In this episode, Christine Rickabaugh joins Camie Wood for a discussion on OER (open education resources) best practices. You can reach Christine by emailing oer@uark.edu. Explore OER resources at the University of Arkansas.

Used to be.

Welcome to the pedagogy toolkit. Inflation is everywhere. We see it in our groceries, housing, fuel for our vehicles. And if you're taking courses at a university, textbooks. In this episode, Camie interviews a special guest OER librarian Christine Rickabaugh.

About open education resources.

Hi, Christine and welcome. Thanks for being.

On the show today

Thanks for having me

Great. I'm so glad you're here. You've been at the university for a while now, and we worked together on a couple of things. But every time I come to you, just like all the librarians, I feel like it's a little bit of magic.

Thanks. So could you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do at the university?

Sure. So I've been here a whopping 5 months now.

Just past that and I'm the open education librarian. So basically what that means is I work with faculty to either find or create textbooks that are openly licensed, which means they are copyrighted, but they hold a license that allows us to save them.

To redistribute them and occasionally to remix them. For example, if you're a statistics professor and there is a.

Way of approaching the content that you want to hit and your commercial textbook isn't doing that. You could write your own. You could find someone else who's already written it the way you want to approach it. Or you could say I really want my students to learn a couple of different approaches and you could take chapters from other openly licensed textbooks.

And put them together to kind of Frankenstein to exactly what you want and what that does is both save students money because open relations means there's no cost to students.

But also it means you're getting content that is specifically tailored to your students. So when you think about courses like biology or something in the environmental sciences, you could have examples that are specific to your students and.

Your part of.

The world. So you could have examples from Northwest Arkansas, from Missouri, from Oklahoma.

That would more engage your students because you're talking about something they know.

And then you can intentionally add things they wouldn't know, so they get that balance of sort.

Of.

I was think of it in children's literature as windows and mirrors, so that they see both themselves and their experiences reflected, but also something else, because that's part of what reading and education should do for us. It allows us to see both ourselves and experiences beyond.

Yes.

So I work with faculty to do that, which can be everything from finding them, instructional designers, finding resources. I do a lot of accessibility kind of checking and figuring out, you know, is this accessible? It? Can we use it with the screen reader? Do we have Alt text in the pictures? All of those kinds of basic things?

And then I'm kind of like half sheepdog. So a lot of my job is just, OK, do we have that paperwork? OK, do we have that? What's that deadline? How can I help you? Like, sending a lot of emails being like, what do?

You need. Please let me help you so.

That's kind of what I do.

Well, that sounds kind of exciting, although a little burdensome when you have to e-mail all the time.

I know to be fair right now we have like between 15 and 16 projects in the works. So it's not like I'm emailing one person. I I have teams of different people and different faculty doing different projects, so.

Right.

It's really exciting. I didn't realize we had that many projects going right.

Now, as a side note, I think Levar Burton would be really proud of your thoughts about reading, though.

I am a Reading Rainbow child. I will I.

Will say it.

I love that so much. As soon as you said that, I thought reading Rainbow, yes, actually reading rainbow.

Yeah, I'm also.

A recovering kindergarten teacher that that probably should have gone somewhere in that info. So. So I tend to think of things sort of in a children's literature perspective because when I was getting my masters, we spent a lot of time looking at children's literature and saying.

Who is being reflected in the story? Who is not? How can we find materials that reflect our, our students, our patrons, and how do we find materials that don't so that they can be exposed to things outside of what they see on the street corner, regardless of what that street corner is or where?

It is and both of those things we didn't talked about in a previous podcast

With those that this connecting uh, what you're learning about?

To something that you know is really important and then being able to see that same thing from a different perspective is also very important to the learning process and ultimately student success.

Absolutely. Well and we are, we have to acknowledge we are educating students for a world that doesn't quite exist yet. You know, when you when I was teaching kindergarten, it was always like I'm prepping you for a job that doesn't exist.

Because in 20 years we don't know where technology will take us. And so in terms of educating college students and thinking about the world they're going into, we know it's going to be more diverse like that. There's just no way it won't be. And so we need to help them figure out how to draw on their own strengths and also identify strengths and.

People who are not like them so that they can exist in that society and be successful.

Yeah, we've actually talked about that a little bit in when we talked our first episode on AI, you know how over time we introduce these new technologies and it kind of redefines literacy for us because you have to be able to know and function with those new technologies or at least have the skills to.

OK.

Adapt to them.

Absolutely.

You know and then within open education in terms of remixing or adapting textbooks, that means we can put in those examples, we can use a variety of names. We can use a variety of pronouns of different life experiences that brought in that experience for our students. So do we have?

Case studies from indigenous people. Do we have case studies from from the inner city, from rural areas? You know, all of the different kinds of experiences that we know our students are.

Thing, and that they're going to have to interact with and actually AI is doing some really great things for I come from Wisconsin and the Chippewa Valley Technical College does a lot with nursing and they are using AI to have case study experiences for their nursing students because.

Love northern Wisconsin. Not the most diverse place, but they know that they're sending their nursing students to places.

That are diverse.

And so they've got AI so that they're not Co opting anyone else's story or experience.

Yes.

And they're not asking people to portray patients in case studies that aren't authentic authentically them, they're using AI instead. And so they get these different perspectives.

It's.

Just on this side of creepy. Like, it's just enough AI that you're like, oh, OK, no, I can tell if that's AI, that's fine. But they're getting really life like and how they can take different experiences, you know, had common health issues and, you know, comorbidities and things that often happen in.

Different demographics than what happens to be in Chippewa Valley, Wisconsin.

Right. And giving them those experiences of looking at different populations is really important when you're a nurse and you're treating people from all over.

Exactly. And here at EU of A1 of the conversations I've had with Hope Valentine in the nursing school is they're looking for materials that allow them to see skin conditions in people of color because they are educating a lot of nursing students who work with people of color and skin conditions present differently in different skin tones.

And they're having a hard time finding.

Materials that do that.

Right. And you want these, you know, if you're sending nurses out into the world to nurse people, you want them prepared for that so that they're not overlooking or missing symptoms. That's really important. So.

Exactly.

Explain a little bit more about what OER is and how it differs from traditional approaches to education materials.

Sure. So, oh, we are. It can be a really wide range of things because it stands for open educational resources. So anything that you can use in your classroom to educate your students could qualify as an OER.

That can be everything from.

Digital images or like the Smithsonian, has a huge collection of digital resources pictures.

Scams, videos films, sound files that they've openly licensed that you could use. So if you are having conversations about American history, you can look at some of the items that actually exist in this.

It can be syllabuses, syllabi, syllabi, syllable. It can be course objectives. They can be rubrics and assignments. It can be a full course text. It can be a full course. There are people who put together everything from the textbook to the ancillaries of PowerPoints and assignments and rubrics and.

All of the minutiae you need to teach it can be a really wide range. It includes videos.

It could be podcasts.

There's a great repository out of UC Humboldt that has all sound effects.

And so if you think about how you might need need that for engagement or something different in an online class to add another modality, this is an option. So it can be a really wide range of things. There's also virus in university out of Canada that do public domain books. So they put together somewhere around.

Four or five dozen books that are in the public domain. Everything from Plato's the Republic to little women, to infant incidents of life in the life of a slave.

They're all in press books, which is a digital printing platform that's super accessible, so it works with screen readers, and then they've also added an AI audio version so you can read and listen at the same time. And so these are books that would be freely available, but maybe not particularly accessible.

You know that don't work with screen readers or screen magnifiers, and so they've made this a project that they're doing they take.

Suggestions for materials, but they've really tried to get some less represented voices, which is just really cool. So ER can be any of.

That.

Basically, if you can use it to.

Teach your students it's OER.

And that's really interesting because I think when people hear or we are, if they've heard of it.

Then.

And.

It automatically goes to a textbook and there's it sounds like there's so much more out there that can be pulled in for students, and we we've also talked about this, how it's really important to kind of, if you can get your students seeing it and hearing it and you know, you, you get these multiple modalities.

MHM.

Then they're more likely.

To remember it.

Exactly. And you know, that also could include occasionally kind of depends on copyright for Open Access articles, but it could also be instead of a textbook you have a collection of Open Access articles that you have your students read and reflect on or.

Film classes we have moving pictures. One of our open textbooks is for film and so the instructor who did it was. It was here before my time was able to find enough public domain.

Film footage to put together an open textbook on films, which is insane because lots of times the visual performing arts.

Copyright is so closely monitored because that is your creation. You know, this is intellectual property. Someone has put their life into it. And so how do we honor that while still being able to teach students how things are? And then the other difference I didn't mention between OER and Portal textbooks is who's creating them.

Right.

Commercial textbooks.

Have.

Textbook authors right on any textbook you can actually see a list of the authors somewhere in the book, usually at the front.

Of the back.

Sometimes on the cover, yes.

And oftentimes these are not subject matter experts. These are textbook authors who have consulted with experts as opposed to people being in the classroom or in the field doing the work.

And so when you think about who's who you're creating for, these are instructors who have a passion for their field but also want their students to succeed. And so they're doing their very best to convey this information for their students, right. You know, so I'm working with advanced composition right now and.

They are working really hard to make sure as they create materials that it's not only what?

The head of the program and other, you know, people with PHD's who have been teaching for years can do, but also how are we making it so that the TA?

'S can teach it.

And be successful so that our students get the best possible experience and the most out of their experience. We can give them.

Well, and that's kind of one of the ideas that we adhere to not only in our accreditation standards, but also here at Global campus is that we want students who are taking that same course to have.

The best, most positive similar experience across the board, no matter who's class you're in.

Exactly. And so when you curate the materials yourself, you put them together. Whether you're writing them, you're pulling chapters from different open textbooks. However you put together your materials.

You're you're more like to be able to ensure that because you can think about what are your specific course objectives, because for the most part, my understanding of the University of Arkansas is that the course objectives.

Are roughly the same for all sections of the course, but the point is when you can control the materials, you can make sure they match the course objectives and what the end result should be.

The desired result for an education in X field should be that we're giving our students the tools to be successful.

Right. Ideally we should have course objectives and.

Assessments and even our texts, that kind of are all aligning right and and similar in every single section of the course. And it helps when you you know you have these course objectives that you've been able to curate your material and OER it sounds like it's really giving people.

Flexibility to to do that.

So, and that's one way I think it could maybe benefit instructors, but how does it make an impact on students?

OK, so they might have enough to eat, but they don't know where their next meal is coming from.

And now we're asking them to make a choice between, hey, do you want to eat dinner next week, or do you want a $300.00 textbook that you're going to use 4 chapters and then you're going to resell?

And when you resell it, it's you're going to get 35 bucks for it.

I mean to me that is, that's one of the key pieces is as a student.

You know, we were talking about inflation before, so the consumer price index in the last 40 years has gone up about 250 to 253%, probably a little bit higher with the current inflation. But let's just round it to 2:50.

I did not realize that yes.

So when we talk about how things are getting more expensive, I mean.

Used to be.

Yes, and everything else is only 250% more expensive. So we are at we're at four times that rate. So we're asking students, you know, and our.

Oh.

The trends are telling us that demographics of higher education are becoming more first generation older students, students with other responsibilities.

I can't imagine being a parent and having to make the choice between. Does my kid have cereal in the morning or do?

I have a textbook.

How do you make that choice knowing that that textbook is what's going to get you to a better place? It's going to.

Help you be successful.

Right.

And.

For.

our online asynchronous programs. You know, the students who are in these programs, not just your online course, but in the programs, they are more likely to be working parents.

Exactly.

You know, so why wouldn't we give them materials that don't ask them to make these hard choices? Yeah, you know, plus, when you curate the materials as A and as instructor.

You know you're going to use the entire book, so you're not saying, hey, we're going to read 3 chapters out of this book and three chapters out of that book. And those six chapters might be phenomenal.

But now instead of one book, you're asking your students to buy 2.

You know, and thinking about those pieces and is that necessary?

You know, and depending on the book, is it accessible? Does it work with the screen reader? Does it come as an audio book? All of those different pieces? Because.

I believe what is it? One in four adults actually have some sort of disability.

I think one in 401 and five, we know they're in our students. We know then we know they're in our students.

We know they're in our classes.

They may not be obvious learning differences, but they're there. And why not just choose items that everyone can work with?

Right.

You know, especially as our population gets older, you know, one really interesting study I saw recently is that something like 2/3 of millennials actually really, like closed captions on their videos. Yes, I I know I do.

I have to confess that I am in that 2/3 and not you know, sometimes I want to turn it off and.

Not have to.

See it but like if I'm watching a show, I don't necessarily want close captioning on the show. Sometimes I do, but if it's a video where I need to parse out information, I want both the audio and visual.

So I like having the closed captioning because I can read it also.

These people who are working, they're really crunched for time, right? Absolutely. Well, I can read faster than I can listen. And so I can turn that video up to, you know, 1 1/2 times the speed. And I can turn the closed captions on and I can get the information faster.

Exactly. Or let's say you're an American history student who has a 40 minute drive to and from work every day.

Do you want to listen to music or would you rather bust through your American history textbook because you can listen to it because there's an audio version in which you're still getting the content?

Right

But that then frees up 40 minutes of your day to, I don't know, take a nap, clean your bathroom, and spend time with your family.

Of people are doing audio books now, and not just for textbooks. I mean for, you know, the the books that we consume. If you're one of the people who at New Year's sets your, you know, book goal for the year, a lot of people are doing audiobooks for those because it is something you can do it while you're cleaning the house.

While you're commuting, you know while you're dropping your kids off to school, all of those things it it's not. It's crushing on the the.

Finite time that we have during.

Exactly.

The day or if you're someone who maybe processes differently and you want to read.

It and then.

Listen to it when I do online classes these days, I make sure that I watch the video in the first half of the week because I might want to rewatch it. And these are like 15 minute videos, but I still want to rewatch it and make sure I understand the content as we continue with an online discussion in.

An online course.

You know, I want to have that content multiple times because I know that when I watch and hear and read it multiple times, it sticks more and I want to revisit multiple times. So if I can read it once and listen to it another time now I've been.

Exposed to it twice.

Yes it.

It helps so much not just to have the multiple exposures to that content, but to have multiple exposures from different modalities. And we've talked about this in a different episode. But for those who didn't hear that, modalities just means the way that you are receiving that information, whether it's visual.

Or through audio.

They're doing something with it. There are different ways to access information, so.

Audio and visual when you can get both of those, or you can add another modality on top of that you know, the more.

Touches you have with information or knowledge of a topic. The more your knowledge of that topic grows, the more you kind of understand those foundations that you're really needing in order to do something with the knowledge.

Exactly. And then the other piece of OER is that they're often digital.

Which means if you want to have H5P content. So let's say you're going to read a chapter and then you want to do a quick knowledge.

There.

You can embed a mini quiz that either does or does not get graded in black order canvas for students to check their knowledge and go do I really understand this? Do I understand this vocabulary? Can I put you know can I sort these new vocabulary terms into different contexts? Can I identify what these things are?

You know, some of those quick checks, so that not only are we as instructors finding out if our students have that, but we're giving them the tools to go, oh, maybe I need to reread that over again. I guess I didn't.

But.

You know, which means we're helping them identify their own learning style and go. I need to read this differently. You know, we're giving them some of those lifelong learning tools that they're going to need because again, technology keeps changing. How how are we going to keep learning? How are we going to keep growing, being able to do some self-assessment on whether or not you understood, but you just.

Read what you just tried to consume.

Seems like a.

Valuable skill to me. Yeah. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with H5P, it's just a way that you can digitally, both present and evaluate knowledge in.

In our platform here at the University of Arkansas, we use Blackboard Ultra and there is a way that you can embed these H5P's right into your course and and you can present or check the knowledge there. It can be graded, it can be ungraded. There's a whole host of ways that you can do it. What Christine is talking about in a book.

Is that when you have, you know you've given them this information. You stop and have a little evaluation of that, but it's a self check for students so that they can check whether or not they understood what they just read or saw or heard.

Exactly. And you can do it with H5P. I was also playing this morning with the Microsoft form that they now have a practice option so you can answer the question, and then the instructor can say yes, that's correct or oh, no, actually it's this and kind of fix some of those misconceptions, perhaps the beginning of.

A module or a topic to kind of help students understand where they are in terms of their knowledge and where they.

Need to go.

Which I thought was kind of cool to be able to have that quick. Well, not quite. It's actually this and you know, give them just that pitch of background information without getting preachy or, you know, overly explaining, yes.

It could be really helpful definitely to do that. I did not hear that about Microsoft form. So that's really interesting.

I I just learned this morning when I opened my course

And and again for those of you who don't know about Microsoft forums, it's mostly a survey tool that Microsoft has and is available to you if you are an instructor here at the University of Arkansas at no cost. And they're also very easy to embed in your.

In your Ultra course, yeah.

So.

You're giving us all kinds of resources today, Christine.

I gotta tell you, I just keep learning and and figuring out different ways and different things to do.

So.

So we've talked about some of the benefits for instructors, but what other benefits do you maybe see instructors having if they use OER as an instructor? One of the frustrating things that could happen in your world is that you have a resource that you used for months or years or multiple semesters and it disappears for whatever reason.

The website gets taken down, they've updated it, but now it's not quite you quite what you're looking for. A new edition of the textbook comes out and they don't include content that they did before. This is one I hear frequently.

OK, when you have OER you have the right to retain it, which means you can download it.

And save it.

That does not violate anyone's copyright.

More you can redistribute it so when you think about this license, think about Warner Brothers and Barbie. Warner Brothers doesn't give everyone a copy of Barbie that they get to keep forever and ever. Amen.

They licensed a movie theater to play it for a certain span of time, probably even a certain number of showings. OK. And then when it's done, it goes back to Warner Brothers.

Or we are is similar in that someone has created a material they are licensing it for you to use. You get to save it, you get to redistribute it.

After that, it depends on which license you choose. If you allow people to commercially profit off it. If you allow people to remix it, do they have to share it the same way? Those are kind of different options, but it means you get to download something and it is yours to use forever. So no matter how many editions of that textbook.

Amount. You've always got that content that your students can use.

And to me, that is a really big one because, for example, I was talking to an apparel professor last week who was like.

Every two years, the book gets smaller. It has less content. We're not doing, you know, this application and that application. And the book gets $5 more expensive.

So if you have an OER.

You have that content until you choose not to teach it because you know course objective has changed or you look at a different way of doing it, but it doesn't disappear. And again you control the content. You're the one saying I want to teach this this way. I think this approach is most appropriate for our students. You get to really.

Make it fit your students and your teaching.

And so one thing that we kind of talk about like one of the reasons we rebuild courses and do things like that, you know, here at global.

Campus is because.

Textbooks or information gets outdated and we need better, more relevant examples. How would you incorporate that with an OER text?

You talked about retaining the knowledge how do?

You update it

Well.

This is kind of the cool part is because most of it is exists digitally. You can continue to add, edit, change it for time immemorial, or at least until press books becomes outdated, whichever one comes.

1st.

So for example, I was talking to an instructor recently who had done a music world culture.

And he was like, I think we might, you know, we might be looking at an update. And I was like, OK, well, you know, kind of think about that. Would you be making enough changes that you would want a second volume or a second edition, or would you want to just update your existing?

One because both.

Of those are possible, so you know if it's just.

Ohh let's update.

You know election results because this is a political or a, you know, political science textbook that you can swap out and do, you know, depending on how many times you've talked about a certain election in 20 minutes or an hour.

Or you could create another volume or another addition that added to it, so you can do that really easily. It's slightly more complicated than editing a word.

Document and and so if you replace it, you have an updated example. If you add to it, you have comparison of elections.

Maybe exactly so. And what's nice is once you save it, it updates.

Automatic.

Quickly everywhere on the web that the book is. So if you think about, so we host our books for press box. So they live on a server that we control as the University of Arkansas University libraries.

So when?

And apparel professor update her textbook. Her students don't have to go by anyone.

They just go to the same website that they went to yesterday and have additional content, so it becomes, you know, an easy thing to do but also think about this Lynn Meade one of our instructors who's been doing a portfolio open textbook.

She built it sort of, along with her students. So there are student reflections in this textbook that are.

Just about real time. So she finished teaching with it in December.

It is now publicly available.

Well.

And it has reflections and comments, and this went well and this was really challenging from her students in that class. The class finished a month ago.

Those comments are already in there and she can continue to update an ad. She also did a public speaking textbook and one of the reasons she loves doing it is because when you graduate, you still have access to that textbook. It doesn't go away because you're not a student.

And she used to always get emails saying, hey, can I get the information about a toast? Can I get that information about a eulogy? The sorts of different public speaking that.

You.

Come across in different stages of your life.

And you can go back and get that and she can update it.

As she hears.

From different people around the world and different cultures and.

How they approach?

Different public speaking opportunities. She can then add that.

No one has to buy a new book.

She can just add another chapter and say in this culture things are done this way.

You know, it broadens our everyone's understanding without costing anyone any more time or money other than Lynn updating her press book. And she does that pretty regularly just because she's Lynn Meade.

Yes, just because she's Lynn Meade. She's pretty fantastic. And. And she's got a lot of resources on that.

Portfolio. She's done a fantastic job with it.

So that's been a lot of benefits for instructors, for students, and it sounds like OER is really great, but I'm sure that there are challenges with OER that we have to meet. So what are those challenges?

They kind of fit in a.

Couple of different buckets. The 1st is that.

And in terms of the world of education, open Ed is still a baby. It's still brand new. I mean, if you think about our public education system, at least here in the United States, it's been.

Around a couple 100 years.

Open education has been around like 25 to 30 years. So, and because it was originally thought of mostly as an affordability issue, a lot of the materials are for large introductory courses. OK, so making the change in your composition 1.

Sections impacts a lot of students right away.

So there's been a lot of focus on those large enrollment kind of Gen. Ed courses.

So when you are at an upper level apparel an upper level agriculture, some of those less heavy enrollment courses, there aren't as many materials, which means we, which is why we incentivize teachers or instructors to.

Creation because there it may not exist yet. I know a lot of the trade schools and technical colleges are running into the same sort of thing of like.

Yeah, we can get them through American history, but what are we doing with mechanics?

What are we doing with the welding? How are we supporting those students? And so, you know, and writing a textbook is a big undertaking. You know, I've taught kindergarten for 10 years. I have known my letters and my sounds for quite a few decades. But the idea of writing a curriculum for teaching small to learn how to read.

Kind of blows my mind, even though I know I know how to do it.

So that becomes a big piece because that's a lot of management. That's a lot of here are your course objectives. You know the actual writing, the compiling of materials, all of that, it's it's a fair amount of work you know and then also making sure that what you're creating.

Is accessible so you know what theme are you choosing in press books because you can kind of, you know, they're different themes with different fonts and things and some fonts work better with screen readers than others.

You know the pictures that you're using. How are those licensed? Are you taking your own? Are you finding them in a repository? How do you need to cite them? All of those kinds of things, you know, finding the videos and the articles that you want to go with it and all of that is, is a fair amount of work. And I.

Can help with a lot of that.

But I'm a librarian, not a subject specialist.

And so I can find you the resources, but it's up to the instructor to go. This is quality. This is not. This is what I want. This isn't. I can just give you a list of options. And and I can get pretty close, you know. Give me your course objectives and I can look at a textbook and be like, oh, this one seems to have a chapter that.

Has similar language to what you're looking at.

But unless you're teaching children how to read, how?

To.

How to read or how to say the alphabet? That's that's not my specialty.

Right, right. You know, so that becomes a big piece.

It does take time to build these and probably keep them updated to some extent.

So that can definitely be a drawback. Do you think there are any drawbacks at all to using them?

With students, I'm having a hard time thinking of any, simply because you know they're designed for the students. Like that's that. That's the great.

Part of this.

I also have had a hard time thinking of any challenges for students because they're accessible.

So you can access them on your blackboard. Course they're right there.

Yeah, I was going to say we just turned the integration on so that literally it will appear as though it's a PDF in your Blackboard Ultra course. If you would like it.

To do so.

Or there's a website that will exist for again time and memorium or until press books ends.

With that textbook available so you know, unless we are deleting it for some reason and we have a couple of projects that have been abandoned.

That we have.

Preserved the the files but removed them from press books because we have to pay per title and so you know, right finite resources.

But those are not ones that have ever been used in courses. They were ones that were started, and then life happened, you know.

Right. Yes, as we know.

Particularly if you started projects so.

Before the pandemic.

And then and then the pandemic happened. Yes, but.

Sometimes.

Life happens and we do understand, like you.

No, absolutely.

Nothing goes. I won't say nothing. Things where we go according To plan l

absolutely. And one of the things we do is preserving those files so that if we ever wanted to get them back, we have an option to do that. We don't ever want to lose anyone's, you know, hard work.

Right.

Right. So if you know, life comes back around and you have that free time, you can jump in it again so.

Exactly.

Specifically for online courses, the things you've been describing, you know, because we are resources are generally digital. You know they're accessible because they can be right on the.

Screen reader.

Oh, that sounds really great. Uh, for asynchronous online courses.

How do you think OER effects?

Asynchronous courses.

I mean, I don't know how they do anything but add to them simply because you know, particularly if I'm thinking about a global campus student and online, you know, maybe the.

Five years ago.

We would have called a non traditional student someone who's maybe not 18 to 22. You might have be taking let's say it's.

Statistics course, because apparently I'm about statistics today, OK? And maybe you had a statistics course five years ago, 10 years ago, when you were in high school or when you were, you know, doing part of a college experience. And now you're back to statistics and you're going ohh, OK, I know. I knew this Once Upon a.

Time.

OK.

You could find another open textbook and get those base skills, or you could go back to the open textbook that you had several years ago and reactivate that knowledge and think about those base skills you're going to have access to this book for.

However long the Internet exists, more or less so in terms of like that longevity.

It's there.

You know, from an instructor perspective you get to cut down a whole bunch of friction because you can embed it directly in in Blackboard so no one can say I didn't want.

To carry my book.

With me, because that's that's a big one. That is one really big advantage of OER and specifically press books are books that exist digitally.

Is.

You don't have to carry your textbook. When I was getting my masters, I had these giant books and it was like I the only place I could sit was on my couch because it needed.

To be in my lap in order to do it. Yes, I actually remember.

But when I was going through with undergrad and my masters.

Exactly. Whereas you can read a press book.

On your.

Phone. So oh, you're on the bus and you have 10 minutes because the bus is running late and you want to bust through a few pages so that you're that much further on your list. Or you just don't want to carry 3 textbooks.

With you everywhere you go.

Like who does?

Exactly. You know that that's why we have back problems in in our 40s.

Is is from.

The from the books we were carrying around as.

Undergrads, you know. So it just becomes.

So much easier.

Right, I love that.

I think too with specifically with the asynchronous online courses, one thing that struck me is that.

The resource is already right there in the course. It's not something else they have to go looking for. And with asynchronous courses, our students could be anywhere you know they're not always right here in Northwest Arkansas and so.

Having your materials right there in the course so students don't have to take an extra step to, you know, reach out to Amazon or.

The bookstore or.

Send Gage or where you know where you're getting your book from it.

It makes such a huge difference to have your material just right there on the page.

The other big advantage that OER has for online students.

Is the logistics piece of having the book from day one. You don't have to worry about whether or not the Amazon warehouse sends out the book, or if there is a postal worker strike or whatever is going on. You have the book available, you're not waiting for student loans, you're not waiting for, you know, a paycheck, any of that. They're ready to go.

Day one because studies do show students who.

Don't have their book the first two weeks, of course, of the course.

Already that much further behind, you know, imagine trying to do that. Catch up it, it becomes infeasible, particularly if you're doing it for more than one or two courses. You know, how do you keep up with that? How do you find those resources? We we have options to just eliminate that problem. Why?

Why wouldn't why wouldn't we use it?

Exactly.

So let's say, you know, instructors have heard our little podcast here and they say.

I think we are might be a great idea for me, what's the best way for them to implement O? We are in their own course.

There's kind of a couple different ways you can approach it. Let's say you just want to do the barest of, like putting your toe in, in which case, let's say you've got a commercial tax book, but there is a concept that just students always struggle with.

Look and see if there is an OER that can be a supplemental resource for your students that maybe explains it in a slightly different way, particularly when we're thinking about students that might have learning differences, or they might be English language learners or whatever. Having an open textbook that is just a supplement.

Saying if you don't understand how X works, try reading it here because you know all of our brains work differently. There's no way that we can reach every single learner.

Teaching in one way, right? So I would say look at that, that would be a first option is just here's another thing. You don't have to buy it, just go on and read and see.

Use it as.

A supplement you could look at, just swapping out one article or one assignment. Those are kind of your small steps, so maybe it's using a Ted Ed talk.

Or a Ted talk or an Open Access article instead of having them go through and have to buy another textbook or pay for a Netflix subscription or however you're doing your videos.

You want to go big scale. That's where I come in. Actually, I can come in at any point in this. I'm happy to help anyone, whether they're looking for a supplementary material or, you know, just a simple swap out. But every spring and every fall, we do a call for proposals. It'll go through newswire. It'll be on the university website.

That's when we'd really have you reach out to global campus and look at the course redesign Workshop as an option. They could help you integrate that in and make sure that you're using the best instructional strategies to get that content going.

So those are kind of your different options. You know if you're just curious, you want to see what's out there, you can always drop me an e-mail and I, you know.

I started on a project for advanced composition and within an hour I had 25 different resources for them that they could go through would be like Oh well, this fits this and this fits that you know these different learning objectives and my my e-mail is very complicated. It's O ER at york.edu.

So it's so hard. It's very complicated so.

We could remember.

We are you are study.

To you. So, because you know that that's the beauty of this is this is what I do so I can do small projects, big projects kind of help people find.

Whatever they're looking for, you know.

And find the resources is is the ultimate goal.

Or identify that this is, you know, a need we have and then maybe if you don't want to write it.

It also becomes something that fits in the back of my mind, and as I get different emails from other open education librarians across the country, and they say, oh, we're releasing this, you know, that's one of the advantages of working with a librarian is that I'm already on the list, serves for different consortiums and organizations in which we promote.

Our open textbooks and so oh.

Someone's working on a course where they're talking about communication and the University of Florida, just Florida, just released a great open textbook about can't we all get along and conflict resolution? And it came out two months ago, but it's a fantastic resource.

And I'm like, wait a minute. Someone just did that book. I just have to go through my emails and find it. So it may not be in three different, you know, databases, repositories yet, but we promote our books to the open education community. So I'm tapped into that as well, you know, and I get emails of people saying, hey.

I know you've got a big apparel marketing, production and design program.

Do you have anything coming out focusing on?

This I reach.

Out to other librarians and do the same thing and say, hey, you know we are X number of courses away from having an entire program that doesn't require commercial textbooks, but I'm looking for something that fits this need.

You know, and I reach out to other people and say no, you know, no, we don't have anything yet. But you know what are you working on? Do we want to have instructors?

Work together across campuses.

You know it's it's a very collaborative community. That's kind of the big thing about OER is that.

It's designed to share, so we want to help everyone else. We want to say this is how I'm doing this, this, this is what went well. This is what isn't going well. You know, that scholarly conversation is constantly going in open education about different materials, different approaches. How do we market things? How do we?

You know, one of the things I really want to do when student work day comes in is have a marker for courses that are OER.

Or low cost at least right now we have kind of a work around with a yard sign plan for the spring so that when registration starts I will have had the textbook adoption list and there will be a QR code on the yard signs that students can scan and get a list of which courses and which sections.

Are using openly open education right so that when they go to plan their schedule?

They know what's open and what isn't, you know.

And.

So it's kind of our current workaround. We're also going to have Flyers in residence halls and around the different campus on TV screens, you know, like in the Union and some of those types of things. We'll also probably do a newswire story so instructors could perhaps link to that on their blackboard announcements.

So that their students have that resource, but eventually we hope to.

Get it in student work day but.

All of that films are really exciting and.

And I'm so glad that you could join us today OR is an important topic that we need to think about, especially in our asynchronous courses, but really in every single course that we do, because it does impact our student success.

And can make a huge difference, not only for our students, but also for us, as we are curating our courses, so think through how maybe you could implement OER in your classroom.

Thank you for being here today, Christine. I just really appreciate you coming and chatting.

With me, thanks. And I would say to instructors, keep your eyes open. I've been doing a few things with the teaching and faculty support center, including some course, some presentations on simple switches. So keep your eyes open. I will probably do more presentations like that.

Around campus in the coming months and years, so that will give you some specific resources as well.

Keep your eyes out for Christine. She's she's bringing OER to the University of Arkansas or spreading the OER love pretty.

Much everywhere you go.

Yeah, that's pretty much a goal, yes.

Yeah. Yeah. OK. Well, thank you so much for joining us here on the Pedagogy toolkit. Don't forget to subscribe.