about. and and you again, you can write it any way you want. And so there's lots of examples of a very neat interactive modules.
And things that are part of textbooks as well, and because of creative Commons license, you can remix existing textbooks.
And so maybe if you like a textbook but you don't like the way the chapters are arranged, or you want to change it.
That's part of a publishing openly is that it's meant to be remixed and rearranged.
The other thing I want to show you today was my open canvas comments.
Course, so I imagine many of you use canvas as your Lms.
Are institution does, but many people don't know about canvas commons.
So i've included a link to how to use canvas commons in my slides.
I can include that in the chat as Well, but if I let me pull up my canvas comments here. so if you go into your canvas dashboard, there's this little button on the side for commons, and if
you click on it. These are all open course materials all freely available on canvas, and there's a ton.
So if you type in world regional geography, you will see a few courses, and one of them is actually my course.
You can see how many people have favored it, how many people have downloaded it.
And so my entire course is openly available online, I teach a traditional course as well.
That's the course i'm teaching in a few minutes this morning.
But this is a fully online asynchronous course.
And again the entire course is published openly. The everything from you know.
Course, introductions to quizzes i've separated based on modules.
So I have like different modules for each chapter. and so the chapter has a little overview, takes them to study notes, Has a quiz, has some key study reading some discussion boards.
So when you click on any of the resources, in canvas comments, you'll be able to scroll through and see all of the resources that are included.
Some of them. might be fairly limited. So if you go back to the search, imagining your teaching like an American history course, it might not be an entire class.
It might be a module or a quiz or i've seen meetings about films before right where they assign a film and hear some cool questions or activities.
So there's all kinds of materials on canvas commons again.
Everything from entire courses just particular assignments so it's a great way to kind of you ease into oer if you've never used oer before.
And again a great resource, especially if you're teaching a course for the first time.
I can't imagine how useful this would have been a decade ago, when I was first starting out with the course, it would have been amazing to have all of this pre done material.
It's also very easy to share to canvas comments. So if I go back to my dashboard here, so I teach another course on sacred spaces.
If I go to my assignments let's say there's an assignment that I really like that i'd love to share on canvas comments like this field trip paper, you go into your assignments.
And click these 3 dots here's where you can share it to canvas commons.
So again, very, very easy to share. You get to set, who can use the resource.
So, for example, maybe you it's very specific to your institution.
You can just share it institutionally if you want to share it to anyone.
Any canvas common user. You can use that as well.
And then you set the copyright license. so I typically do the Creative Commons attribution share like non-commercial license.
But sometimes i'll put it in public domain as well so you can set the license type, and then set all the metadata.
Change the image if you like, set the grade level, and then be able to share it.
So again, very, very easy to share things. Let me move this out of the way.
I have a few other materials that i've shared online as well.
So I have my world regional, entire course. I have a specific module for human geography, and then this I actually shared openly.
I had created a midsuster survey for our teaching center, And so that's just shared on the public domain.
So again, very easy to share things very defined things as well.
If you, if you want to share a course. Another idea might be to like for my world regional course.
I created a sandbox course that I wanted to share.
So when you go into all of your courses. if you click all courses, you should have an add new course, Button, if you don't check with your instructional technology department.
But I I knew that I wanted to create a shareable course, and so I created a course specifically designed for that.
So I imported all the material I already had, but then took out things that were very specific to my class, and just designed a course that was basically meant to be shared.
So I would recommend that, too, if you're sharing an entire course that's kind of a nice option.
So you don't use canvas commons or if you don't use canvas at all I have a few other links for how to find open course material because that's the question I get from a lot of
faculty members is i'm interested in oer I don't know where to start again.
Canvas. commons, I think, is a nice way to start especially if you're teaching an online course.
But viva open plug for vita open has lots of amazing course materials designed by faculty and higher education.
Professionals in Virginia, so that's a great resource!
Oh, we are Commons is another one. I find faculty.
Have good luck with there's lots of courses on there as well, and oer commons there's guides for how to integrate that to banner or to a blackboard. excuse me.
So if you're using blackboard, there are some some integration with oer commons, and then merlot is another good resource for faculty as well, so there's a lot out there, we're mentioning a little bit stop
sharing before our session today that you know. 10 years ago I found, if Faculty wanted to use oer it was a slog to try and search through things and try and find things that were peer reviewed.
There was a lot of uncertainty about I don't know if this will be a good resource.
But now there's so many amazing resources out there and again, I would encourage you to if you have cool of course materials that you're willing to share.
You might be surprised how widely shareable they are!
I against thought that this textbook would just be for my class.
I thought that the online course, maybe a couple people would use it but you see it's been downloaded, you know a couple dozen times.
So again, you might be surprised at how how excited other faculty are to use your materials.
So thank you so much i'm happy to take questions now I know we have time for questions after all the presentations that i'll be teaching so I apologize that I won't I won't be here, so but Thank
you all so much, Thank you so much. katie it's really, really, really exciting. I know you have to run.
But here's one question that we've got is Could could you talk about how you think working in open has like affected your growth or trajectory, or thoughts on teaching itself?
You kind of got to that. But I like i'm interested in that picture. I can definitely tell you're passionate about it about that.
I love that question. I mean so there's kind of the personal side in the professional side, right like personally, it has totally revamped my course.
So you know, I mentioned that world regional geography is a very hard class to teach, and it shouldn't be in theory right like.
Imagine, you know, we just talked a few weeks ago about Russia and Crimea.
And now look at what's happening right so all my students are coming in, super passionate, very excited at the seemingly very relevant course.
Material, but it was hard when it was just this kind of dry like. again.
It was like reading the encyclopedia here's Russia.
Here's the rivers here's the mountains so I had wanted to flip my course, and do team-based learning that was really kind of the impetus for changing the textbook I didn't I
couldn't find a textbook that would fit that because they were all just very overwhelming to students, and and just kind of this rope memorization. So it's made my course so exciting so like today.
We're going in talking about sub-saharan Africa.
But we're not talking about the things the textbook wants me to talk about.
We're having students of having students design posters I have giant posted notes sitting with around my office where they're going to design posters and kind of teach each other about these topics.
So it's it's just made the course so much more exciting to teach being able to break free from what the this publisher tells me I should be teaching, basically which you could do anyway.
But it's just you know to be able to write your own materials has been really an amazing and freeing Then on the professional side, too.
I've been surprised at how well received it it's been institutionally some a tenured faculty member, and you know this didn't count as a as a peer-reviewed textbook per se but it's
peer reviewed online. And so I still included it in my professional materials.
I've also been able to do research on the textbook so if you're an oer author, you're interested in oer survey.
Your students right? I mean that's easy kind of data that you can then work with.
So i've written and published a couple of articles about how a meta, the writing process, and then how it's been received by students echoing what Liz found right that students are are less likely to to buy the
textbook, especially if it's an expensive textbook and I try to connect it with our professional organizations.
Drive to be more diverse, and so I try to make the case that look, if we want to be more diverse as geographers.
Well, we're not going to have many geographers if again echoing Liz's survey results.
If if our most vulnerable students can't even access the 101 course, you know, I found that to be deeply problematic.
So So yeah, personally, professionally, it's been it's been really an amazing experience.
The thanks. Thanks so much, Katie. I think there was one question that I think you addressed from my my friend at Vcu Mike Fororter about being able to adapt content, based on student, impact.
And I apologize to Andrew Lee, who had actually raised his hand earlier, and I I missed you.
No need I was just raising. my hand to say i'm one of those people, so I didn't have a question.
But thanks thanks for the eagle eye that's impressive!
Oh, it was one of my co-host it wasn't me.
I promise. Well, I think we'll get a move on we're gonna give Katie time to go down the go down the hall and actually teach this wonderful class. and really thank you Katie for the presentation and this idea one
100. Our next presentation course Tour from Doctors Renee, Leclair, and Andrew Banks, Dr.
Renee La Claire is associate professor at Virginia Tech with the background in biochemistry, and this generation of this medical focus oer was her first experience in open education highlighting the value of
oer materials, and how they can facilitate change in the classroom and reduce cost. Dr.
Andrew Banks is also an associate professor at Virginia Tech, who has taught medical physiology for 2 decades.
He's generated 3 oer textbooks to enhance, an integrated, focused approach to medical education and to relieve the economic burden that traditional discipline-based textbooks place on students We were really
thrilled to have them. submit this proposal especially dealing with the upper level, upper level medical education.
It's really unique. So welcome andrew and welcome her name thank you. we're gonna tag team this. but
Our presentation actually focuses on some of the great questions you had.
So we were set up really lovely by that first presentation.
So make it. we're excited to be here and even more so now.
So this I just want to start off by introducing the team for this project, and this is a real important piece of oer in in generating that team of players.
And so we have a needle walls from V tech Works, who was really a skilled project manager. and, unlike the first project we heard about, we went through the peer review process copy editing all the sort of traditional textbook
type activities to to really solidify this oer.
And Anita was instrumental in doing that, and we also had kindred Gay Gray, who was our graphic designer for the textbook.
She was ideal at creating all of our open lee license.
Now images which are in a repository online and then both myself and Andrew, as our sneeze, as we're called our subject matter experts.
But I would recommend everybody to get a team of people when you're when you're thinking about doing this, and i'm gonna let Andrew introduce the project a bit about its rationale and its underpinnings and then i'll walk
through the courses. Yeah. So thanks. thanks for our Lena has come to speak to you today.
We set off on this project with really 3 elements for the rationale, and it's similar to what Katie mentioned before.
We were needed to align our resources with integrated content.
Medical education has gone into a much more integrated approach rather than a discipline based one.
But we also needed to support active pedagogy that we were implementing as well.
And of course we also wanted to reduce student debt i'm going to deal with these 3 different elements to our rationale individually, I think, for, like a lot of undergraduate courses, medical education had traditionally
been very discipline-based. Each discipline had its own very thick, very expensive textbook, and we went through, caused by course, during a course in cell biology and biochemistry.
Genetics, physiology, etc. Well, this has recently changed and it's, become much more integrated.
So instead of that textbook chapter by chapter approach we've now transitioned to a much more, I think, appropriate way of teaching that medical education which is by a case based approach, but that gives us a problem with resources because each one of
these cases that may be used to deliver Content would take chunks out of each of those each of those textbooks that have been traditionally used.
So while we had a nice integrated curriculum, now blending those disciplines just as they're blended in medicine and blended in in the human body We didn't have an
integrated and blended resource, and that was one of the roles that we wanted to generate.
We've also seen a dramatic reduction and the delivery time available to us to deliver basic sciences.
And this graph here shows the reduction from 2,008 in purple of biochemistry in purple.
There has been dramatically reduced to now just a handful of hours.
I teach pulmonary, physiology, it's also gone from 30 to 21 to 9 h, and in the in the last couple of decades.
But when we have plenty of time, we could dedicate big, thick textbooks, just to that single discipline, and then we've had to transition to review books, and maybe just the chapter on the lung out of our general
physiology book. But now we were so short of time we needed to be much more focused and much more integrated.
And this is where Renee and I generated textbooks to really meet that time crunch, so we could be much more focused and go along.
So we've also transitioned as well as to an integrated curriculum to a much greater use of active pedagogy, and that means that the what we want the students to do is to prepare and a very
low level, and that's the need that our books are really trying to meet is we want to give them learning objectives that start with list.
And now, and describe right down at the bottom of Blooms taxonomy.
And what we then want to do is to have an in-class activity that takes some higher up balloons taxonomy.
They come in prepared and so that they're ready for the assessment after that class activity where they've been asked to evaluate, apply, and analyze.
And so we take them up that blooms taxonomy.
But the bottom that taxonomy. that preparation is critical, because we've really got to encourage the students to be prepared when they come into the classroom.
So there are classroom exercise can elevate them up.
Blooms. And this is important because this is a double amc's summary of what we should be doing with our medical students, which is apply knowledge to solve problems in living systems and also in human behavior.
To again apply knowledge and solve problems that's the reason why we want to take them up looms.
But critically. we need them to come in prepared with the basics, and they come in prepared with the basics.
We can actually get them higher up that tax on more scale.
And these are the we work in a competency-based curriculum, and using that active pedagogy allows us to also incorporate some of the other competencies that the double amc wants us to implement
interpersonal communication skills that reliability and self-reliance there as well as that things that we've already mentioned with the basic knowledge and reason. and thinking, then i'll cost that was our third real rationale for doing this just for
the 2 courses that Renee are involved in in a age courses. All the cost for the textbooks independent textbooks was was over a $1,000.
In total. We expect our medical students to actually spend nearly $5,000 in their 4 years of their medical career.
So through development of these books that we've generated already we've cut down that cost significantly.
I'm going to hand over to renee now and she'll describe some of the curricula changes the curricula structure that we've added the same you're on me right classic right classic zoom
moment. Those are our rationales but I want to really show you how these fit in our courses at the medical school, because we we we don't have standalone courses.
And so I think when we start thinking about how we use er oer and integrated courses, This is a really great example.
The curriculum of Vtc. Som is really foundational to generate.
Physician thought leaders cutting edge, medical education, and our curriculum is divided into these 4 domains.
With basic science being one of them with research clinical skills.
And hssip or health system, science and interprofessionalism.
So the courses that we are talking about are block block one and block 6 in our first and our second year curriculum.
And I can tell you we started there only because these are the areas in which Andrew and I teach, but otherwise there was no no certain earn picking point.
So the first year blocks are 8 weeks long they're foundational science, generally with anatomy and pbl as well.
And then the second year, the courses are 6 weeks in nature predominantly focused on pathophysiology, and with problem-based learning.
But again, in any one of these given courses, all 4 domains are part of a course structure.
So when we think about a course, grade students have to successfully master all of these donors.
So if I break out those domains within, the course that I teach Med 601 or block one, as we call it, the oer is really focused on this this small area, so that is the area where we're looking at thousands of dollars of
textbooks. The other 3 areas may have their own textbooks as well, so that combinatorial cost is is really distributed.
But again, these are our topic areas, and then for block 6 first Andrew's course structure is fairly similar, and his books are focused on the pulmonary and pathophysiology.
But I want everybody to appreciate that these courses aren't Standalone.
They are all intertwined and interwoven.
So a weekly structure for any given student in this, in this singular course, may look something like this, and the color codes here really represent different domains.
So for for me the light blue, so jeans and genomes.
Dna transcription translation that's the target area of the oer that I developed.
And that is the material there is really to support what happens in those classrooms in the blue area.
So lots of things going on lots of moving parts in this course, but the oer is targeted to help students prepare for when they come to these these large group sessions.
Also paired with problem-based learning. You see here anatomy, dissection, as well as their other curricular domains.
So within each of those blue areas, just like a regular core setup, we have this preparation material that's needed, and learning objectives to support this active classroom setting.
Whatever that activity looks like, and all of those are again aligned with our assessment.
So the oer material itself was provided as preparation as Andrew said to leverage the student's ability to prepare efficiently to come into class to be engaged with that active activity.
So one of the I have our books i'm gonna share the links in the chat. But one of the real foundational things when we started developing our textbooks, is that the sections needed to be very short for recognition
of student time, but they also needed to be very fluid and mobile.
And here's a great example of this and if there's any other other medical educators.
You can appreciate how fluid this is. so cholesterol is one of my favorite compounds as a biochemist.
But in any given year we're cholesterol is delivered in a medical curriculum, could look very different.
So some years it's delivered in digestion absorption and some years it's delivered as part of steroid hormone synthesis, some years it's a part of fundamental cell
membranes. Other years it's included in coronary artery, disease, and and and other types of vascular disorders.
My prep. The appropriation material we designed in these oers is fluid and short enough to support any of these.
So what we were finding ourselves doing is rewrite these short blurbs to be, you know, unique to our text or unique to our course.
Delivery, when in reality what we needed was something that was she very specific, but could be shuffled around to accommodate this within our curricular setting.
And so that was really the goal of our textbook. the other example that made our makes our resources really handy within this arena is for cross-disciplinary applications.
But for this i'm showing a host of different topics. that could be delivered within the same one or two-hour session that a student might need to come in briefed on what how all of these are interrelated and our
ovars are short enough where we can get a student to be prepared enough to come into the classroom to be really engaged in this activity; whereas, before, if we were using a textbook, there may be 9 different chapters across 4 different
textbooks that would be insurmountable and so We've all experienced this in that setting where a student would just say I didn't read any of this, because it was way too much.
I would have had to have read for 40 h to come in to prepare for my 50 min activity.
With this oer. This is now an achievable activity.
So outcomes I you know the oers are a lot of work, and really to do them well.
And so what I want everyone to appreciate is that when we set off our goal for outcomes was not necessarily enhancing students, success.
Medical students are generally very driven and motivated. They perform very well on standardized exams, anyway.
So we looked at outcomes a little differently. And we really just ask, Is this helpful?
Is this a helpful resource? and most students that it was helpful.
More importantly, we found that 76% of our students use this at some level which is an achievement for those of you online.
It's they are accessing this they're using this as a resource.
They're not coming under prepared or unprepared which was really great. And we also asked, Would you you know, use this in other courses to which they they said, Yes, so we do have other faculty members that are now?
Thinking about what this might look like for them. The other piece of this that we touched on in a great question, were the unintended consequences or the unintended outcomes for us as educators, so we developed our textbook which really then helped us
leverage curricular design. It helps us change session, level pedagogy into lots of different things in the classroom overall.
That changed student satisfaction. Students were much more engaged. It also helped leverage things like a scholarship towards promotion, collaboration across different disciplines, different levels of mentorship across disciplines and across ideas, and scholarship
and publications. And so it's a lot of work But these were some really positive outcomes that we can appreciate.
And so over the course of the last couple of years, Andrew and I have actually been able to publish several classroom activities.
Other white papers on doing this that are now pieces of scholarship for anybody online where that's a real important piece.
Make sure that that you're doing that so that's what we have for you today on our oer is I put the links in the chat, and I just want a special thanks to beiva for funding our project we partnered with
Weberry Tech. So our books are available, both on press press books, through Vt.
Works and through through Lee Braytex, and then show for the invite.
Today. Thank you, everyone. Well, thank you, Andrew and Renee for that great presentation.
We now have some time before break for for questions either feel free to put them in chat or raise your hand.
And Andrew. I see a hand this time for real this time, indeed for real.
Thank you, Andrew and Renee. That was fantastic.
2 quick questions, as somebody who has actually done some teaching overseas at European medical schools. specifically for Andrew.
My question is with the dramatic reduction in time, where you are.
Having students learn about your discipline. Is it the fact that students are just not cuddling up with guidance and West for hours in the library?
And instead, just watching all this on, Youtube how do you feel about their ability to develop foundational information?
And my second very brief follow-up question is, our students may be printing your materials out, or are they just using this on an ipad?
Thanks so much. That was amazing. well, thank you the the first question is the easy one.
We're seeing students use our resources electronically but as Katie saw as well.
We're seeing them bring into the classroom a printed out version, which which surprise does that we presume they were technophilic, and would never want to print anything out on what Pope.
So we were surprised to see that the the foundational material sort of from from guidance.
And West, as you pointed out I mean i'm a pulmonary physiologist.
So West was everything to me, and to let that go, and to even start to let guidance go, became personally an obstacle to get over the The content volume had to be reduced.
But really because we've gone over to an active pedagogy, instead of referring to several paragraphs in guidance or chunks of one single chapter in West it, was easier to really focus in on those small
pieces, as Renee mentioned that pieces had to be mobile that's difficult with a traditional textbook, or even the chapter of a general textbook.
So it was really to encourage that preparation, because, as students needed to know that if they were going to invest their resource of time in preparing for our class, they needed to get bang for the buck in the classroom So if we
gave them extraneous material that never came up in the classroom exercises.
They lost faith and trust in the fact that they they should be doing this preparation, so that
Part of it was reinforcement that it is worthwhile preparing, and it really made that alignment.
Of course, from preparation to classroom exercise to assessment.
Was was one of our real foundational frameworks, and we we had to engage in.
But the the volume Compression is is just there's more and more known in medical education.
Never mind medical knowledge about the basic sciences, but for example we are now squeezing in other subjects.
We're. we've got a big research component to the curriculum here at Vt.
But we are now putting in a big health system, science, component.
Everything is getting crammed in and it is basic science that's now sort of taking the squeeze, but we're going to open with it.
Thank you. Great question. Thank you. You know that that is a great question.
I love the idea about sentimentality versus changing roles of students and needs of the curriculum, and also the first part of the question.
I wondered if Liz or anybody else on the on the call that's on the core survey committee.
I think parts of the quite survey talked about format and preferences.
Is there anything we can preliminary share preliminarily share?
There there is. Yes, we did talk about. We did ask questions about format and it was.
It was an important part of the survey that second research question. right?
Let me pull that up real quick. was what course content materials do students find to be the most beneficial to their learning?
And I think that goes to what Andrew and Renee were talking about right, and really thinking through how how to engage students in the preparation work, and to get them engaged in the readings and motivating them what would
motivate them. So some of the things that we asked in the Survey included print versus online or electronic, whether they prefer to have a lifetime access to these materials as opposed to just renting
or having them for a semester. So a lot of what Andrew in her day actually spoke to, which I think is fantastic and and be a full initial survey.
Report has a lot of that information on it. So if you go to the the course material survey web Page, you can access that full report and see all of their responses.
Thanks for is open for for other questions to to liz Renee or Andrew.
There's a good question and chat from mike forter Medical images are much harder to find, and open repositories than others.
That also heart hearkens back to katie's quite a presentation.
How did you go about finding finding your visuals so i'll let you take that one?
But we had kindred, did all of our imaging, and she was phenomenal at generating, recreating, remixing, and finding materials so definitely from that matter.
You pull in some collaborators to help with that Andrew. I don't know if you have any have anything to follow up with on that.
I think the worst. Some challenges particularly for the path of physiological imagery.
Some castology was in some chest. X-rays, for example, Ekgs.
But, to be honest, it was easier to find something that on occasion more than it was difficult.
There's sites like radio pedia or open source life in the fast lane is I've got a whole library of ekgs that we use for 2 chapters all open source.
So it was actually. sometimes we struggled and sometimes we had to make modifications.
But it wasn't too difficult. julianne I just saw your question, and I I have to say yes, so, for undergrads pre-allied health.
These books are actually really appropriate I lost across a lot of platforms, because what I need medical students to come into the classroom with is just a really fundamental perspective of things.
And so it isn't written when we think of medical education I think a lot of people think as like this really lofty upper graduate level these preparation materials are really to solidify that foundations and So
I've actually adopted this my own book for a post back online biochemistry.
Course, several other it's really appropriate for that target audience depending on how you're you're intending to use the material.
So yeah, I would say, give it a look and see and reach back out.
There are some to that end there are definitely some topics that I would normally teach in a traditional undergraduate biochemistry course that aren't included, because they're not they're not relevant
but it does have a lot of fluidity across many of the Allied health professions.
Thanks for that. And then oh, we got a really juicy question from Matt.
A philosophical question from from matthew matthew Pierce that I I welcome the presenters, or if anybody else wants to, because we've got a lot of other experts on the call, jump in on this feel free to in
the chat or raise your hand so ignat like wholeheartedly agree with you, and we don't subscribe to you know the the ice cream versus broccoli persona.
Just because I like it doesn't mean it's good for you. but in Meded, I think, and others we compete with third-party resources that are just short changes you know if if there's something in this in this one that I
don't want you know I don't feel like that's sufficient.
I feel like the oer feels that gap I think as educators, at least for me.
Personally, i've embraced that students are going to find some if they don't want to read what I've It's the too much.
It's the goldilocks hypothesis if I give them 10 chapters.
They don't read any they're gonna go to osmosis, or they're going to go to Youtube So I really try and find that happy medium between them. So that they can engage in a material that I that I find to be really useful
for them, instead of launching them, allowing them to launch into the third party world of resources.
But That's That's a great point yeah I think one of the lessons that I suddenly learned straight off was my my book started off as voice over Powerpoints.
And it was a transcript of those Powerpoints that turned into the chapters, and I think used to give an hour and a half lecture on asthma.
I over voiceover powerpoints or lecture actors.
It was nicknamed was 12 min long when I went back and looked.
I couldn't actually discern what content i'd really missed out. So it was the efficiency, and it's the efficiency that they're the third party resources, give the student and that is what they need and
I think that that's been that that's been a lesson to us is that it's okay then, going to the third party resources, but some of them we have problems with some of them are not particularly accurate and I think
that that's one of the issues that we had thanks for that question, and the and and the comments got shot.
Never thought I would be talking about life in the fast lane, or a broccoli and ice cream.
So both of those are in the back of my head other other questions or comments.
I think we've got time for one more before our plan break Matt.
We also have our students read at least the first chapter of Make it stick.
I would encourage everybody to do that absolutely that's very beneficial. I think, with that's that's a great a great place to stop, and i'm going to share screen once more for our our break so everybody can can know where
we are if I can find the share screen button it's the big green one that's right there in the middle.
So right now it's about 11. o 5 We'll go ahead and take a 10 min break, and we'll be back at a 1115 to hear from Dr.
Robert Godwin Jones, Dr. Daniel a week, and Dr.
Stephanie Westcott. so thank you all and thank all the presenters.
So welcome, Robert, and thank you so much. Thank you i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen hopefully.
You're seeing that is that correct? Everybody able to see it Okay, thank you.
Very happy to be here today, and I think my presentation kind of goes along the the from what we've already heard this morning from from Katie.
First of all, i've started on this project because I was dissatisfied with existing textbooks, as as she was wasn't thinking really about at that time about saving students money because that wasn't really on the
horizon a number of years ago, as it is now and then also there.
This was a collaborative effort, so as as renee and Andrew talked about That's I think that's always something that's important in in these kinds of projects.
So i'm going to talk about how I got started with this, and talk about what the textbook looked like, looks like, and how that fits into the the course that I teach, and some design considerations that I had in putting putting this together
and then showing you i'll end up showing you finish up showing you some of the what it looks like, so just to give you a bit of the background.
A few years ago the foreign language program at Vcu decided that we wanted to add to the core curriculum
A intercultural learning component and the various ways to do that.
But we thought that maybe in the interest of not taking time away from contact, content in contact, hours in the in beginning an intermediate language track that we that we'd introduced this course taught in English across so there would be usable across all
the languages on intercultural communication and so happened that we had a course on the books called communicating across cultures, but they were set up by someone who shortly afterwards left the university.
So I'd actually never been taught so I volunteered to teach it, because I was interested in the topic
This connection between language and culture, and so I put together a course, and that they this became, I core requirement in for foreign language, majors and French, German, and Spanish as well.
But the language of the majors that we have, and then subsequently also has a core requirement for students.
Majoring in international studies. So when i've designed that course and I thought I was interesting.
I think Katie mentioned that she's been teaching the world Geography course for 10 years, and this is when I started teaching this course as well.
And so I kind of followed a bit, of course, description, and the course catalog used a very traditional approach to intercultural communication of a sort of social science orientation that we light heavily on the work of Edward Hall and
Gert Hofstadter, back in the 1819, 80 S.
And 1990 S. And this is the typical approach to teaching this content in the United States, and there are similar courses in intercultural communication at Vcu.
In the in professional schools. When I taught the course, it was a face-to-face course, and I was learning as I was, as I was teaching it, and I used a commercial textbook very traditional approach.
I used a little bit of supplemental media and discussion forms in blackboard, which was what we were using at the time. but it was basically a traditional face-to-face class.
So I got the incentive to change things around for for one thing I wasn't real thrilled with the textbook, so i'll talk about that in a minute.
But also there were. there was a grant opportunity that came my way that I thought was really interesting. And it was an internal Bcu Grant program from the Global Education Office global virtual classroom.
And the idea was, we were supposed to find partners among one of Vcu's foreign partner universities and and work with them on some kind of teaching project.
And I thought this great last give me opportunity to to connect with colleagues in other countries.
And then the second thing that that has helped me is the Bc.
Library a few years ago, started this affordable course, content project, which is great, which encourages faculty to use oer, and and also to create oer.
So my idea here was to create a open textbook, but one that would be collaborative.
That would involve input from other folks, especially folks with other perspectives on the topic.
And I also wanted to make sure that I could and yeah integrate something that I've I've been wanting to do for some time to have virtual exchanges online exchanges between my students and students and other universities and so
I want to put put that into the mix as well. So I I looked around for partners among the at that time I think there were some dozen official Vcu university partners, and so I found willing collaborators in India the Indian
Institute of Technology in Colorado, and also in South Africa.
At versa quasimo natalie and durban, and those were my initial collaborators, and subsequently I've had a number of other folks from all different places help out with this in terms of reading the textbook I
was as it was written, and so suggesting revisions and additions.
So it's been a great process in terms of getting to Know those those colleagues at those partner universities, and I've worked especially closely with Professor Malik from Indian Institute of technology.
And and and i'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute. So that was one part of the collaborative effort putting together the textbook, The other was finding partners to do exchanges with my students and my
They're also I looked at Partner University started with Pieta Goris linguistic university, which is in Northern caucuses, and in Russia did a few exchanges there, and then subsequently with the Indian
institution in Colorado. And then currently my students are, tell a collaborator with
Wenzel University, which is in Taiwan and cow shone, and Southern Taiwan and i'll talk about that a little bit more as well.
So what one of the things that I wanted to do, and one of the reasons I was dissatisfied with the mainstream commercial textbooks that are used, and the United States and teaching it or cultural communication.
I want to put more emphasis on language, and that made us a lot of sense.
Given the fact that you know this was a core requirement for initially for foreign language majors. and the other thing that I wanted to do was to make a textbook come up with a textbook that would be less us centric that have
a more international perspective on intercultural communication. After all, the course was called communicating across cultures.
And so I wanted to. If you look at the mainstream us textbooks, they're all very similar in the content, and they're all from a very us centered perspective, just to give you an example of one of the most used
textbooks in the United States has a chapter called Language as a barrier, and that seemed to me very strange.
I think of language as a bridge for cultural understanding.
So I I said, about collaborating and coming up with a a first version, and then subsequently, those colleagues, 3 or 4 of them have have continued to help me out and revising, and adding on to the content that's
there. what? What i'll be showing you is available in a variety of formats, and also at a bright variety of sites.
I have the main site that I that I control, that I put material up into.
But there are other sites that have, because this is a shareable content.
The other sites that have have integrated the the textbook into their collections as well.
And i'm going to show you both the standalone text standalone textbook. But i've also integrated and integrated the text into interactive to doils.
I'll talk about that a little bit as well so I wanted the design to be modular, so that people could pick and choose if they wanted particular chapters to use, and that they could use those and revise those and head on to them whatever they
wanted to do so. It was important to me to have editable content.
You obviously want that in ler, and to have it be shareable and needed to be in in a standard based format.
And obviously digital. it's a way that you want to go these days of integration of media.
So audio clips and video clips also in the interactivity is is something that's very attractive.
I think in and in developing these materials so the content is available in in different ways, and i'll show you how that works in practice.
So I wanted to make it available and open web just a set of web pages, but also wanted to make it available.
In an lms like blackboard or canvas and i'll talk about that.
How that works. The other thing that I was interested in, particularly in view of of the potential of having this content used abroad.
For example, in India and in South Africa. is I wanted to be mobile friendly, and it's much easier these days to do that than it was a few years ago when I got started on this project.
But I wanted it for bandwidth purposes to be downloadable content.
And so that you know that that downloadable to a to a phone.
So that was one of the considerations and putting putting this together That's why, although it back then Flash was quite popular when I started working on this 7 or 8 years ago.
I didn't want to include anything like that those proprietary formats that didn't wasn't going to work in a mobile environment and in terms of of being able to access the materials particular videos I was
using Ted talks as a model because they have transcripts in multiple languages.
They have the versions of the video in different bandwidth versions, and so on.
I think that's the way to go if at all possible.
So I use this text initially. in an online course.
I teach this course course typically in the summer as well as a in an asynchronous format.
And then I used it subsequently in India with my colleague, Professor Malik and
That was really an interesting experience, because we had Indian students, obviously, but a number of foreign students as well.
So I got really interesting feedback from from that experience in covid poor.
I've been over there a couple of times while working with working on the project with Professor Malik currently I I'm.
I usually teach this as a hybrid course, but currently i'm, teaching it as a asynchronous online course, which I think is the experience we've all had 200 in recent years moving over to that format But i'm
hoping to get back to hybrid Format actually in in the fall.
So in the current chap and the current version there are 7 chapters, each divided into 2 parts, so it works well in a 15 week. semester.
The text is available as separate chapters and a variety of formats.
The Html version is also integrated into a tutorial.
So it's available as on the open web it's a set of web pages, but also integrated into into an ebook format, using he pub. 3 currently folks in the library of very happy to have
colleagues there working on this are putting it into the press books format.
So I'm. i'm Curious about that particularly because of the ability to integrate the interactive. 2 H.
5 P. which has a lot of interactive elements that you can put into a a press book in press book format.
This is what the table of contents looks like. So I have an opening chapter that deals with basics about intercultural communication, about the discipline, talking about culture and communication.
General issues. second chapter on identity formation 2 chapters on language from a variety of perspectives and nonverbal communication, obviously is something that's always covered in in such courses chapter on intercultural
communication and professional context, and then including countering other cultures idea in person or in virtual ways.
So I wanted to before I show you the the content. I wanted to talk briefly about this idea of telec collaboration.
As one of the things that, as I said before, I wanted to incorporate into the into the experience of of using this textbook.
Was finding partners with whom my students could communicate and so i'm currently partnering with Wenzhou University.
And the nice thing about that is, they are also using this textbook.
And so this sets up the possibility of using the course content.
As a starting point, or the conversations that my students have with with the students there.
And have fortunate enough to find a colleague who is teaching, in fact, a course with the exact same title in Taiwan. So that's worked out very well.
There are a lot of practical issues to work out. one.
One of the main ones is the time difference 12 h or 13 h depending on on whether we're on daylight savings time or not.
But students get around that. So the way that this is set up the students, we we set up the the teams of students and they contact each other and then arrange these conversations outside of class time.
So one of the things of having a shared tech Poe.
Our textbook like this enables us to do, for these virtual exchanges is, start with material in the textbook, and then add on to that.
And so you know we we what we trying to do is have kind of the easy opening kind of surface level topics, and then inviting the students to to deep deeper into the content along with having fun things to do as well and
that's that's I think an important part of that So i'm just going to go briefly through some what the content actually looks like.
This is the Pdf version so that's one format that's available.
As far as I know my students I haven't heard of my students printing it up.
They may be doing it, but I think most of them are.
Are viewing it on screens, but it looks like a traditional textbook.
As Katie indicated with hers as well.
One of the things that I really enjoyed actually was finding copyright free and integrating those into the text.
So That's That's been a kind of a fun thing to do. So This is Pdf version.
This is the ebook version version. This is on ebooks on a Mac.
So any ebook reader can download this epub version, and and and it's works the same way as on any any ebook.
They website, the main website, or my website. and, as I say, the contents available.
Other places as well Looks like this, and so as you can see down below. you can download the text as a word documents.
It's a pdf as an epub there's also links to the online tutorial.
So you can go directly into that on the web or you can download download the web pages as a as a zip file.
So they're different formats available there. so the tutorials were designed, to present the the content in a more more interesting way than just reading a textbook.
So they have a lot of interactivity them, and they were especially designed for how I taught the the course in the summer as an asynchronous course.
So what that looks like this is the first page of 7 pages of one of these tutorials.
This goes along with the first chapter of the book and there are 7 pages, including videos.
They're both videos from other sources from Youtube for example, as well as presentations that I've recorded the unit chapter is integrated into this as well.
So students can read the text within the tutorial or in the other formats that i'm showing you And then the final page has a formative assessments, and this is the the questions are based both on the material in the tutorial and in
the reading And so this is something that just allows me to make sure 2 that the students have gone through the materials, because when this is accessed in an Lms.
That the those questions automatically is sent to the great book in in Lms.
And that tells me that they've actually gone through the tutorial.
So in an Lms. how that works is that you can integrate through third-party, content through something called Lti, which is standard for doing that, and that's supported by virtually all Lms is so blackboard.
Canvas all the rest of them. and the nice thing about That is that that I can see that the students have actually worked their way through the tutorial, and I say they're great It's just a few points that
they're awarded for answering those questions but it's enough to allow me to see that they've actually done that.
So in we're now using campus we switched over last year from blackboard. and this is the opening module for this course, and as it looks in canvas, and the first thing that they do is is work on the
tutorial. This is what that looks like when they call it up in campus. So it's a it's Lti linked.
And so what that means is that that they can keep track of their scores.
They can go back and resume if they, if they stop doing it.
Halfway through. So I think that my time is up and that's good, because i'm just at the end of the presentation.
But be glad after afterwards to entertain questions and If you have any specific things that you're interested in.
You can send. send me an email Rg: Jones at Vcu.
Ow: unmute. Okay, Thank you. So much. really impressive.
The international collaboration. Part of this project is just mind-boggling, and I'm sure there will be questions or comments about that.
During their question period. a little later in our session today.
Well, now, I'll turn to our second presenter who is Danny a leak, PHD.
She's the Dean of online learning and instructional excellence at J.
Sergeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond, and an instructor in the Aa.
And communication program at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, Dc.
As a faculty member in communication studies. danielle has over 14 years of experience, teaching successful service, learning courses and training faculty to do the same.
She's received the Michigan campus compact award excellence and service. learning.
She was recognized as a presidential service, learning scholar like Graham Valley State University.
Daniel recently received an open education research fellowship for her investigation of digital equity issues in higher education, publications and research focus strategies for measuring and promoting civic learning and equity.
The peers of face-to-face and online talent, college classrooms so welcome Danielle.
We're happy to hear your thoughts today. thank you and thank you for that lovely introduction, and it's ironic that I'm talking about a class in public speaking.
But I still get so nervous presenting in front of all of you.
So. thank you for having me and forgiving me this opportunity to talk about my public speaking class.
I'm gonna share my screen with and give a bit of a presentation to
So I teach principles of public speaking at Ga. Sergeant Reynolds, and this is an opportunity for me to sort of build off the amazing work that my colleagues have already spoken about.
Today by speaking about a course that is not only a class that uses open materials, but also uses open pedagogy, which, in a lot of ways many of you have already spoken about the course that we just heard about is a great example of
that of being interested in wanting students to be. I mean what you were just talking about was so much the idea of wanting to be able to collaborate with colleagues.
That is an example of wanting to be able to build in an open way the way that we think about how our textbooks are constructed and open.
Pedagogy, then, is thinking about how our students collaborate with one another to construct knowledge.
And so that's really sort of the foundation of this course and a little bit of what I want to share with all of you today.
So let me dive in and describe. then how this course is constructed, and what I teach, and I will also share in the chat a link to some resources and invite you all to contact me.
If you're interested in additional Materials the resources, for this course will be available in the Reynolds Community college oer hub, which is a subset of the Viva comments as well so you'll be able to
access them soon, and a number of these materials will also be available in the canvas commons.
This will be the first time. i've taught this course, this past semester through canvas, so i'm working on making those resources available to people through canvas as well.
So if you've ever taken a basic public speaking course at a college level, I suspect, and please share in the chat.
If you're familiar with this format that you're familiar with the public speaking course that asks students to give a certain set of speeches, you've probably done the standard impromptu speech, informative speech persuasive
speech, maybe a special occasion speech that's pretty common and the standard expectations for this course are pretty similar.
That students will leave the course, understanding how to construct the speech, how to research, first speech, and how to give some of the standard formats for a public speech, and in conceptualizing. then what makes a speech class for students more engaging but also
more impactful open pedagogy as a way of teaching speech class is really for me the most obvious way to access some students and move past that sort of sense that most students describe about public speaking.
The most horrible experience that they'll ever have and I Guess I just have to ask, and I I really need y'all to share with me if you know if you've had that feeling about taking your public speaking class.
That it was the last thing that you ever possibly wanted to do and if you're familiar with the open education movement, you know that part of the reason why people got involved with open education was because there was a sense that that a lot of our traditional
materials for courses, you know. students will buy a textbook, and then they never use it again.
So you spend a $100 on a text for a class that You'll never, ever open a book that you'll never open again.
Materials will never use again. I mean that's how people feel about public speaking class in general.
I mean this is a class that i'll take but I don't ever intend to be a public speaker.
I don't ever intend to use this again. i'm never gonna give speeches for a living.
I mean, these are the things that people say about public speaking classes, even though we have this sense that everybody needs to learn how to be a public speaker.
But open pedagogy is the component for open materials is kind of based in this idea that we really need to stop seeing what's students are doing in a classroom as not reusable is not
I've we need to stop seeing what students are doing is something that they just do for that class that it's that that some assignments need to be renewable.
They need to be reusable that students need to think about what they're doing is being part of their lived experience as relatable to not only the just a skill that they're developing for their career, but is something that's going
to be valuable for them for the future as well. Okay.
So the entire philosophy around developing this class was not just that the materials would be open.
But that also that these materials would be the assignments.
Everything that students are doing in this course, including the way that the course is developed, is develop.
The spirit of open pedagogy in mind so we developed. the course together really from start to finish, that when students are engaged in working through their activities, that they are doing everything that they're doing is impacting the world around
them that includes each other, and it includes the world as we are living in it.
Okay, so that's kind. of how we're seeing it so we start with the idea that the textbooks for the course are openly licensed.
So the actual reading materials are actually the texts are openly licensed textbooks, and we I teach the students about what open education is as part of the course we have an actual module about open education.
And i'm gonna pause my sharing here for just a second, and i'm going to share with you all a link to the resources, as i'm using them order to show you a copy of the syllabus I have somebody
asking about what, how you can actually get access to these resources.
All of these resources are also so you are welcome to copy, remix, Reuse anything that you have in here.
Well feel free to drop questions in the chat room, talking online, to answering them while and presenting as well.
So this is a link to the materials as I am discussing them.
So the students find out about open education materials from the start of the class that talk about how this is an open class.
I talk about how they will be designing the class with me.
So one of the first things that we do in the course is we engage in an activity called annotating the syllabus.
Some of You have probably heard about an activity like this before it's the very first activity we do in the course, and I asked them as their first.
I mean, besides introducing ourselves I asked them to go through the process of, and they find out that the textbook is openly licensed.
So that means that it's going to be free they want to pay for anything that it's available as a Pdf.
If they want to print it, so that they have a pretty copy, but they can also have it digitally.
On the first Day class you talk about all of these things in the first day, and then the first activities called annotating the syllabus and I'm going to give you a link to the annotating syllabus activity, So
that you can actually have a link to the annotating syllabus activity and the annotating X syllabus activity guide.
So this annotating activity is something that students actually do together as part of the class.
This syllabus activity is something that we all do together.
Where students go into a Google document for the course and the actual syllabus, and they write notes about it to me to each other.
And essentially what i'm asking them to do is say what they think about the syllabus.
Do They have questions about it? Do they have feelings about the syllabus?
Are there things about the course that are unclear? Are there features of the course that they find interesting, provocative?
Are there things that they find about the syllabus that they want to add?
So have they taken a public speaking class before? Are there things that they would like to change about her?
So with this and they engage in a practice of developing the syllabus for together. And I don't actually use something outside of Google right now, because our key, all of the students have access to Google as a tool So
they're all they all have access to it but I have used hypotheses.
If you're familiar with hypothesis hypothesis as an annotation tool, so that's something that I've used in the past.
So that's the first activity I asked them to make at least 2 comments together, and and to respond to one another and have a video where I show them how to do this, So that they understand how to make comments inside of Google
docs together as a way to participate as part of this annotating the syllabus activity.
They have also learned about the fact that they will be making a decision about how
They will also have the process of deciding on. They will be able to, grade.
Choose how they will be greated in this course as well.
So if you are inside of the folder for this entire presentation, and you see the syllabus, you'll see that there are a 100 points in this course for this public speaking, class, and there is a opposed number of points for
each activity in this course, which includes you know the standard things for a public speaking course, like a informative speech, a persuasive speech.
But i'm going to share my screen and show you this if you are watching along as opposed to looking inside of the folder.
Share my screen. And again, remember, the idea of of open pedagogy is that students are people just like all of you and me as the expert.
So in public speaking is that we all have something to contribute to the knowledge that is created in the world.
So students need to be able to contribute knowledge. They need to feel, not just feel, but they need to be recognized as people who can contribute to the knowledge in our world, and they are learning about this concept of open education along the way as
we are all learning together, and so this is a copy of the syllabus that they would be annotating as part of this first activity.
So they are contributing to the knowledge they're contributing to the forms of information that we experience as part of this course, is the first item of information or learning that we have as part of this public speaking, course and they learn from the start
that they will be contributing their knowledge and information to this course.
Through this annotation activity. And then one of the things that we do together is we discuss the fact that they will be contributing to their own outcome in this course, not only through their performances, but also by determining how they will
be assessed in the course, and they will make a decision as to how they want to be assessed in terms of what weight they want.
The activities in the course to be given. And so the students make a contract with me about how they want elements of the course to be assessed in terms of the weight of the number of points for each of the activities in the course
This is another element of open pedagogy, and that is the next step that the students engage in is determining the weight.
And so, as you can see inside of this syllabus, the point value for each of the activities is sort of a 10 points or x.
So the students can take. I sort of offer what I think is the right amount, not a right, but a possible amount of weight to give each of the activities.
And we discuss Why, this is what i've started with at the start of the course, and then they make a decision about how many points or what the point values should be for their course grade for each of these items.
So I mentioned that another thing that we do is part of this course is a module that is related to differenting.
What open education is, and we do this through canvas.
Another. one of the colleagues in the presentation earlier talked about the canvas commons.
It's a fantastic way to identify modules that define what open education is and talk about open pedagogy.
I have unveiled myself with those incredible resources that have been provided by all kinds of other people that have done that work.
My students complete a module on open education, and so that is one of the things that I use, and here's kind of a mini example of that content by students who complete a brief module and open education at the start of the semester
as well. there's a self-check that the students do, to complete sort of a mini module on open education, you know, from pedagogy.
So they're coming. familiar with this idea that they're contributing to knowledge in the world.
In addition to what I was describing about doing speech with an open mind, and students creating part of the syllabus, creating grading schema, talking about the idea that we value each other's voices and experiences so students also
do as often they do in speech courses, select their own speech topics for the class.
But I want to stress that when they select their speech topic
This will be really important, because they are selecting a speech topic that is especially meaningful.
For when they give their speeches, students are asked to select a speech topic that will impact the students in the class in a really meaningful way. and and or to be giving a speech that will really impact people and and to truly be speaking about something that
they care about and and we really work towards this in the class so much so that when we, if you take it a speech class, and you've heard people talk about this idea of audience analysis and really thinking about the people like what is audience analysis
and in speech textbooks. there's sort of these cheesy discussions about how you conduct surveys on your you know.
Try to do an audience analysis for your survey of your audience.
We really do that in speech class, And the students really come to know one another and really think about what is it that they care about?
And how do they speak in a way that is impactful and will continue to have impact in the future.
And by that I mean really continue to carry on beyond just the course, and to give you an example of how that plays out.
Just this past semester. Here are some examples of the speeches that students gave
One student chose to ask students in the class to sign the petition that was active on free.
The textbook. the that is one of the increasing, you know.
Stop inclusive access. I mean. they got so into what they learned about the open education movement that they applied for and are not interning with spark, which is one of the open education groups, and they really called for all of the students in the
class to really get involved with the open education movement. Another student who is an environmental activist in the speech, trying to persuade people in class to pick up 5 or 10 pieces of litter every day, and was making the case that this could really
make a difference in our community and have this. This is it was a really, it was an incredible speech.
My community College has an emergency Med tech program and I didn't know this. but The number of people who are doing the work as frontline work in the emergency medical area has really gone down as a result of a
pandemic, and the student made the appeal for people to volunteer as emergency medical professionals.
I didn't even know that people could do that and did you also know that an ambulance weighs 10,000 tons.
There is another fact that I didn't know and gave the information for people to volunteer to.
You can volunteer to support ambulances by being an ambulance driver.
That's something you can actually do you don't do the medical work.
But you can volunteer as a driver, and and that was something that the students spoke about.
Another student talked about stopping people from consuming energy drinks because it was something that a family member had gotten sick from 2 and another student who's part of our culinary program talked about people needing to start baking as a
way to handle the anxiety from the pandemic When students speak about things that they care about, and really understand that they are impacting people in a way that matters.
They are engaged in the work of a pedagogy, and to finalize that, and to sum up what I've said, the students are actually recreating the textbook by we remix the textbook during the semester by adding elements to
the textbook that are specific to our community college campus.
So to conclude the semester, the students actually finished by rewriting elements of the textbook to be specific to our community college campus, so that in the next semester upcoming in the fall when I teach speech again the students
will be reading examples from these students. about their speeches and about things that they learn in this class to to about about getting speeches as part of what they've done.
An example of what other people have talked about about remixing textbooks, making the content more local and more specific.
So that is what I did in this course about using open pedagogy.
Thanks for listening. Thank you. Done now. What amazing and impressive strategies for engaging students in creating new knowledge and showing respect for their ability to really contribute to to the work.
Of the course we're going to turn our attention, now, to questions, and so, if any of you have questions for either Danielle or for Robert, this is a good time to ask them, so you can unmute results, or put them. in.
Chat or you can put your hand up and we'll we'll call out your names.
I'm going to start off with a question for Danielle?
So do students embrace or resist. Do you have any? Do you have?
Is there any resistance that you need to overcome yeah I mean students?
It's there are there are 2 places where students are have difficulty, right?
Students struggle with the idea that they have agency in the process.
Right of making decisions about having agency in the process of being in power in the classroom, so making the decision about how they will, how they participate in class.
So dealing with deciding how they will be evaluated, is the first place, you all could probably see that that is extremely uncomfortable, and the second place is in and for each one of those elements in the course.
Just just to clarify in case anybody's thinking about this already?
Well, how does that work? What if a student I can already feel people be like?
Well, what if the student decides that they want all 100% to be related to one activity?
Fine. I mean that is a student's choice If They decided that all their eggs in that basket.
That's very empowered to make that decision. they Still, they still do all of the activities in the course right.
That's part of the way the the work. is kind of set up but that's really that's scary, because that is a change that is different than the way students had things before.
And the second piece is in It is extremely exciting and also scary to thank about the work that you're doing sometimes as having a real effect on people Now, through the work you're doing in a course and that moment has
makes the work that you're doing or it's like I said exciting and scary. So that moment of choosing a speech topic and having it really matter mixed speech class and also speaking a lot more difficult it's the same reason
why talking about this in front of all of you? as much more difficult for me than any talking about.
Probably anything else. It was a care a lot about open education.
If you ask me to stand up here and talk about like yeah doing assessment in task string, I would feel much more comfortable.
Many of you who don't know talk right to me That's a much better topic Talk about than this great Thank you.
What other questions do we have for our presenters? I have a question.
This I love this concept. We have tried things like specifications, grading, which is kind of similar, but different.
But how do you feel that other? your colleagues have reacted to this?
And have you seen any changes in sort of you know, student outcomes, and how those students then use these skills differently based on how they valued them?
Okay, so full disclosure. I have only been teaching at Reynolds for a very short period of time, so I would not speak to how my colleagues here have responded to this.
Yet. you know it is they and everyone has a I would never!
Everybody's way of teaching teaching is an art not a science in a lot of ways, right?
So I think that there is room to do to do all of the and disciplines all have different ways of doing the way that they do.
And in public speaking, one of the specific things that is, is a thing is that everybody has to speak in front of people.
So I that is one of the the quirks that I have to address when I'm dealing with my class.
But it is always all of those are my cabiats to say that it's certainly awkward.
The you know, the first time changes awkward. So there is that.
But you pick up on the things that are gonna be so when I am really just avoiding answering the question, which is to say, some people start by being really Sydney.
And then some people are. and then, after the side eye, there is sort of a interest in an interest.
It can be interesting. People are interested and curious. Do you perceive that it actually increases the the quality of Yes, Okay.
In this, in speech yes, 100,000%, absolutely without any question.
Absolutely. and I've been teaching public speaking since i'm real since 1990.
8, Thank you. So there is a question in Chat Danielle.
Did you see this question? Yes, the question about student permission.
So students in. So that's a great question i'm not gonna take credit for this.
This credit goes to all the genius oer people in the world to who have done this work, and I need to must give credit to people like Liz Thompson, who is here, and but my other cut there are any of my other colleagues who are
from Viva and all the brilliant people who are oergs who have taught this.
Oh, my goodness! so many people head of liquor who's probably here.
So we run out from diva all of these people. So one of the things that has made this work infinitely better, and I mentioned, and other people who presented it a much better job of talking about this, So by teaching the students about aer
to start and talking about how open it open. We license materials are licensed in a particular way.
Students learn that the license matters and students are given are enabled to make that choice.
Students are not required in my course to decide that they have to contribute in any way.
That is not a report for the course they are not it's and I.
They are optionalized, they choose not to contribute back into any of the material, and nothing that is presented in the class as a speech, for example, is recorded and shared outside of the class.
So that is the first piece of this. So items that are part of that are remixed into the textbook, because the textbook is openly licensed, become openly licensed, again, and students choose to read
license because of the way that the textbook is licensed.
It is i'm gonna mess this up it is the the open license.
That is, you have to re-license it in the same way to be open license again, and students learn the licenses, and they choose to put that same license on it if they choose to contribute.
And that is how they choose to do it, and that is the permission, then the that they give to the materials that they choose to do.
I would say that I am. but I have in all of this Thank you.
Share like. Thank you very much. I have never had. Students seem to be in, I mean, are incredibly enthusiastic about being able to do that.
That seems to be the thing that they are most enthusiastic about.
When Judith asked about students being resistant, the resistance is always in like, What do you mean?
You want me to tell you like you want me to participate in like putting things out there.
That other, you know, like participants in the beginning they're like you want me to type stuff up, and other students can see it.
And you want me to put it all out there and everybody in the class can see it.
It's not on the discussion board in canvas and what but like the whole.
Now you want me to put stuff and it's gonna be like in the book.
The other students are gonna read that's awesome that part they get really excited about.
So thank you, and it's great I wanted to ask Robert a question, and Jimmy actually posed this one to me.
What's surprised or delighted you from the from your conversations your telecommunication conversations from your contact with students.
Oh, it's been a wonderful it's been a wonderful experience. and I think for for me, and for the students and in student evaluations it's something that the students always comment on and you know it really allows them to
use the course content, you know, in in real life one of the things we're just finishing up the first virtual exchange.
Now in my class, and one of the things that's a couple of students commented on was that they realized they had to adjust their language.
Their English not used slang to talking to non-native speakers, and so they they learn about about language and how language works.
And you know, one of the other things that surprised me is is how a lot of these exchanges a number of them, you know, over the the last few years have developed into friendships.
Students have have told me that they're now you know and regular communication with with the students that you know they were assigned to.
You know, as an academic exercise. So I think that that's that's that's great. And it just just using real the real exchange, you know, with with somebody abroad I think you can be on a really eye-opening experience as one of the things in
this first session that I invited the students to talk about was food kind of as a icebreaker and reform my students.
I'm just reading it last night. said that They were surprised with that. How popular stinky tofu from Taiwan as as a national dish, and and so some of the the discussions you know go into
very interesting areas from food to politics. You know they were talking students were talking about in the exchange about Taiwan people in Taiwan being afraid that you know that that China was getting the message from Russia.
That, you know you can just take over by by force you know Taiwan potentially, that that's a model for doing that, and that Russia seems to be able to to control that that situation.
Powerful learning experience for your students. it's really great so I think we're going to turn our attention now.
With thanks to our 2 presenters gonna turn our attention. to Stephanie Weston and Stephanie is the open and sustainable learning coordinator for viva.
We've heard Viva mentioned over and over again we have and our tax today.
So, Stephanie. i'll turn the floor over to you all right, so let me share the screen here.
Please let me know if you're seeing anything from my insanely messy desktop other than my powerpoint slide, because there are some things that I like to keep hidden and working from home.
Helps me to do so. So in the interest of time i'm going to kind of take a gallop here through the through some oer resources that I wanted to share.
And you know my my name she mentioned Stephanie West Got my my email address is is down there as well. So if I go over something too quickly, or if you miss, there are a bunch of links and i'll try to throw them into the
chat at the very end. but if you you know if you'd miss something, or you you want to ask about it later.
Please please contact me. So, as I said, I just wanted to talk about some oer resources that are pretty Virginia specific, and things that are available to people.
I want to start by mentioning the open education network and the Open Education Network is an organization that maintains first of all the open textbook library which is a great place to search if you're looking for books that might be useful to your
students in your classroom, and they are peer reviewed and the reviews are posted there.
So you get a chance to see what what people who thought about using them in the classroom.
Also thought of them. So there's a link there But another thing that the Open education network does is train faculty and librarians and and other people on campuses to teach each other about open education and open educational resources and once
you have gone through that training, you have the opportunity to be a campus leader.
So Viva the the Virginia academic library consortium We've been mentioned a few times.
Viva maintains a consortium membership in the Open Education network, which means that if you are on a viva campus, and that's all of the public institutions in Virginia, and many many of the
privates that people on your campus may may have had the opportunity to take this training, and that means that your campus may have a campus leader.
And so again i'll try to drop these links into to the chat.
But you can go to viva's website, and See who your campus leader is on your campus, and these are people you can contact and ask about taking a workshop in open education.
But also about what if I want to get involved in open education?
What if I want to choose an open educational resource for my class?
So that is, you know, a resource that's there for you on campus by campus.
I'm. seeing someone ask, is the open textbook network the same as openstacks.
It is not, and openstacks is a great resource.
The open textbook network is interested in open education sort of broadly in openstacks.
Jimmy has given us the the the link which will save me from doing it later.
The Open education network in Virginia. Virginia is really lucky in that we have a really motivated, enthusiastic group of open education leaders.
And so we have an open education network coordinating committee, and they regularly have community calls for campus leaders.
They are going to open up their community call next week to anyone who would like to attend.
So if you have questions about open education, if you want to say who's my campus leader?
If you want to say, where should I look for some some particular information, or what are the advantages of oer?
Any question is about good question. Please join us on this community. Call on Thursday March.
The seventeenth at one p m we'd love to see you there!
So that's the open education network I want to mention a few places.
You can search. but Kitty Phyllis and the first presentation today mentioned most of these.
So if you thought I was going quickly before, watch me run through this slide.
So viva open is the the viva oer common site.
And so i've got the viva open address there, as well as oer commenced.
These are both great places to search for open educational resources.
I want to mention a couple of projects that Viba is is doing through viva.
Open. they are in progress which means they're not finished but There's a lot that's there. the first is the course mapping project and viva has been working with faculty in the State of Virginia to identify
open educational resources that are appropriate for specific courses.
And so you can go into Viva open if you're at a Vccs institution.
You can search by course by course number to see what has been identified as appropriate for your course.
But there are. You can also search by course, name. you can see some other institutions have have done this as well. but you can search by your course specifically, if if you want to see what other people have recommended.
We're also trying to pull together a syllabus bank and so there are some syllabi from Viva Grant receiving pis and and other people, and we're hoping to build that out that's just sort
of getting going. But we're really hoping that that will be a place where people can submit open syllabus to people can see how of other people who taught this class used this in their syllabus and so
that's something to check out Got a few suggestions of ways to search openstacks was just mentioned in the chat, and it is place that openstacks maintains a lot of really good introductory textbooks.
So if you're really just looking for a solid intro textbook to replace a solid expensive intro textbook that you use openstacks is a great place to take a look and see if they they have what
you're looking for. There is merlot kitty mentioned so I won't go into that.
But then there's also a mate the George mason's oer metafinder, which searches across a number of different repositories, and in search engines at the same time, so you might want to check those
out and then finally, the the grants which I think was what was advertised on the on the agenda is what i'd be talking about.
So i'll. get to that first of all some individual campuses offer individual grants to people who need some financial support in creating or adopting oer.
And so I'm just going to say to people who are listening who do know about those resources on those on your campus.
If you want to drop links into the chat right now, people can take the look at what's what's available on individual campuses for those who are interested in what viva offers or what's offered
statewide Leva offers 2 types of grants.
The first is an open course. grant in the O. the other is an open adopt brand.
So our open course. Grants are grants for individuals or teams. They're in the amount from 2,000 to $30,000.
They can be for individuals a group of people at an individual institution or multi-institutional teams, and they're meant to support people, and they adopt adapt or create a grant and open horse grants include support from viva access
to press books. access to you know the any sort of resources we can help with in terms of consultation on copyright as well as as the funds that you're awarded opencourseware. grants Usually we're on a
schedule now, where usually the applications open in December and close at the end of february.
So we're currently reviewing the latest batch of applications. and you know the decisions about when and what is going to happen with the Grants next year have not been decided, but I would anticipate it would be a very similar
schedule. our open adopt grants are $2,000 awards, and therefore an individual, just an individual, to adopt a pre-existing resource. So we're not asking you to do, and for any sort of adapting and
creating work with this. But if you were to go for instance, to viva open, find a something you'd like to use in your class.
But look at it. Realize it's going to take all summer for me to sort of do the work to make my class work with this text.
You could apply for an adopt grant to help subsidize that working.
We'd give you $2,000 to help make that possible. So for more information, you can check out our website.
There's a list of previously awarded projects if you want to get a sense of the kinds of things that have been done or in in the works, so that you don't spend a lot of energy trying to work up a project for
a course that actually, or something coming. But I will also say please feel free to contact me with any questions you might have about about grants from schedules, and what kind of projects as we approach deadlines.
I'm always happy to talk through potential projects or look it applications for people.
And finally, one more thing i'm going to say is I mentioned with open with our open grants, that people get access to press books.
Viva has a press book site lots of people today mentioned using press books to create their their texts.
If you would like to create your own oer and press books would be helpful to you.
Viva has press books, instances available without having to apply for or receive a grant.
There's a form length there, and you can go there and request a request, an instance, and I may be in touch.
If we have any questions we hope that they'll be used in classroom.
But if you have other ideas about what you would like to use the press books, for, you know, contact me.
So that was my run through a few a few resources and some information about rants.
I'm happy to take questions, but I also imagine we are running right up into the end of the event.
So I will also say, you can you can contact me and I'll throw some things into the i'll throw some things into chat here, as we're finishing up thanks so much, Stephanie I think We definitely have time
for for at least a question if anybody wants to drop one in the chat or raise their hand. I I will say that, you know, since this is a lot of people from Virginia and a statewide call I've been so impressed
by the some of the projects coming out of Viva that are multi-institution.
And I think that's also really relevant from the shed perspective and the Ovac perspective to see shared resources across institutions.
So I you I know we could give many examples of of those that Stephanie's been involved in we're so lucky we're silicon.
There's so many cool cool projects, and people doing really different innovative things that you know, Obviously, we care very much about saving the students money, and and that makes a big difference.
But also like you. How How exciting to like see what things that that pedagogically can happen for students in the classroom when when people start sort of thinking about using open educational resources, you know, like i'd really go back
to katie's original presentate katie's presentation about the you know, community of people working in oer, and that people are willing to help, and it's certainly been a pleasure for me to be a small part of this
and to see how people are collaborating. I was gonna ask How does Virginia stack up against other States?
That's a great question. We dissolve some of that on the student responses, but i'd welcome other programs perspectives from presenters.
I will say that viva There's other state consortiums doing similar work to Viva.
But it is not something from my perspective to take for granted I think we've certainly been inspired by affordable one in Georgia.
Some work in Louisiana? But It's not every state Well, what do you think, Stephanie?
You know more about this than that? Yeah, no, I you know.
I think obviously, most of what I know is about consortium efforts. And I think what's really cool about it is that each consortia sort of has their own focus the thing that they that they're really sort of drilling down on and spending energy on and so yeah
Viva has has learned so much from from Georgia and Louisiana and Oregon, and in Pennsylvania.
But it's also a very cool community. of you know I get calls that are like I'm doing this, and and can I ask you how you're doing this?
And if i'm trying to figure something out I can be like wait, they do this really, really well in in Georgia.
So who can I talk to so yeah But We We have been lucky in that we've gotten really generous state funding for our open and affordable initiatives, and we've been I I think that we're just thrilled that
we've had the kind of support from from chev and and from the State that we've had in order to be able to do the grant program on the scale that we have to be able to do things like the course mapping program
and and be open in the way that We Have sounds great and I will echo on Emily's comment in the chat.
We're just about at 1230 so I think i'm going to wrap things up.
Let me, put in chat, we actually have a feedback form that will also send this link out to all the participants.
Because we are interested in how this program went definitely. Want to thank everyone on the chev ovac for organizing this.
Gosh! we got such a great outpouring of proposals.
We weren't able to accept them all and the fact that so many were so interesting that really influenced the way we tried to shape this event, and I also want to thank all the presenters that I just really brought so much rich perspective on
open education and inspiration, and how it's affecting their teaching and helping the future of our our students that are gonna be our future.