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so good afternoon everyone my name is Jenni Haman and I'm a program manager with eCampusOntario and one of my great privileges in my work is to partner with the open education fellows - to learn more about open to share more about open on their campuses and so today I'd like to introduce as part of our OE Fellows webinar series professor James Skidmore who's professor and director of German
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studies at University of Waterloo and Michel Singh instructor at La Cité and Nick Baker at the University of Windsor and we're going to talk today about OER nd policy in Ontario so I'll leave it to you to introduce yourselves in more detail just a couple of housekeeping items if you're if you're listening in if you can mute yourself as we go along that's just reduces a bit of
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background noise but you are welcome to turn on your microphone and ask a question I will be keeping an eye on the chat window and keeping an eye on timing for the team but this is James's story so I'm gonna let him take it away great thanks very much Jenni and welcome everyone I'm going to take over your screens for a moment or for a few minutes anyways and we'll start with
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that we have a powerpoint presentation we want to share with you and so I'm taking over your screens to do that big thank you to Michel and Nick for helping out on today's webinar and a big THANK YOU to the rest of you for joining in really happy to see so many of you and just it's marvelous because if policy's not
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the most interesting topic maybe so it's really nice to have you all here are what we're going to do today we're going to go over a few ideas about policy and share those with you I'll speak for a few minutes then I'll turn it over to Michel and to Nick for their point of view on the on the on the
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topics we're raising and then we'll open it up for a big discussion to everyone so the if you have questions you may want to save them till where we open up that general discussion but if something comes up that you really need to talk about then please jump right in but we we plan to be done by about ten to 1:00 or so sorry ten to 2:00 and yeah so I I'm James Skidmore and I'm a prof the University of Waterloo and I'm working
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with eCampusOntario on policy and well on open education and my particular area of interest is policy and I'm working with eCampusOntario as an OE Fellow but also I'm doing a special project on helping eCampusOntario develop a policy framework if you will that other institutions
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at the college and universities can use to develop other to develop their own kind of policies around open and I guess one of the big issues for me is that when we're talking about policies we're really thinking about what Ontario higher education institutions can do structurally to support open education to improve the uptake of open education in the province that's that's
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really what this centers on in terms of what policy is about and what policy why we why we talk about policy and when we when we do talk about policy they're they are kind of two, I see it as there being sort of two approaches this has come to me as being an open fellow with eCampusOntario and in
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attending conferences such as the the big open global conference that was held in Delft earlier this year and at other locations there's a lot of desire on the part of open education practitioners to to see open really take off at their institutions and but there's always this discussion about what's the best
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approach to making that happen is it the bottom-up approach where you you do a lot of open activity in terms of profs taking on open resources or teaching centres providing open education seminars and workshops to improve the uptake of open or is the top-down approach the way to do it where the institution itself through policy through strategic planning through other
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means incentives really creates an open an open culture at that institution and as much as the open the people who are involved in the open education culture throughout the world have been working it from the bottom up there's a real desire for more top down more policy involvement from the institutional level
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and I provided just this little very very simple XY graph axis kinda graph to make the point here if if we have if you look at the red star the red point on this slide if we have if we have low institutional policy involvement at the
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university level meaning so if policy isn't really established at a university level it doesn't matter where along the axis there for open activity you it'll that star won't get very much higher that point on the graph won't move but if we can if we can create more institutional policy to support open activity we''ll see just greater uptake overall and so I should have labeled
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this this very simple graph something like the impact of open impact at an institution and to understand that open impact is going to be more than just activity there has to be that institutional policy involvement so the policy needs to be a part of this equation there are a number of issues
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that I think institutional policies could address in the open education universe there's a lot of talk about about issues and basically about obstacles preventing open uptake for example and there's a lot of stigma that centres on it's
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sort of instructor centric for example is an instructor nervous about using open for fear of exposure mistakes in their material could be noted could be seen is their concern about criticism you know that they put out their teaching materials and then people come along say oh I don't want to teach it that way I teach it this way what have you criticism on the content, you're teaching
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that! why are you teaching that, this kind of thing there's of course the common refrain at institutions of higher education that teaching is valued less than research and so putting effort into teaching is often considered a not wasted effort but there's a there's a certain skepticism about how much effort to put into that and that can depend on the institution obviously and
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then just the general notion that open educational resources might be less valuable unless the quality might be less than you'd find elsewhere now there's also that this these stigma and these issues feed into the professional culture obviously does open activity have enough prestige worthy for
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the open practitioner and does the the research and teaching that is assessed in review practices for tenure and promotion annual review practices does that if it's valued differently does that then lead to less acceptance of open and there's a certain a certain understanding or certain
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agreement that yes this is true I should point out that for some of these ideas here about these obstacles we've provided a list by I have a very I have a super capable assistant working with me Myrto Provida and she's provided a very short list of resources and is putting that link in
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the in the chat so you can follow up on this at your on your own there's a lot of literature out there on these issues that third category there of intellectual property is important because as institutions become as institutions are required really to deal with open access in Canada of
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course because of tri-council funding requirements that also crosses over into the teaching realm and how and and so who owns the materials created by instructors at higher education institutions in Ontario and that's an issue where policy is just we need policy to sort those issues out and we need the kind of policy that would make sure that the
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openness of the instructors who want to make their materials open have the policy support to do so so that's just a very general overview of the issues involved of some of the ideas that we're thinking about with regard to policy and open education I'd now like to turn it over to my two colleagues who've
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joined on the chat today we'll start with Nick Baker and Nick is the Director of the Office of Open Learning at the University of Windsor and Nick I'll let you take it away and I will if you do beep or something I'll push forward your slides as you require yep if you want to jump forward a slide for me there James that'd be great
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yeah this one here yep that's perfect so I'm gonna talk a little bit about the policy landscape from a university perspective and I want to start with very quickly talking about the national landscape so and then we'll talk a little bit about Ontario and my context here at Windsor from the national perspective you know as with most things in higher education in Canada they're
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very different from province to province and there there really is one particular shining light when it comes to open educational practices in Canada and that is to look to British Columbia obviously they have a longer engagement with with the concept of open practices then then the rest of the country does but still very young still very young in that that process so
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in BC and also if you look across the border into the states there's been a huge proliferation of activity around open educational practices over the last few years and in BC you have you have Kwantlen as the first University in the country to to develop Zed cred degree programming so entire credentials using
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only open or low cost or no cost to student learning resources but if you look at what's happening over there now you've got pretty much every University engaging with it in some way Simon Fraser and UBC are also working on programming that will release soon UBC is also the first institution in Canada to specifically recognize using OERs or engagement in open educational practices
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in their tenure and promotion processes so at the moment it is only in the educational leadership stream that they have the so their two streams traditional faculty stream and educational leadership stream at UBC but in BC there are most of the other universities are working on language that would would support that so you can see it's actually a pretty simple change in their criteria I've got
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that on screen there where they just they specifically list open education resources and repositories as a contribution to their scholarly practice James can we jump to the next slide please sure can no thank you so in Ontario eCampusOntario obviously
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has been doing a lot of work and providing lots of support and generating a lot of interest around around open educational practices and use of OERs and there are a number of places and I hope this is not an exhaustive list but ones that you would have seen recently talked about that have internal grant structures for example to support open educational practices we had our first one 2013-2014 open up some internal
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grant funding Queen's and Ryerson have two new programs that are or revised programs that are running right now and most of those places have active committees that are either Senate committees or they are institutional level subcommittees working groups looking at looking at open educational practices and how to support them on campus so one of the things that
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eCampus has done really by providing funding and by providing a forum in which to discuss these things is to legitimize them in the same way that we legitimize research in higher education at the moment we don't have any kind of really active Zed Cred initiatives, but I suspect that it's going to change very soon in Ontario, I know it's a topic of discussion here at Windsor
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things that we've been working on it's it's a real challenge though it's really difficult when programs have so many different people involved each of whom have have academic freedom that they can absolutely exercise and student support here in Ontario I mean there's there is some activity in the student front but
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it's certainly not as vocal and active as it is in the States or in BC so that's another thing that we need to to allow that voice to be heard from multiple sides James can you just flick to the next one for me please yes so our PT renewal promotion and tenure whatever you call it at your institution it
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matters it really matters because it's the currency of the professoriate in higher in universities and at the moment in Ontario we don't have any that I'm aware of at least that have managed to get OER specifically addressed in their tenure and promotion criteria what we do have is I guess a discussion around it in some places and there are
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some places who are starting to wonder whether where it fits which is also a good part of the discussion to have so you know for myself I'm a teaching stream faculty similar to the UBC's educational leadership professoriate it for us in my department so the way that we work at the departmental level we have our our PT criteria that we create there are some very broad guidelines at
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the institutional level but essentially each department can create their own and they can be quite different from each other so in my department where we do have academic staff we specifically recognize engagement with OERs and open learning open educational practices in both the teaching and scholarship
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criteria so a place to go might be to start with those teaching stream faculty which you know makes a whole lot of sense and it may be a low-stakes way to get universities involved in this and pretty much all of us have some version of a teaching stream faculty member now so I think that's a useful place to start James I think there's one more I believe there is yep, there we go all
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right so I just wanted to quickly mention that the University of Windsor does have an actual senate-passed memo on reducing costs of students reducing cost of learning materials for students it's been around since 2012 and then it was revised again in 2016 and adopted by Senate the issue is that people forget about it very very quickly but in essence it says some really interesting
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things so it says that faculty should always first look to no-cost options rather than publishers and consider the feasibility of open educational resources when they're assigning learning materials it secondly says that if if those things don't exist as something like a textbook then they should look to OERs and pull them together and create
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a series of open resources thirdly it says if those things don't exist I should consider creating them and openly license licensing them which you know I'm still am flabbergasted that we managed to get this through Senate pretty sure no one actually read it but it's there and we can point people to it it the challenge that we have is that we don't have teeth for right now it's a
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it's a kind of a memorandum or a set of guidelines but it's a start so I will leave it there I think and hand over to Michel great thanks very much Nick really appreciate that and let me just then introduce Michel Singh who's a faculty member and senior adviser at La Cité College in Ottawa Michel welcome thanks James hi all so as James was mentioning I'm a faculty
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member at college La Cité, college La Cité is a French only Community College in Ontario in Ottawa about 4,000 ish students and I've been teaching there for now 21 years as some of you guys know I'll be transitioning to a full-time role with eCampusontario here in the next couple of weeks so happy to be here with you guys today and chat a little bit around policy and what's
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happening with OER at the college level especially from my lens which is my institution so and and just before we get into the slides I think if a French institution is kind of interested in terms of sharing materials and open educational materials because there's way less opportunities for us to work with publisher materials there's just not the same amount of resources out there we're
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not as as much approached by publishers to use their textbooks and stuff like that so it's it's a different context and I feel there's there's something to be said about that context so I'll kind of go through that as well give you kind of in some insights in terms of how we're looking at things that La Cité in terms of OER policy maybe James can just flip the next slide I'll just quickly give you a quick glance at what's happening on the OER
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side of things I think Nick did a great job of laying the landscape in terms of globally or here in North America how policies are kind of shifting so this slide is just about giving a bit of context around OER and what's happening at the college level which is a bit different than at the university level so it's still very much early day's in terms of adoption there are some leaders out there I put down a couple of colleges there I
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know Cambrian as well is very much a leader in terms of awareness around OERs and I think awareness is super-important terms of figuring out policy James talked about it there's a top-down approach and a bottom-up approach and I think awareness is really at the center of that so some colleges are really leading the way terms of that so thank
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thanks thanks to them OCLS Ontario college library service has developed a great toolkit to raise awareness around OERs as well and I put down the link there so that's something that is slowly but surely making the rounds it's been translated which helps a lot and especially for us for us two French-speaking colleges so that's interesting kind of setting that
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the context here at the college level and there's also some chatter a little bit like Nick said there's some chatter here around the province around Zed degrees and how some institutions may position themselves in order to offer these degrees and entice students towards these programs you can switch the next slide I'll talk about the context of La Cité right so awareness
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is an issue in for francophones in terms of OERs something that always comes up when I chat with OERs either with with admin stakeholders at La Cité or faculty members or even students is the fact that a French context is very fertile grounds in terms of building open educational resources I mean me as a faculty member for 20 years I mean I've created adapted
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translated a lot of material it's kind of part of my day-to-day professional life we do this all the time cause there's not a lot of stuff out there it's not the same amount of qualitiy not the same amount of coverage of resources for Anglophones so it's kind of part of our culture's to build stuff the thing is we don't before this this move towards open we didn't
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really have any vehicle to share it and and I mean IP or intellectual property has always been kind of just little a little bit muddy in terms of colleges because there's colleges are different than the universities in terms of collective bargaining rights colleges have one collective bargaining agreement and within that whole collective bargaining agreement there is some language around intellectual property and the fact that what faculty members do in
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their professional life should be or produce in terms of their teaching learning should be proprietary to the college there's always been some very muddy grounds in terms of who owns what so open kind of enables us and I think francophones are really well placed because there's a lot of material being produced or adapted or translated so I'm I think at La Cité there's definitely an uptake and towards the creating an institutional policy around
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open because there's it's so much of a fertile grounds in terms of creating some some some resources one of the things that's interesting in our talks about institutional policy is a lot of what we're creating and what we're interested in it's not nearly tied to textbooks so we're trying to figure our way in terms of creating a policy that will talk about textbooks
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but we'll also talk about resources in a broader sense so so and I think La Cité's way of looking at it is we need to enable our professors to share materials with open licenses you do it from a top-down level so there's institutional policy to support it but really to enable people to be able to share anything so so small resources PowerPoint slides, text whatever make sure
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that we enable our faculty members to share so in terms of policy we're having some discussions around building this policy and at the same time we're also having discussions about creating a tool that will enable sharing of open material and in our community and broader at one point in time so we're already working with IT in terms of figuring out if we can't build a
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platform or a tool that would be accessible from our learning management system so that teachers could share and/or get some open materials within our college and then to a broader with a broader perspective and maybe pulling in some resources from the outside and or sharing our own resources with the outside so that's on on our road map I was just talking with the IT team this week about it so I think it's it's also interesting to see that at
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La Cité it's not only about policy it's also about creating tools that will enable that policy to happen so so that's kind of the landscape at La Cité, I mean there's always concern of all around ownership of resources that's always part of the conversation with faculty and with administration I mean La Cité is really concerned about retaining not not retaining but making sure that
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when professors leave the college that we we have some type of legacy of that teacher's material so one of the things we're really thinking about is creating programs for people that we retire from La Cité, so me creating a program like a one-year programs just before retirement
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with funding targeted funding for having these teachers build oer resources before they leave the college so that it's that's part of their legacy so that's one of the things we're really looking at is creating those programs to entice those people who are leaving us just to leave something behind so that's something that's kind of taking shape we had a pilot last year with one teacher and it really went well so I think we'll build on that maybe just move to the
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next slide gladly yep one of the things I really wanted to share with you guys is a tool and that's on the Lumen Learning website so it's OER policy development tool what it does it's really inspired by three institutions that have created their their own OER policies so I think it's the University of Edinburgh
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African virtual University and Tidewater Community College so it does touch both universities and colleges it's a great tool because it kind of frames what institutional OER policy should look like and it draws in some statements from those institutional policies from the partners three schools I mentioned and it kind of frames that not only the creating the
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policy but also discussing about the policy so it's been a great talking point in our meetings to be able to loop in that tool and kind of look at it and say okay so how can we adapt this so that it makes sense for La Cité so I think it's it's probably and it's also something I think an institutional policy an OER institutional policy must grow with the institution so you can look in some ways when we start off but it needs to grow as we move forward
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and I think that tool enables us to kind of think about a policy for today and potentially a policy that will evolve to times with feedback and adoption so those were kind of my thoughts about college landscape what's happening at La Cité and this tool that I find is very useful in terms of policy as you guys know policy is not super exciting but I think that having this tool for us
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and has really facilitated the discussion and the understanding around what we're trying to do so James back to you thank you thanks a lot Michel, thanks for pointing out the the Lumen policy website that's really helpful and thanks Nick as well to you for your comments I really enjoyed hearing those so we wanted to open it up now to to all of
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you who've joined us today and I've just put up some discussion starters some questions to just get you thinking if you want to address questions to particular participants please do so but those three questions that I've just thrown up they're just just to get us going what policies promote or discourage open practices at your institution because one of the issues when you're thinking about policy development is also looking
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at policies that work against open development and how you how you perhaps deal with that and also then what kind of policies do you think are needed at your institution in particular or more generally and of course then what makes for good policy and that's that's a big question because there's as Michel was pointing out a policy that can grow with the institution questions of sustainability as Nick was pointing out in his comments
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the issues that are involved at institutions where there are so many players involved so for example the issue surrounding tenure and promotion if you have a couple of department members who aren't fond of open education or don't see the merit of it that can have ramifications throughout the whole process of tenure and promotion and how can policy work
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around that when you have so many different players with so so many opinions that they can hold on to relatively easily thanks as Nick pointed out to things like academic freedom so I'd like to throw it open to everyone I'll stop sharing my screen for the time being so we can discuss these questions and see each other what have you so we'll do that and happy to hear any comments or ideas you may have there the floor is open
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hi James I think Alda that has some question in the comments as a starter okay let me take a look at that yeah okay so Aldo writes within policies initiatives does the terminology of textbooks while a well understood concept limit the imagination in terms of instructional strategies for example considering digital resources as a replacement for traditional texts whether they are hard copy or digital I
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think that's something you were addressing weren't you Michel in your work at La Cité I and I agree I think is textbook maybe a 20th century kind of idea that we have to get away from what do you think Michel thanks James well I think and there's a couple of I have a couple of thoughts I mean I think text books is an important part of OER and I mean I think the savings part of textbooks is
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enticing it's a compelling story right you can save some money here by using open textbooks instead of publisher textbook so I think that's and being able to adapt textbooks I think that's very important now the reality at a French college anyway that last day is that the majority of what we use to support our teaching are not textbooks it's other resources and so that's kind
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of my feeling you need to figure out a way where we can share and and adapt and resources that are not necessarily textbooks there's a lot of stuff simulations I mean a lot of people are using simulations at La Cité and we want to share that flight decks there's so many things we need to share outside of the textbooks now I understand why textbooks are important but I think we really might need to broaden the discussion and bringing
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other types of resources as well did. Nick, you have any comments I'm wondering if that's something that comes up with your work at Windsor we can't hear you Nick physical mute of the mic as well I think you know it's easy to have a
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conversation around textbooks because they're things that people understand as part of their regular work but they don't often think about the other things that Michel was talking about as being things that they should or could openly share and I had a very interesting and similar conversation with a faculty member just a couple of days ago who was applying
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to graduate from our from our new certificate program that we just stood up this year and he was concerned that he didn't have things that were OERs and that what that's not a requirement but it's one of the things you can point to as evidence of your engagement in the practice and so he was kind of he was all concerned about this and we said to him you know you've got all
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these videos that you created that you put out on YouTube that you said anyone can use and there's all these little pieces of material that he's developed that he's also made and he said oh but don't I have to have like the exact license or it's not an OER and I can't talk about it no, not at all you know there's lots of people who are in that same boat Nick there's a question for you
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from Rosarie in the chat that's she writes that the your Windsor senate statement is encouraging do you see that developing teeth and what would be needed to develop those teeth oh yeah I noticed while Nick turns on the lights I'll just point out that Peggy has written to everyone as well in the chat and Peggy French who works with eCampusOntario and
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points out that the repository that eCampusOntario is building supports over 80 types of assets back to you Nick on the question from Rosarie I think it's a start and it allows me to have a conversation you know at Senate I'll be reminding Senate that it exists tomorrow I'm also talking to we have a Senate
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student caucus who are made up of half-and-half students and faculty in other positions I'll be reminding them that they came up with this thing tomorrow and trying to extend that conversation into how it it should be used now and we're also looking at the resources from the Lumen policy tool too as a way to try and kind of it it's on the agenda of my office for next year
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to to shift the needle on on on how it might be applied and I think that we have cracked open our tenure and promotion criteria right now we're in the process of to a three-year project to review them and to have criteria all approved through a Central Committee and there is
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certainly an opportunity there to to get recognition into the pool and we have made a recommendation to our academic policy committee to strengthen the the policy and guidelines around use of openness, great, Nick following up on that Leonora asks if you can share what approach was used to actually get that statement into
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the into Senate minutes into the Senate policy yeah so it came through we have this Senate student caucus which is made up of all the student government leaders and some other elected students and then it also has faculty from faculty representation it also has policy committee representation on it it's been a struggle to get engagement with that
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unit but one of the things that they came up with three years ago was to revise that policy and they made it a centerpiece of what they were going to do they usually pick a couple of things every year that they want to to do unfortunately what didn't happen was the student governments didn't then take it and create any kind of education campaign around it or really use it to
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push beyond just taking it to Senate but Senate they asked Senate to formally adopt it as a as a memorandum to faculty and then it was sent out by the Provost to all faculty and occasionally we were able to get him to do that to remind people as well thanks you know it reminds me too when we when we talk about establishing the conditions to improve the uptake on open at our institutions
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we have to look for a lot of allies of course the first places we look at of course are the instructors and then the teaching support centers and things like that but also we have other allies and other people or stakeholders really who need to be consulted and and and involved in the issue students is that you mentioned the student caucus at your says students in Ontario have been very active in the in open their their particular issue of course is cost
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of study materials and so they've been very supportive of of reducing those kinds of costs through open education and another another place to look for stakeholders and I think support are also our retail services and bookstores things like that because I know at our own institution at Waterloo Shawn Gilbertson who works on our open
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scholarship and working group at the university he's a fantastic advocate for open educational materials and resources and he's especially well-versed in the in the issue surrounding open and and publishing and university bookstores one of the issues that he pointed out to me and I hadn't really thought of it before he had mentioned it is that at some institutions then there could be an
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institutional issue with regard to open because depending on how much they're depending on the the money they're making from from the normal text book sales now this is perhaps more key a more an issue in the United States for example where ancillary services like bookstores may be reluctant to see an
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uptake on open educational materials if it means that it could affect their bottom line and that's something to be thinking about how do you get institutions to to think beyond those dollar and cents issues and that that's something I hadn't thought about I'm not sure it's an issue in Ontario universities but I but I'm interested in that in that aspect as well so I can
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comment really quickly from our bookstore I remember sitting down with them when I first took this role acting in 2013 and they were convinced that my job had been designed to put them out of business and though it was it was a very kind of aggressive and fear driven kind of meeting to begin with and you flash-forward to you know last year
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when I sat down with them again and the meeting was proactively driven by them asking if they could help this cause by listing courses that have open textbooks in the regular course catalog so we have a system that that links our course catalog to the bookstores catalog and students know you know they regularly
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would go there and they find what their textbooks are for the courses and that often helps decide whether it what course they're going to enroll in they click through to the book so the book store's catalog and now the bookstore is is listing our open textbooks as well excellent that's great I'm just checking the chat here Melanie writes that it also she thinks it also depends if the bookstore is owned and run by the institution which is of course not the case at all
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universities so there's there's a there a number of issues involved here for sure so thanks for pointing that out um Jenni has asked a slightly different taking the conversation a little bit of a different direction in anyone's experience is the issue of what textbook is used at the college level course part of a concern with transfer agreements to the university level there's a pretty persistent myth or so it seems
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that universities prefer to see standard publisher textbooks rather than open I don't I'm not much involved with with university transfer between college and universities can anybody speak to that who's in on the webinar today oh maybe just my I I haven't heard of any pushback at La Cité maybe others can chime in if they have I haven't seen it here with most of the programs that
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we're engaged with but I also wouldn't be surprised if people who looked at things for the credit transfer wouldn't have a clue whether that was an open textbook or not so that's probably a good thing it does seem to me and I'm and again I'm not involved in this it seems to me that's a pretty granular approach to accreditation of courses that people are looking at the textbooks used in a course I think usually my feeling is they might look at the course
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description perhaps the Syllabus but not so much the textbooks that would be on the syllabus but more than that just the content delivered in the course or the content dealt with in the course I think it does depend on whether it's a single credit transfer or transfer, yeah block transfers you don't really have a mechanism for checking that but if it's a if it's a letter of permission
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or a single credit transfer that we're looking at then yes I'll look into you know what kind of text where they taught from all right what I see there's an interesting message here from Aldo I think we should just take a look at that if you get a chance to see it in the chat talking to faculty members and
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strongly opposed to giving away his IP top down policy especially around is important but I wonder what other policies institutions have implemented to recognize and reward the creators, mind shift is needed yeah that's a very good question Aldo or comment thanks for that it this this the mind shift let me just speak to that very briefly the IP issue and and related
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issues there are that that is important some instructors are very reluctant to to go down that path often I think out of ignorance of as to what really that path is about and I don't mean ignorance in terms of willful ignorance just simply not knowing but I'm wondering yeah that the point you're putting there well what what can know if we can policy create the mind
00:43:47
shift that's really a good question about that and that refers then to the whole is it top-down or bottom-up where does that mind shift occur any comments there one of the things that I saw at OpenED you know a couple of weeks ago was there are lots of I went to a number of presentations that were talking about how they were both adjusting policy and incentivizing faculty to engage and some places we're doing things as simple as or as small I
00:44:17
guess as offering faculty $150 cash to adopt an open textbook and that was working really effectively in some places others were offering things like course buyouts others were offering things like access to resources to adopt or to adapt open not necessarily textbooks but OERs so I think it's
00:44:44
got to be a combination of things that's it that's interesting like why is it that we feel the need why did why do we think if, say I'm adopting a textbook a commercial textbook for a course or a commercial program for a course why wouldn't why wouldn't I ask the university to give me time to adapt that to my course as well I mean it seems to me that that's a to say that for some
00:45:10
reason I don't understand why we have to why we have to make these extra incentives for open but perhaps it's because we simply have to get it onto people's radar somehow I'm not sure but that kind of that that rubs me the wrong way a little bit and I might chime in just quickly here at La Cité a couple of years back so I think three years back there was a risk assessment done at La Cité and the top 5 risks, I don't remember the top five risk, but the top risk that was
00:45:36
identified by this external audit firm was the fact that there was nothing left by any teacher at La Cité you teach 30 years at La Cité you've done your your gig go to retirement there's nothing left, so so this firm said this is a big risk for you as an organization and the reflex from the organization was okay well we need to grab all the stuff that that's happening
00:46:03
because we want to minimize this risk and this is where the open movement and the open policy thing became interesting is the fact that it when we try we did the pilot with this retiring professor to build material OER this was doing two things right assessing or minimizing this risk if we do this at a larger scale we'll minimize this risk plus plus second thing is we will mature senior
00:46:34
professors will be creating OERs and this will probably have a benefic effect with other faculties and their faculty members at La Cité, so why it's functioning why think we're having some good traction at La Cité, is we are actually minimizing this risk that for administrators is super important but at the same time creating a ground roots movement with our senior faculty members so I think those are the types of
00:47:00
initiatives that I see can really move the needle forward thanks for that Michel I'd refer people we won't go into it but there's some really good comments coming up in the in the chat section so be sure to read those following up on all those comments and then also from Naomi Salmon from U
00:47:23
Wisconsin about issues there around teaching assistant pay and fairness and the involvement in open material creation so thanks for those comments I noticed the time it's a about ten to two and I I'm wondering are there any final comments or questions that anyone might have to pose to the our two
00:47:48
panelists or to anyone participating in the webinar can I just make one quick comment about something that's odd that I've encountered recently here and it was also a significant topic of conversation at opened was this idea that faculty who chose open resources would get some kind of unfair advantage
00:48:15
over those who chose publishing textbooks publisher textbooks in in their sections because students would want to use their sections rather than than others like it's an actual argument here people are saying well that's not fair if they choose a free textbook then everyone's going to want to take their section my response is yeah why not so yeah it's so the
00:48:45
teaching materials and the way that we teach is so personal and deeply ingrained in academic identity that is really tricky to to mess with that's part of the messiness of working in this field you know thanks for that comment that's a very good point I did have I did have one just I don't want to open a can of worms right at the end of the of the session here but I do have one question
00:49:09
about Zed Cred and this might be of interest or perhaps people who are more familiar with it and can enlighten me but Zed Cred really is that really the most productive way to institutionalize open because it seems to me that it's going to necessarily be limited to a to a smaller group of programs or academic programs or curricula I'm thinking it just in my
00:49:41
own field of work I do where it would be hard for example to have people read contemporary literature and not have them buy the the actual novels to read that literature which would then negate the whole Zed Cred notion of no costs and no material cost involved so is that really the best approach or is that something like a an ideal that we want to try to approach and every step in
00:50:08
that direction is a good one hi it's Jenni James I can speak to that a little bit just because it's you know strong area of interest for me yeah please in in the way that kind of that Nick just described where what we might create is is impoverished disciplines who aren't using open who are no longer
00:50:31
getting people to come to their disciplines there's a risk actually with with doing zero textbook courses and programs that those programs will be more popular because they're less expensive and what might be at stake is is reduction in enrollments for programs where as you say for modern literature where there really is no substitute for the study of the work without purchasing it so I think it's kind of an interesting it is a bit of an
00:50:57
interesting can of worms to open and I think you know there are many programs where open is is not a possibility and so lots in the open community talk about using open educational resources when appropriate and when possible and sometimes neither of those things are true and open resources are actually not a good solution so I think it's an interesting
00:51:21
part of policy conversations if you're promoting zero textbooks as the most amazing thing that's ever happened in higher education you want to be a little bit careful for those disciplines where it's it's not appropriate or possible no thanks thanks Jenni Nick has added some comments to the chat that talk about the use of again trying to go for low-cost and using
00:51:46
library resources etc which are of course valid points um I personally I have nothing more to add other than thanks for our participants for Nick and for Michel's contributions if anyone else has anything they'd like to add before we hand it back to Jenni I think she has a couple of things she wants to close out with this is like class hearing nothing
00:52:18
Jenni and thanks again to all of you for participating and for being part of this webinar really appreciate your taking the time today to to be a part of this journey great thank you James Nick Michel that was really great leadership on this particular topic and all really great questions from the audience at every one of our webinars for the OE fellow series we have been giving away a copy of a book and the book is
00:52:46
called An Urgency of Teachers by Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel and it's hot off the press and very popular in the open community right now because they talk a lot about the critical issues in open and digital teaching and learning which is great so our winner of the book today just by random draw is Myrto Provida so congratulations Myrto we'll make sure we connect with you by email and get your book thank you very much you're
00:53:13
welcome yeah, it's totally rigged it really was pretty random and also I just want to promote our next OE fellows webinar on Tuesday November 20th with Helen DeWaard Laura Killam and Jessica O'Reilly and they will be talking about open educational practices so you can check out our eCampusOntario website under the OE fellows page for more information
00:53:38
and to register and also coming up we have our Open Education Ontario Summit this coming Sunday and our TESS events so check our eCampusOntario webpages because we're gonna be sharing out some live feeds from TESS and we're going to be doing some virtually connecting so those are the kinds of things we've got going on and it was great to see everyone today so thank you all for your
00:54:02
attention this was a really large and great lively group with lots of questions is there anything further that we can we can share just let me know and you can connect with me I'll put my email down here in the chat if you want to reach anyone or you want to reach me all right thank you everyone have a great day thanks Jenni thanks everyone
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