SCHEV Open Virginia Advisory Committee (OVAC) Webinar Series Part 1: Open Education: Student Success and Faculty Autonomy

Simple item page

dc.contributor.author	Rebar, Beverly	en
dc.contributor.author	Walz, Anita R.	en
dc.contributor.author	Westcott, Stephanie	en
dc.contributor.author	Geary, Tom	en
dc.contributor.author	Woodward, Tom	en
dc.contributor.author	Rondeau, Sophie	en
dc.date.accessioned	2020-10-13T20:13:19Z	en
dc.date.available	2020-10-13T20:13:19Z	en
dc.date.created	2020-09-18	en
dc.date.issued	2020-09-18	en
dc.description.abstract	<b>SCHEV Open Virginia Advisory Committee (OVAC) Webinar Series Part I: Open Education: Student Success and Faculty Autonomy</b> Fall 2020 Virtual Events on Open Education: Student Success and Faculty Autonomy. Join us for lightning rounds of presentations, small group discussions, and expert panels. Welcome: Beverly Rebar, SCHEV <b>Institutional OER Policies - Highlighting Virginia Tech's Guidelines for OER & Open Textbooks</b> Anita Walz, Virginia Tech In 2018 the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation that required public institutions to develop and approve guidelines for Open Educational Resources and/or Low Cost materials. This lighting round talk gives the history of the legislation, provides information regarding how the charge was interpreted at Virginia Tech, and describes the resulting contents of Virginia Tech's Guidelines for Open Educational Resources and Open Textbooks which were passed by VT's Board of Visitors in June 2020. It will also make brief mention of the status, types, and contents of guidelines at other Virginia public institutions. <b>Lessons from the First Year of VIVA Open Grants</b> Stephanie Westcott, VIVA Three rounds of awards in VIVA’s Open Grants Program have offered some lessons about the support for faculty as they adopt, adapt, and create Open Educational Resources in Virginia: (1) The need is great, with nearly two million dollars in support requested in under 18 months; (2) The advantages of this work go beyond cost savings and include faculty autonomy and student engagement; (3) While enthusiasm for this work is high, some disciplines and course levels are better represented than others, leaving work to do. This presentation will elaborate on these lessons and suggest opportunities and directions for the future. <b>Using OER to Amplify Diverse Voices in Multiple Modalities</b> Tom Geary, Tidewater Community College Increased access and affordability are often touted as the key benefits of open educational resources, but perhaps the most significant advantage is the inclusion of marginalized perspectives in different modalities. Zobel (2015) writes, “OERs expose students to potentially more diverse texts than they might normally see in any traditional textbooks” (para. 6). In this lightning talk, I will argue for the importance of amplifying diverse voices in readings, videos, and podcasts to engage students in multiple learning styles and share my strategies for incorporating OERs by minority scholars in my technical writing and composition courses. <b>Building OER in WordPress</b> Tom Woodward, Virginia Commonwealth University WordPress is the ubiquitous open source software that runs a large portion of the Internet. It can be customized to do virtually anything. We’ll look at how VCU has been able to build bespoke textbooks, interactive 3D media, geographic data visualizations, customized student portfolios, multimedia timeline tools and much more using WordPress as the foundation. Learn about useful plugins and economical development patterns. All of the examples are public on the web and the code for various plugins and themes is available in GitHub. <b>Bringing it all together: Mapping OER with Virginia faculty review</b> Sophie Rondeau, VIVA Identification and discovery of appropriate and high quality open educational resources (OER) is a significant challenge for faculty and is often a barrier to adoption. In response, the VIVA OER Course Mapping Project Task Force is developing a listing of OER through VIVA Open that align to Transfer Virginia courses. Virginia faculty are invited to “sprint” review the curated content for quality of explanation of subject matter and comprehensiveness. The results are increased engagement with and among Virginia faculty, exposure to available OER in their discipline, a faculty reviewed seal of approval, and greater insight into their valuation of curated OER.	en
dc.description.transcript	>> Welcome, and thank you for joining us in this webinar of Open Education and its relation to Student Success and Faculty Autonomy. My name is Beverly Rebar and I'm a Senior Associate for Academic and Legislative Affairs at the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, also known as SCHEV. SCHEV is a coordinating agency for higher education in the Commonwealth. In that capacity, we convene a number of advisory committees that help us by providing input on policy, and also enabling a collaboration of sorts between staff at institutions that have similar roles and interests in sharing their best practices. This particular event is organized by an advisory committee called the Open Virginia Advisory Committee. They're focused on making recommendations and working on policies that facilitate the implementation of open educational resources at the institutions. They organize events like workshops and conferences such as what we're having today and that facilitate networking and sharing best practices. I only have a short moment to make my introduction to this event so I can't name them all at once, but they are on your screen, and these wonderful people who work on our Open Virginia Advisory Committee. I want to thank them all for your hard work on this. In fact, we had a live event planned for early in 2020, that was going to be a one-day in-person events, and of course like many events that were to take place after March 2020 had to be canceled, and the world turned upside down for everyone in higher Ed, as far as new pandemic and its effects. But these members of our committee, they wanted to continue the conversation and prioritize continuing to bring people together around open resources, and so we have this virtual event today as well as one in October that will continue the conversation with a series of lightning talks and discussions. In fact, all the events that happened this year have really brought the importance of open education and to even sharper focus than ever, especially for us as state policymakers. It's always been connected with access and affordability issues, and really leveling the playing field between students who lack the resources to obtain expensive materials. This is really very much intertwined also with calls for social justice and the prioritization of diversity, equity and inclusion measures. These are still really important conversations and there's lot of connections with what's going on in higher Ed today. We're going to have some great talks today that will highlight some of those connections. Again, I mentioned there's another event on October 23rd, I believe we'll have a link to that registration in the chat if you haven't signed up already. There's also an open VA listserv, that if you're a member, that might be how you've heard of this event, but if you're not a member, please join the listserv as well, I think that should be in the chat as well. Today we're going to have a number of lightning round talks, they're very dynamic, exciting presentations that will be five minutes long. There will be a question and answer session, a brief one, for two minutes right after each presenter, so we're going to use a question and answer, the Q&A function to put these questions in and I will ask another presenter after their turn. But never fear if you don't have time, or if you don't synthesize your question in time, we'll have another period after all presenters go, another 10 minute period and we can engage into some further discussion with these great presenters. Also use the chat if you have any technical issues or anything offline to ask of the panelists other than Q&A. I will go ahead and get started with our first presenter. This is Anita Walz. She is the Assistant Director of Urban Education and Scholarly Communication Librarian and at the University libraries at Virginia Tech. She's also the founder of Open Education Initiative at Virginia Tech, and the Project Manager/Managing Editor for several open textbooks, and openly licensed audio collection on Virginia history and several open source virtual reality animals. If that weren't enough for Anita, she's also been co-charing the OVAC and has made innumerable contributions to it, so we thank her for that, and she'll be talking about institutional OER policies, so Anita. >> Okay. Thank you very much. I'm grateful to be here today. I'm going to be talking about policy implications at Virginia Tech related to some things that have happened at the state level. In 2018, the General Assembly passed a bill HB454, which requires that governing boards of state institutions implement guidelines for adoption and use of low cost and no cost open educational resources. We might ask, why this bill? Why now? The bill was presented by the patron, Eileen Filler-Corn, who is the current Speaker of the House in the General Assembly. She has long been interested in affordability of higher education issue. Several institutions already have existing OER guidelines, Tidewater, Reynolds, Northern Virginia Community College, and as a result of the guidelines, several institutions and groups have stepped forward. One of them being SCHEV, which has created model guidelines. The SCHEV OVAC committee did this in November of 2018. Three other higher education institutions have had their guidelines approved by their board of visitors or equivalent body. Many people are still in process, so you will see more of these coming out in hopefully the coming year or so. I want to talk to you a little bit about the guidelines at Virginia Tech with an emphasis that this has been a very iterative process. It took 2.5 years to get here. We involved input from many people across the university at many different levels, and I just want to emphasize that all of these people had great contributions. Two of the important steps that we took early on were to define what our purpose is in passing these guidelines. We don't just want to comply because we have to. Let's make something good out of creating guidelines for open educational resources. Our goals were to encourage adoption, adaptation, creation, maintenance, and public sharing of OER. The other important step was to actually define what Open Educational Resources are. We adapted the Hewlett Foundation definition, adding some language about them being freely and publicly available as part of our open access commitment, we wanted to make that really explicit. We have in our guidelines information about standard ways of talking about open educational resources. They include not only textbooks but video. It is Beverly mentioned, virtual reality resources could be openly licensing considered OER. Part of the reason behind the move toward OER is because of cost. The cost of course materials has gone up significantly in the past 40 years or so. The other impact that we see from open educational resources is the academic. We're taking these two factors, considering them to be very important. What's in the guidelines? We have definitions, we have emphasis on some of the values, academic freedom, some of the benefits of OER, some of the assistance that's available. How to create, what are the license issues? How to mark resources as OER, how to mark third party resources that you don't own that are included in the OER. We have a section on peer review and documenting ones contribution as part of a hopefully tenure and promotion way of calling out your work. Then we have information about resources. As well as a section looking ahead. Please take a look, there's a blog post coming forth as well. Are there any questions? >> Heather is curious about the virtual reality sources. >> If you want to say more about that. >> Sure, the virtual reality animals are a project from the College of Veterinary Medicine, and they're designed to reduce the requirement to euthanize animals in order to look inside. Through a grant funded initiative, we funded our pilot project to develop what we called at the time a "Digital Dog" that's being used in our lab courses as a compliment to physical hands-on work with animals. It's also being used as a tool that students can put on their desktop and take home with them, put it on their laptops so they don't have to be in the studio with goggles and own all of that equipment. Thanks. >> Thank you so much, Anita. Our next presenter is Stephanie Westcott. She is the Open and Sustainable Learning Coordinator for the Virtual Library of Virginia. Before coming VIVA, she was the Project Director for PressForward Project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. She spent 10 years teaching history at campuses in the University of Wisconsin system, and she's going to talk about the lessons from the first year of the VIVA grants. Welcome, Stephanie. >> Thank you. I'm going to share my desktop here, but let's see if it actually advances. [LAUGHTER] Let's see if we can get that going. Good morning. As she said, my name is Stephanie Westcott, I'm the Open and Sustainable Learning Coordinator for VIVA, Virginia's Academic Library Consortium. VIVA represents 71 academic libraries in the state of Virginia, with a mission to level the academic playing field for students in the state, which it does through cooperative purchasing, resource sharing, and it's Open and Sustainable Course Content Initiative. In 2019, VIVA launched its Open Grants Program that was formerly the VIVA Course Redesign Grants, and now has run three rounds of a grant competition that awards up to $30,000 to individuals or teams that plan to adopt, adapt, and create course content that will be made available to students for free. We've had an opportunity over the last 18 months to learn a number of things from the grant applications that we've received, and the projects that we funded, and I wanted to share some of those things with you today. The first thing that we've learned is that the need for this type of grant program in the state is great. With a 146 applications received and more than 2 million in funding requested, we've awarded $578,189, and those awards adds the potential to save students in Virginia, as much as 15 million in the first five years of use. So there's obviously a great need and desire to do more. The second lesson that I wanted to share with you is that we've learned that the benefits of the grant projects go beyond cost savings, and these benefits include that these projects fill classroom and pedagogical needs. Many of our applicants are motivated by a ack of materials suitable for their courses, and the desire to create course content that will improve student engagement and outcomes. We recently funded a project that will create the first undergraduate robotics textbook. This is an example of course materials that don't exist at any cost, and through the grant program, will be funded and made available for the first time to students, and for free. Another important benefit that we've seen is the improvement of diversity and representation in course materials. We've seen this in a number of places. We have a project that's creating a lab manual in anatomy for nursing students with diversity and representation as a project goal, and similar project goals are central to materials being created in education, in anthropology, foreign languages. Finally, grant projects offer opportunities for collaboration among instructors across institutions and institution types, strengthening ties between them, and standardizing access to course materials, and ensuring coverage of similar topics in courses across the state. Then the third lesson I wanted to share with you today concerns the reach of the program, and the areas in which the importance of open education and the capacity to think about it and address it have really taken hold. After three rounds, we're able to determine where, particularly in terms of discipline and project type, our reach has been uneven. You'll note here on the graph, this is applications by discipline, and you'll see that we've had a lot of applications in biology, math, so stem fields, and also some reach and success in professional programs like business education. There are some areas that we're getting a lot of applications, but then there's areas, like in the humanities, social sciences, where we're receiving a few applications, but not as many. We've also seen an uneven distribution in types of applications. We expected when we began the Grant Program that we would primarily see applications from people who wanted support for the time it would take to adopt a pre-existing resource, so integrating it into the syllabus, writing new lectures and creating new ancillary materials. Instead, as you can see, we've primarily gotten applications from people who want to create the resources altogether, and while we're thrilled with the breadth and creativity of those projects, we've also continued to ask ourself, "What about the instructor who's new to open education, or who just doesn't have the time or the resources it takes to create their own material? " With that in mind as we go forward, one of the things that we're doing, is this fall launching VIVA Open Adopt Grants. Those Adopt Grants are intended solely for that individual instructor who wants to move toward a course based on open and affordable materials. We're going to be awarding $2,000 grants for people to do that work required to adopt a pre-existing open resource. Applications are due October 19th, and moving forward, we'll also focus on increased outreach across disciplines and institutions, particularly as we encourage collaborations with faculty across the institution types. We'll also be using the resources and lessons that we've learned in other VIVA Open and Affordable initiatives, like the VIVA Course Mapping Project that my colleague, Sophie Rondeau, will be talking to you about soon to locate areas in which course materials may be particularly needed, and we will hope to fund projects in those areas. Thank you. >> Okay. Great. Thank you, Stephanie. I do not see any questions in the Q&A, but I had a question. You touched upon cross institutional collaboration, what types of institutions are you seeing collaborate most? Is it between four-years or two-years and four-years collaborating on courses that transfer or that type of thing? >> They are. There is a lot of cooperation, and in fact, so I'm happy to talk to people who are preparing applications, and one of the things we talk to them about when they're putting together teams, is that a strong team is really one that involves people from all different types of institutions, and thinking about transfer courses is one of the reasons that that's important. But also we see people who are really wanting to make sure that creative material covers the needs of different institutions so it can be more widely adopted. >> Great. Thank you. We also had a request that you share the link to the OER adoption grant applications, so if you could do that after. >> [OVERLAPPING] Sure. >> Thank you very much, Stephanie. Our next presenter is Tom Geary. He is a professor of English at the Virginia Beach Campus of Tidewater Community College. He's taught over 50 sections of Z-writing courses and exclusively used open educational resources in his instructions since 2014. We all know TCC was a great pioneer of the Z-Degree. Tom has presented on OERs at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference and the Two-Year College English Association Conference. He will be talking about using OER to amplify into verse voices. Welcome, Tom. >> Thank you. Good morning, everyone. The benefits of open educational resources had been well established by scholars and advocates. Increased access, affordability, and faculty flexibility all make OER an appealing option for colleges and universities. The most significant advantage, however, might be something that we're not paying enough attention to. The lack of diverse voices in our course readings is a problem. Rather than amplifying the perspectives of minority scholars, many faculty likely inadvertently maintain the status quo by selecting texts written by white men, like myself. These course readings fail to reflect the diverse student population in Virginia higher education. This isn't new. The Western Literary Canon has long been dominated by white authors. Sunili Govinnage relays that in a survey of New York Times articles published in 2011, author and cultural commentator, Roxane Gay, discovered that nearly 90 percent of reviewed books were authored by white writers. Our colleges promote equity and inclusion as central values and prioritize diversity and the hiring of faculty administrators to reflect the communities we serve, yet the curricula remains stale. Michael Mikhail writes in The Daily Trojan at the University of Southern California that in a Sub-Saharan African politics course, there were 55 required readings of which only four were written by African men and no African women made the cut. Mikhail adds, students ought to be able to read texts from diverse perspectives and from scholars who had those particular students in mind when writing them. Students cannot obtain a world class education while the scholars they study belong to the same class of white men with access to elite institutions. The underrepresentation of black, indigenous, and people of color in academia, according to the Harvard Medical School, leads to academic echo chambers that all too often present a homogenous portrait of what it means to be a scientist. They point the material taught in the science classroom as an area of concern and argue it should be our goal to change the narrative. We can start with OERs. Open texts are often a collection of writers, and they're easily published, and regularly updated to not only address current issues and new findings, but also to add fresh perspectives. In Hybrid Pedagogy, Gregory Zobel writes that OERs expose students potentially more diverse texts than they might normally see in traditional textbooks. This means we can read, see, and hear a variety of voices, many of which are traditionally marginalized in different modalities, including the written word, podcasts, videos, which is great for engaging different learning styles and bringing texts to life. Amplifying diverse perspectives is gradually entering the academic consciousness. The cite black women hashtag, for example, calls for recognition. As OER advocates, we can further this goal and change the post-COVID university by making an effort to consider who is writing the text that we use. In the New England Board of Higher Education Journal, Robin DeRosa proposes OER is not only financially beneficial to our students, but potentially game changing. DeRosa writes, ''Our colleges and universities need to step up and open education as a framework", perhaps one of many, that can help us center equity as we go forward at a pivotal moment in time. In my own courses, I find sources through a Creative Commons search. I use the old and new search engines and research who the authors are. Rather than rely on one text to find a variety of writers and try to work in multimodal areas when possible, I follow minority scholars on Twitter and listen to them. I also seek and consult compiled lists of works by underrepresented groups. One example that gives a roadmap of how to proceed is the bibliography of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in Technical and Professional Communication, created by three Virginia Tech scholars, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Sweta Baniya, and Chris Lindgren. This list of resources is mostly non-OER, but it has some, and it gives us a start. Sano-Franchini, Baniya, and Lindgren point to other scholar lists, as you can see here, and Yuan Wang's excellent resource to design books by women and people of color, similarly serves as an important compilation. These bibliographies should exist for OERs developed by minority scholars. Let's make a push for a more inclusive classroom by soliciting and fighting OER's created by those who are currently underrepresented. As Govinnage writes, "We no longer live in a time when marginalized people are voiceless. Instead, we have the opportunity to ensure that those voices are amplified. People of all cultures and backgrounds have valuable experiences and universal ideas to share, and we all stand to gain when those voices are heard". >> Thank you so much, Tom. That was really eliminating on the intersection of equity with open, and really appreciate that, gives some food for thought as we consider equity more fully and our policies statewide. I would open it up for Q and A, if anyone has any questions for Tom. I believe it's a question for Tom, seeing a difference in student engagement over time. >> I have in terms of using multimodal works and, especially, what I've added in videos and podcasts. I have seen students engage those more than just having different readings that they do in the course. In terms of finding diverse voices, I feel like it does, but it's hard to know. I haven't given surveys or anything like that, although I probably should try to get a sense of how the students are thinking about it. There's a move also by some that we should try to consider this, but that it may be meaningless because students might not know. It's not like you open up a reading and then you see who the author is right away. Calling attention to it is something I probably could do a little bit more explicitly as well, so that students are aware that it's diverse reading list and that they're not just seeing a name. I probably could do more at my end to try to increase that engagement. >> Excellent. Thank you. Just hang tight, maybe there will be more at the end. We have another Tom, Tom Woodward is up next. He is the Associate Director of Learning and Innovation for VCU's art labs. He's been actively in creating and presenting on open educational material and software since 2004. Longtime there, Tom, and I'm seeing you lot at various events. Looking forward to hearing your talk on building OER in WordPress. >>Right. Thank you. Some of this stuff may be technical, but don't worry about that. It's more about the conceptual possibilities and hopefully get me all excited about those. WordPress, really for me, is a tool for making tools that can create and reuse OER. There's a couple of reasons why we use WordPress. One, it's open source. Two, it runs a third of the web. Then when I say it has many entry levels, I mean that as you as an author with no technical skills, can come in and do stuff. If you have technical skills, you can build things. If you have a lot of technical skills, you can build more complex things. There's just a huge community of people supporting it. Anytime higher had can leverage energy and enthusiasm that's happening outside, saves us money, saves us time, opens up possibilities, so those are good things. This is what I say about WordPress. It's not a blogging platform. It's a thing that lets you write stuff, store stuff, show stuff, and interact with stuff on the Internet. That's a lot of options, a lot of stuff. You can do any of those things in pretty much any way you want. I'm going to take you on a quick OER continuum tour. We'll start with stuff that's more traditional like Pressbooks. You may or may not be aware that Pressbooks, which I believe we've got a statewide access to unlimited basis, is WordPress. It allows you to create textbooks online. You may also be familiar with OpenStax. OpenStax is a popular OER textbook piece. With Pressbooks and a plug-in that the University of British Columbia wrote, you can import OpenStax textbooks directly into Pressbooks and you've got a textbook that then you can edit, control, publish, revise, et cetera. Pretty nice, pretty easy, pretty traditional. We've also had success with people writing their own textbooks. This is one tied into what Stephanie was talking about, one of the Viva Open Course Content Grants. This was multi-institutional work focusing on graduate research methods in social work. They did an awesome job. I think what I start to see here is thinking through multimedia and how it's going to work. You start to see the concept of a textbook changing a bit. Then we're going to push it a little bit farther here with this French example, we have customized plugin creating a vocabulary box to prompt people. We have Gravity Forms doing some automatic assessment stuff. We have H5P elements embedded that get you different places. This is how we start to expand Pressbooks using off-the-shelf plugins. H5P which you may have heard of if not, check it out. Gravity Forms, which is nice for form-based submissions. Then you get started to see how you take control and start to make what you want and need through plugins like this. We make our stuff available so there it is. Then we'll move to traditional WordPress. This is where things get fun is that you can use WordPress to leverage other things that people have already made. So three-dimensional proteins, awesome. This is using a library called mod.js. >> We can create this whole really complex interactive object to which we can then insert in LMS, we can do all different things with it. That's one of the things this theme facilitates. We can cut and paste this iframe, throw it right in Canvas or blackboard. Then, we put a three-dimensional interactive object in an LMS, something that couldn't support natively. We can do stuff like build interactive timelines, this is using WordPress as the authoring tool for timeline JS, which is night lab product. I'm going to go through this a little bit faster, but it can also visualize independent WordPress sites, because the data is standardized. We can visualize this in as many ways as we have imaginations. This one is doing some data analysis around the idea of Web literacy. All that stuff is possible, it's functional, it blends in here. This was a model we revised to mimic the Canvas layout for people, when we didn't have Canvas as an institution. I'm hitting my last minute here. Let me jump ahead. We can just mash stuff together. I think that's the beautiful thing. As many environments as you have here, we're mashing in Google folders. We can just blend everything. We can make the stuff happen the way we need and want it to happen. I think that's what's beautiful, geographical information, students logging data in the field, then it comes down to what I would like to pitch here, which is how do we as Virginia, work together better to make these tools, make this content available. That's just the tip of the iceberg with things, pretty much anything in the world is possible. It's just a matter of prioritizing and working together to get it done. I hope other people maybe are interested and excited about this, and we can push it even further. >> Thanks Thomas, that was great. Someone did ask if there is a good resource for getting up and running with H5P. We felt it was overwhelming to still look at it on their own. >> Yeah, my general suggestion there is to take it in small pieces. There are a million different interactives. They have pretty good tutorials. I think that's the thing where if we had a shared repository of H5P elements across Virginia, not only could you copy them and import them into your own H5P instances, but you'd have a database to get your role and with interactive content. That stuff is exciting. You don't necessarily have to be able to make it from scratch. You can start to leverage it and take advantage of them. >> Great things. We have our last presenter, She is Sophie Rondeau, beavers assessment and e- resources program analysts. In that role, she works predominantly with the Open and Affordable Course Content Initiatives. She is motivated by ViVA's mission of leveling the academic playing field for Virginia students, and has completed her CC certificate for librarians, and also participating in a spark Open Education Leadership program. Her presentation is literally entitled bringing it all together, mapping OER with faculty reviews. Sophie, we'll bring it all together for us here. >> [LAUGHTER] Thank you very much, Beverly. Thanks for that introduction, and thank you for being here. I'm excited to share with you our course mapping project and our faculty review sprint. VIVA has a number of open and affordable initiatives including Curriculum Driven Acquisitions, bookstore program, a faculty textbook portal, and Open Education Network membership, VIVA open grant and others. Having a diversity of program increases the possibility that VIVA will be able to achieve the goal of increasing access and affordability to high quality educational resources for Virginia students. One of these initiatives is the course mapping project. The primary goal is to support faculty and discovery of open curriculum materials, by creating content suitable for their courses. A Course Mapping Task Force composed of librarians that VIVA's member institutions, are closely engaged with this project. The pilot phase of the project had involved working closely with the transfer Virginia project, to gain access to course template for high enrollment VCCS courses. This enabled the task force to curate OER aligned to course objectives and topic, and has the potential to impact a large number of students, often facing barriers to completing a four-year college degree. Curated OER are tagged to the VCCS transfer courses, and consolidated in a project hub on VIVA open. That's VIVA's OER common hosted website. An essential component to the project involves receiving faculty input of curated materials. VIVA hosted its first faculty reviewed sprint in late July. Sixth biology faculty from doctoral four-year and two-year institution, reviewed curated and aligned OER, the quality of explanation of subject matter and comprehensiveness in consideration of their suitability for the transfer Virginia courses. Following sprint, a faculty reviewed endorsement with applied to OER considered suitable for the course, or for which the faculty member would recommend to a colleague. Standardized comments that their reviews were posted to the VIVA open platforms. Additionally, OER that were not deemed suitable were removed from the hub. Preparations are underway for the next sprint in music and history, and the goal is to have sprints for most, if not all, the transfer Virginia disciplines. Including faculty reviews of curated OER, has really benefited the course mapping project. Not only because we can include comments and endorsements, but also because of what we learn about what faculty value in curricular materials for students at this level, in their education and for the courses. An engaged cohort model where they brought this point home at faculty shared with the cohort, their assessment of OER. What's more, several faculties said they reviewed materials that they would consider adopting for their courses, and they are sharing with colleagues. This slide illustrates the endorsement logo for faculty reviewed OER, and standardized comments apply to OER. We chose to standardize the language of the review comments, to ensure that the context related to the review was clear. This is a screen capture of the VCCS transfer course mapping cub on VIVA open, which is where the curated content has gathered together, and anyone is welcome to go to the site and see the content and use it. Thank you very much. I welcome your questions, and here is a link to the hub on VIVA open. >> Any questions for Sophie? Certainly welcome a discussion, or questions you might have thought for the previous presenters. Okay. Sophie, I have a question for you. Did the mapping project reveal strength, weaknesses within the state that we should think about? >> Yes, we're starting to see that there are definitely areas where the content's not as robust. I think we'll start to see that even more clearly when faculty reveal more disciplines. Biology has been our first sprint on, it's actually an area where there's quite a lot of OER. It's maybe not the best example of whether we're OER lacking in the state, or we're expecting to see that from curation efforts and in future sprint for other disciplines. >> Thank you so much. We have the registration up for the October 23rd event. Hopefully we'll have an agenda ready for that soon, but again, we're inviting more proposals, more opportunities through dynamic presentations and discussions on this topic. I have a question for Tom Woodward. Tom, you mentioned a repository of components, specifically H5P, but others might be helpful too. Is that currently included in any existing repositories or is that just something that would be great to have? >> I don't think we've broken it out that way. That's one of the things that I think would be interesting, particularly with things I don't know, like H5P or other items is what, well, you get it back into the learning object repository thing if you're not careful. But some consideration on how theat stuff can be found easily is always complex. I don't think that certainly not internal the VCU, do we have a good answer to that. I haven't seen one really successful at larger scale. Adding things like within components, like within H5P always make stuff more complex rather than less. But it's exciting times and challenging times, I wonder too, like maybe I'll ask a question, Beverly, is that all right? [LAUGHTER] What do you all think as people involved in OER? Like with everything going online for now and more programs becoming online, do you think people are going to become more cooperative across Virginia, or more competitive and less likely to share stuff? >> I let people ruminate on that a bit. Tom, there was another question about your examples and how much the examples were faculty produced versus needing an instructional designer. >> The majority of our work, what we do is we build the tool and then the faculty member is able to create the content on their own. That's always our goal. When I talk about the simplicity of WordPress in terms of entry in data for either students or faculty, that's what we want. We never want to be like a stopgap between you doing something and getting it done, or editing something and having it be successful. >> Thank you. An attendee commented that she would like us to be more cooperative. It's really not knowing what's going on and then being able to work together. Sharing is important. I don't think anyone will disagree that being more cooperative would be a good thing. [LAUGHTER] Somebody disagreed. Another says, I think it's a great question for the team at Virginia Tech, we want to share as much as possible and leverage any excellent resources that already exist. Another comment. There could be barriers such as funding and university expectations, but overall, people want a collaborative space. I have a question for you. Can you talk about the number of stakeholders involved in getting the Virginia Tech policy developed? >> I talked initially to over 20 people, everyone from undergrads to graduate students, to instructional designers, librarians, administrators, of course faculty, in many different disciplines too. My main question was, if you were to write a policy or guidelines, what would you want to see in this and what would you not want to see? [LAUGHTER] So people had a lot of really good things to say. It was a very helpful for informing the initial working group on that project. We had a group of five faculty that met for a number of months to draft a first iteration, and then we had some failure [LAUGHTER] with regard to that and we started over working a little bit more closely with administration and legal to find out exactly what they needed, and then worked on a lot of language related things, did several presentations to faculty senate, and then we're able to present to University Council, had a positive reaction and the President's office put it forth to the board of [NOISE] visitors afterwards. We had quite a long process. It was not clear at the beginning what the process would be, but we had many people involved in this. I feel really good about what content are in the guidelines in terms of relevance both to students and faculty, as well as some of the administrative issues like the fact that it costs money to support these things. Yeah, I feel really good about that experience, even though it was really time-consuming. >> Of that case, itself spent a great deal of time developing some guidelines on behalf of SCHEV, put out therefore, policy development. That document is available on the SCHEV website. I have a question for Stephanie. Stephanie, what advice making half for faculty applying for VIVA grants to make them more competitive? >> A lot of it depends on both the grant and the project. There's some differences there. Large projects tend to be more successful if they are collaborative, across different institutions. I think specificity are real, really thinking through the project ahead of time so that you have a plan, so that you can tell us exactly what needs to be done. Then also thinking about those goals that I mentioned that are beyond cost savings that really make a project important to student success in multiple ways. Then I also just said that if you have a question, if you're really thinking about applying and want to talk about how to make your specific project more successful, to talk about some of the things that we've learned that might help, that you should send me an e-mail and talk to me about what you're planning so that I can really work with you to make the most successful project, that is what you want it to be. I think that everybody brings different ideas about what will make their project great to the table. I can talk to you a little bit about what resources can we offer? We offer press books to all of our grant recipients. What can we do to make this sound like a really great project for both for the people who want to do it and also for students in the state of Virginia? >> Great, thank you. Hillary commented to Tom's earlier question, I think about the collaboration versus competitive. I can see it happening at different levels, both happening at different levels. Some faculty become more open in sharing content as a way to share the load of moving online. That make sense, but some are concerned about their institutions replacing them with premade online content. Some maybe more hesitant. But yes, at the program institutional level, there might be competition for enrollment increasing was another comment of hers. That may be true. SCHEV is currently getting a preliminary sense of how the pandemic is affecting enrollments, and it's too early to tell the full effects. That's a good point. It might be driven by the economy post pandemic, is another comment. A question for Tom Geary. Tom Geary. Question about, have you worked with colleagues in other disciplines about diversifying their course content and perhaps, which disciplines if you have? >> I have not. It's something that I would really like to do though. I think it's something I plan to do. I had thought about the idea back in the spring, but then of course, things went awry as we had COVID-19. I really do think it's an important conversation to start having more broadly, but really, I've just looked at it in the English composition technical writing fields for now. I think it's going to vary a lot by field because some fields have a very active scholarly community and the others, I don't know as much they've, they may or they may not. It might feel that there are a lot of scholars on there who are having these discussions. Maybe that's not the same case across all fields, but I would like to reach out to others across my college, into other colleges across Virginia to see what is being done? Who's having these conversations? What are they looking at? What resources have they found? >> Thank you. Comment maybe directed at VIVA about doing a Health Sciences Focus Grant because of the lack of textbooks for nursing students, open textbooks. I don't know if that's something VIVA has considered? >> What is the question exactly? Just if that's something that we get applications for or interested in? >> If you've been particularly deliberately focused on health sciences because of the lack of appropriate textbooks and the open realm for nursing students. >> No. I wouldn't say we've been particularly focused on any one discipline or area. One of the things that is really important to us when we assess applications as an awareness of whether there's material available there. We are aware for instance, that there's a lot of desire for good materials in nursing and related health fields, but not a lot of good material out there to be found. When we get applications like we did, I mentioned just fun lab manual for nursing students who were very happy about that. It's a wonderful project and it was a strong application, but we're also really thrilled to see ways that we can fill those holes. Yeah, there's so many areas that do have great need for OER, and the health fields is something that we're really aware of. >> Great. We thank you so much for your attendance and your attention. Thanks to all of our presenters today, and thanks to the OVAC for putting this on. On behalf of SCHEV, thank you for being here. Hope to see you next time.	en
dc.format.extent	00:50:04	en
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10919/100475	en
dc.language.iso	en_US	en
dc.subject	open educational resources	en
dc.subject	Virginia	en
dc.subject	guidelines	en
dc.subject	VIVA (Virtual Library of Virginia)	en
dc.subject	grants	en
dc.subject	policy	en
dc.subject	diversity	en
dc.subject	WordPress	en
dc.subject	interactive	en
dc.subject	OER faculty review	en
dc.title	SCHEV Open Virginia Advisory Committee (OVAC) Webinar Series Part 1: Open Education: Student Success and Faculty Autonomy	en
dc.type	Video	en

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