From Access to Justice: Realizing the Transformative Potential of Open Educational Practices

Nancy Henke, Univ. of Northern Colorado: Alright! Welcome everyone! We have a few housekeeping items before we start. First, if you just joined, feel free to introduce yourself in the chat, we're always glad  to hear where people are coming zooming in from. Welcome, happy, Open Education Week! My name is Nancy Hanke, I am the Textbook Affordability Librarian at  the University of Northern Colorado, and I'm thrilled that you're all here today. Before we begin. I have a few items that I want to

attend to very briefly. First, please do note that today's session will be recorded. So please just keep that in mind when you're choosing how you participate in today's  session. The recording will be made available in UNC Open, the University of Northern Colorado's  Institutional Repository, and through the Colorado OER Higher Ed Hub on OER commons, and the link  will be sent to registrants when it's available. But please also know that because we are  committed to accessibility, the recordin

g won't be immediately available so that we can ensure that  the video and the transcript are accessible to all users, and simply due to staffing this may take  several weeks, so we appreciate your patience. Some other things to know: we  have enabled both of QA. feature and the chat feature for today's session. The QA. is meant for questions directly for our speaker, which he'll have a chance  to address at the end of his talk. The chat is intended for attendees to introduce  themselves and en

gage with each other but please try to avoid putting questions for our speaker  directly in the chat, because they just simply may be inadvertently overlooked when we get  to the discussion portion of our talk today. Some other things, I have some  gratitude that I want to share. First, I want to express my appreciation to the  UNC AOER Committee, and especially the Events and Promotions Subcommittee, as well as members of the  administrative team at the University Libraries. All of our open Edu

cation Week events require work  that is not seen by those who attend, but is still absolutely vital for making it happen, and I am  very grateful for everyone's contributions. I also wanna send a thank you to the  Colorado Department of Higher Education who has supported this event in multiple ways  and without it, it would not have happened, so we express our gratitude there as well. And finally, thank you to all of our attendees. There are always going to be many  obligations on people's time

, and if you are an open education practitioner,  those multiply during open education week, so you're making a commitment to our field by being  here, and we appreciate your attendance. Next, I want to address the University of  Northern Colorado's land acknowledgment. The University of Northern Colorado occupies  the lands in the territories of the Ute, Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho peoples. The University acknowledges the 48 tribes that are historically tied to the State of Colorado. Thus th

e land on which UNC is situated is tied to the history and culture of our native and  indigenous peoples, UNC appreciates this connection, and has great respect for this  land. Additionally, the university community pays its respects to elders, past, present,  and future, and those who have stewarded this land throughout the generations. And finally. I'm very pleased to introduce our Speaker for today. Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani serves as the vice Provost for teaching and learning at Brock  University.

He is affiliated with the Social Justice Research Institute and the Social Justice  and Equity studies MA program and leads the Brock University inclusive Education Research lab. His research focuses on open educational practices, inclusive teaching and ethical  approaches to educational technology, and he currently serves on the board of Directors  of Open Education. Global, the organization that began Open Education Week in 2013. Earlier in his career he led the development of Canada's first

0 textbook cost degree program, was  invited to speak at the United Nations about how open education supports UN Sustainable Development  Goals, co-edited 2 volumes on Open Education, co authored 3 textbooks in psychology, and has  received numerous teaching and leadership awards. He is also husband to an amazing scholar Dr.  Sarita Jhangiani, the father of 2 remarkable boys, has 2 cats named Lucky and Leila, and  perhaps most impressive -- he enjoys playing tennis and ukulele simultaneously! I

t's amazing you've got to see it! So please join me in welcoming  Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani! Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani,: Thank you so much, Nancy, for that very, very sweet introduction,  and good afternoon, everyone. I'm gonna try and play with my buttons  over here to bring up my presentation, as I'm starting to speak as well. So bear with me. But as I do this, I want  to echo what Nancy said. I really appreciate you taking your time  out of your schedule to be here today. It means a lot and I see that I

see people from  all over the continent, certainly from all the way from Saskatchewan down to Texas, including  some some good friends like the incredible champion that is Kathy Germano, from New York. So thank you for being here, and thank you also to the AOER committee at UNCO for the invitation. It means a lot to be able to kick off open education week with such a wonderful supportive  community, especially one that I'm certainly drawing inspiration from as well as I've been  following your

work and learning from it. Before I begin, I do want to as well recognize  that I'm coming to you today from the west coast of Canada, British Columbia, and specifically  the traditional ancestral and unseeded, was never ceded through a treaty. For example, the territory of the Squamish first nation. Very privileged  to live, work and play over here and raise our children, of course, as well As Nancy said, there'll be the QA feature for the official questions but I am going to try  and leave th

e chat open as well, just to get a sense of the tone of how things are going, and  if there are areas of interest to you as well. So I'm gonna do my best folks but I do wanna  first start by setting a little bit of a tone as well. And I say this because, you know,  Open Education Week is a global celebration. I'm assuming we're all here because we care deeply  and perhaps personally, about equitable access. And I could tell you my own personal story at  some point as well about how you know this

. This work matters so much to me  because it is personal, right? I've this idea that education is a  tool for economic and social mobility, that it can unlock human potential. It's not a theoretical construct for me, certainly. Coming to North America as an international student dealing with food  insecurity along the way. So I wanna be quite transparent about my politics, which I  imagine are not terribly different from those of you celebrating open education week. And so I'm going to call on

the words of the incomparable bell hooks over here. By sharing that my commitment to engaged pedagogy is also similarly an  expression of political activism. And in many ways I'll point to very  specific parts of this along the way. One element of what I mean when  I talk about this is, of course, the United Nations Declaration of Universal  Human Rights, and specifically, Article 26. That speaks to the importance of equitable  access, and that higher education should be accessible to all as a

universal human right. And yet I confess the more that over the years that I've been doing this work, the more that  I study higher education and even work as an academic administrator from within the system,  the more I can see the many ways, sometimes blunt, sometimes obvious, sometimes very subtle,  that higher education actually replicates and reinforces, even if sometimes inadvertently  existing societal power hierarchies. If you look at the work of the brilliant  Tracy Mcmillan Cotton in

her book, Lower Ed, for example, she makes a powerful case for how  education and college education in particular, has moved from being a collective good that  benefits society to much more of an individual good and so far from being a universal  human right education, and it indeed, higher education in North America. And I can point to the United States in particular, but Canada's not immune over here. It's increasingly becoming an individual privilege rather than a universal right. Now, I wan

na point to some specifics over here, and of course, those of you in  Colorado in particular I have in mind when I'm talking about this. But really the data are not terribly different across the country. But just to give you a sense, since 1980, for example, the proportion of total education revenue  at public institutions in the US that comes from net tuition revenue has effectively doubled. So this means that students across the US, over the US have been picking up a greater and  greater sha

re of the tab for higher education and I'm sorry to say that in Colorado  the Bulletin is shouldered by students to an even greater degree. So if we look over here, you'll see in 1980 it was about 37%. That was already a bit higher than the US average. And at this point it's approaching 2 thirds of the total cost. It's interesting to look at these changes, and when they took place, and it probably won't  surprise people to learn that in many states, Colorado included, there was a bit of  a cro

ssover in the mid-nots around the time of the great Recession, for example. And so it's around that time where students began paying a greater share of the cost  of higher education than the State. And of course I do wanna note that  certainly you can see a bit of a trend change right at the end of that graph  when it comes to state funding going up. And that continued over the last couple of  years, where it's risen even more steadily, as you can see in this graph as well. But of course, one

of the challenges of supporting higher education,iIn Colorado, and  certainly trying to widen equitable access is that Colorado has typically lagged behind the US  average when it comes to per FTE or post student state funding at least appropriations. So there's room for progress, certainly. But here's a bit of a snapshot in terms of where  things are at the moment, one of the scholars whose work I certainly have drawn on quite a bit  over the last decade, even though she's no longer at Temple

University, is Sarah Goldricrab, and  this is one of the books that I certainly learned a great deal from, particularly when it comes  to the raw cost of college in the United States, and in particular the issue of food insecurity. So if you haven't read this book, I certainly do recommend it. It lays bare how difficult the American dream is in reality at this point; certainly, for  those of us who are educators within the system at this point the forces that are facing students  today are quit

e different than what was when many of us were undergraduates. Sarah used to lead the Hope Center at Temple University. And so I want to point to some of their more recent research, which  includes this large survey published in 2021. This included responses from almost 200,000  students from about a hundred three 2-year colleges and 72 4-year colleges and  universities across the United States. That's included, for example, Colorado  State University, although not UNCO, I certainly think that

there's a lot  to draw on that will be similar. But the essence of this report indicates  that nearly 3 in 5 students across the US are experiencing basic needs insecurity. And that includes 48% of respondents overall who experience housing insecurity and  about 29% of respondents at 4 year institutions who experience food insecurity. So I wanna talk about food insecurity just a bit. Because, of course, this is an issue,  certainly on my campus as well in Niagara, in Ontario, going backwards ove

r here, but  it's certainly an issue as well at UNCO. For example, I read that there was a survey last  year, and about 602 UNCO students were surveyed, and about half of them, nearly half of them  said that they experienced food insecurity. Many of those attending or engaging in  this talk after the recording as well will know that the Bear pantry on campus  provides food and non perishable items. Monday through Thursday people can collect  7 items during each weekly visit. So of course, it is

limited. It's not open every day, but even with those constraints the pantry  recorded nearly 3,000 visits by about 821 people from July to November last year. And so there is, of course, greater demand than there is supply, and over the next year,  in fact, they will be moving to a larger space, I understand, to include things like food  processing spaces and more refrigeration. So I encourage you to look at ways  to support this important initiative, particularly for students who are literall

y  having to choose between groceries and of course, things like textbooks. I'm mentioning this because, you know, groceries and textbooks  often come up in the same discussion. For a few reasons, I mean, one of the reasons is,  I think if you're an educator in higher education; you know that at the start of every semester,  perhaps just before it, there is this chorus of emails that we all tend to receive. “Hey, Prof. Do I really need the book?” “Prof. Do? I may use an  older edition”, for exam

ple. And food insecurity is one of the things  that lurks behind those emails, of course. But there's a few other reasons why I mean one  of the reasons why textbooks are worth talking about in this broader issue of affordability and  access in higher education is that there's really not much else that has risen quite so much when  it comes to costs as college textbooks have. Here's a graph from Colorado's own Jonathan  ports who, of course, has moved out since, but did incredible work in the St

ate,  and it shows just how much textbook costs rose relative to inflation since 1980. And you can look through these data if you like, as well, the bureau of labor statistics  provides this information as well. It's been quite startling. And typically certainly until about 2018 didn't really matter what 5  or 10 year period you were looking at. Typically, it rose between about 3  and 4 times the rate of inflation. There certainly has been a  plateau since about 2018. There's a few reasons for

that that I will speak  to as well but I think one of the things that has played into this, of course, is that many faculty  members in some cases will assign books that they actually don't even know the cost of as well. So I wanted to touch on an economic concept known as the principal agent problem. Right? The economists will know this already, but  typically when you have an individual who's making a decision that a lot of people are bound  by, but the individual themselves, that is, not f

acing the consequences of that decision  that gap creates a bit of a challenge. And so, as a student has said in some research  that we've done at my home institution, buying a $200 textbook doesn't hurt quite as  much as buying a $200 textbook that proves to be useless, so unassigned, for example. But I will say that you know, as an educator beyond the emails that we receive from students,  the other unsolicited packages we receive, of course, tend to be from commercial  publishers. I'm certain

ly accustomed to teaching introductory psychology over  many, many years and every year there will be a new addition with fairly cosmetic changes. And so I do wanna point to a business model that has made this issue much, much worse, particularly  on the part of commercial publishers. And I'm going to quote directly over here from the  CEO at the time of Send Gauge, who wrote in 2018 that there are millions of students out there who  are making very difficult very painful trade offs in the purch

ase of learning materials relative  to paying the rent, paying for basic needs, food, etcetera and that we, as an industry, have chosen  for a long time to basically ignore that or have more or less been paying lip service to them. It's amazing when this is actually said out loud. Nonetheless, what this means, though, is that  students often are making this trade off right. So students can't easily say that  they're not gonna pay tuition. So they choose to skip buying their textbooks,  for examp

le, just as they can adjust. So if they can't so easily say I'm not  gonna pay my rent, but they often do, in fact, starve themselves and are faced with food  insecurity so there are few parallels over here. The best data we have at the moment in the United  States, certainly, concerning student textbook access comes from the State of Florida, and I'm  sharing with you the latest version of this. They've run this in 2016 and 2018, but  this comes from 2022, where there were about 14,000 response

s from students at 30 of  Florida's public post-secondary institutions. And, as you can see, more than half of them  report that they're simply not purchasing required course textbooks due to cost. That's how that sentence ends in the Sydney, but 43.7% are taking fewer courses. Nearly 40% are registering for specific courses: and so on, and so on. Right? So this gives you a sense that high  textbook costs are affecting students, not just in terms of economics, but in  terms of educational outcom

es as well. None of these are optimal choices, and the  sad part is, these kinds of choices are disproportionately made by students from  marginalized backgrounds, particularly first generation students, students of color and  others, for example, holding student loans. This, of course, hits close to home for folks at  UNCO as well, and I really want to applaud the honesty and the bravery of Ethan Roth. Ethan is a psychology undergraduate student at UNCO. He's a member of the AOER committee, an

d is, in fact, working for  the University Library this school year, doing projects on behalf of the AOER. But I do want to call attention to a terrific blog post really, really revealing, really honest. And, as I said, really quite brave. And I'm gonna quote over here to illustrate  that Ethan is an example of the kind of student who is behind those kinds of choices. So I'm going to quote over here to say that Ethan says “taking classes without required  materials is a lot like starting a cour

se half way through the semester. It feels like every  assignment. Every lecture is in the middle of a topic that you've never heard of before. Tests are based on topics only covered in the readings. Assignments on certain  chapters. Exams are open books, but only if you have a book to open.” This is very, very true, and again, I have to appreciate Ethan's work on  this, not just in terms of supporting his work through the library in OER. But in this kind of public advocacy as well. It means so

much to be able to communicate  directly to educators like this. Right? This is not something that's happening on other campuses. This is not just the case for students these days. If they can afford X, they can afford Y, no, these are real human beings. And we're talking about equitable access over here so often when you're making a choice about  an expensive course textbook, let's say you are making a choice between, you know something that  perhaps 50 or 48% of your students can afford,

or something that actually is available to  everybody from day one course, things have changed quite a bit, and and not just at UNCO things have  changed across the continent, certainly in terms of a faculty awareness of the problem of textbook  costs and the availability of OER as an option. And this was just before the pandemic where we  saw that, you know, if just over 4 out of every 5 faculty members in the United States agreed  that textbooks and course materials cost too much serving insid

e higher ed, this is one of  the things that that, of course, influenced. But it was not the only thing the rapid increase  in the adoption of OER through the pandemic. Digital delivery was across the  board for quite a period of time. And suddenly I know at my home institution  we were sometimes dealing with international students who were in China behind a, you know,  firewall effectively erected by the Government, and they were concerned about what  platforms they could access or not. Let alo

ne the cost of shipping  expensive textbooks overseas, which was untenable for the campus store as well. And so suddenly it was interesting that the use of open educational resources wasn't just  supporting access and affordable access, and equity it was actually quite critical  in serving international students overseas. And so we saw quite a surge as well  through the pandemic in OER adoptions. But to take a step back from where we  are, though I do wanna say that if you're, you know, a rank

and file faculty member, and  I was for a long time certainly as well. I would often have conversations with those same  textbook publisher representatives that would send me those unsolicited packages, and when they  visited with me I would say, you know, I'm really interested in more affordable options over here. And that's when they would typically say things like, well, yes, of course we are, too. That's why we have ebooks, they would say, and ebooks. I really wanna be clear as the E image

illustrates over here in my mind are very  much a wolf in chiefs, clothing in part, because students never buy an ebook right? They lease it, which means they lose access after 90 days, 120 days. How many other days it is! There's issues in terms of copying  and pasting and accessibility through the digital rights management. And students, of course, are unable to resell a book at the end of the term but more  to the point. Even if they wanted to keep it, they lose access. Right? So a studen

t who, let's say, takes  anatomy and physiology and wants to go on to med school, keeping that book  as a reference, is unable to do so. And over the years the focus on digital  textbooks has morphed even further, as the business model has gone to something that  is often marketed as inclusive access, although sometimes it's also called other things. Sometimes it's called exclusive access. But inclusive access is perhaps more honestly  described as automatic textbook billing as this report from

the United States Public  interest research group spells. In this model every student at the University  institution potentially is billed a mandatory course. Materials fee that represents an  alleged discount of the high water mark of the price of a new hardcover textbook. And this fee I want to be clear is still often higher than the average student will  actually currently spend, because the spectrum of options right now includes everything from  purchasing used copies, use of reserve copie

s at the Library group purchases, the  use of older editions, and of course, the many students who go without as well. So it's a bit of a forced model. One of the challenges over here, of course, is  that, as I said with the e-textbooks, students are not purchasing, they're leasing. So that's one issue. There's the DRM. There's the copying and pasting accessibility issue. But more than this, this model is typically an opt out model. Typically, the opt out is under restrictive terms that are n

ot terribly  obvious to students. Sometimes they have to locate and complete and submit a form within  10 days, for example, and good luck with that. But for students who prefer to work with a  print copy whether for accessibility reasons, or simply to resell it. Following the course, the ability to opt out is really important. But yet the publishers, of course, have a vested interest in keeping the number of  students who opt out to a minimum, as you might imagine this is guaranteed revenue.

Certainly from every student. And so this is why the opt out terms typically  range from restrictive to potentially punitive. Now, it's interesting right now to  follow what's happening in this space. Because, in fact, the US Federal government  is currently pushing back against this opt out version of inclusive access in  favor of a more opt in model instead. And so I'm on a quote from one of the leaders  in this space, Nicole Allen from Spark, which is known as the scholarly publication,  publ

ishing and academic resources coalition. Nicole says that if inclusive access is the  great deal that many people claim it is. There's actually no reason to believe  that students won't continue to do that voluntarily. So again, I would say, this is something to watch in this space. It's been fascinating to watch. This is not the only space where this happens. You're seeing this in AI as well right now, right where a company puts out a tool that hasn't  been really carefully vetted or thought

through, and they'll follow up a few months  later to say, we're gonna sell you the solution to detect the use of our faulty tool. And so it's really quite fascinating to me. That you know this is akin to me inclusive access  to, you know, an arsonist effectively selling you a faulty fire extinguisher. So I have reason to be suspect. Let me just say that. And this is one of the reasons why, of course, I care so much about open education. Because with open education in general and with open educ

ational resources in particular. We're  not just talking about resources that are free. The important aspect, the defining aspect of open  educational resources is, in fact, that they come with a set of freedoms associated with OER, and  these are commonly referred to as the 5 Rs. So these are the permissions or the  rights to fully reuse, revise, remix, retain, and redistribute. So as an educator, of course, you can freely access and reuse these resources in  your teaching and learning, you can

revise them, and in practical terms that could mean everything  from, you know, in a bigger way, maybe you wanna translate it into a different language. But it could mean you wanna contextualize, it could mean you wanna update it, or at the very  least, you want to say you don't have to tell your students don't read Chapter 4. Take it out. If your discipline, like mine psychology, is still  bumbling its way through a replicability crisis. You can actually revise some of the canonical  findings

that have been questioned. You can do all kinds of things  with that permission, right? You can move from mapping your course  onto the table of contents of a textbook to actually modifying your instructional  resources, to serve your pedagogical goals. And I would suggest that this is  actually an additional veil of academic freedom that has never really  been considered worth fighting for. I would suggest it is. But you can remix right? You can combine 2 or more OER together in an  interestin

g way, whether it's just embedding openly licensed videos or interactive  simulations inside an open textbook, or much more. and students can keep this work for  ever, and you can freely redistribute it as well. And of course textbooks will get most of  our attention given what we do in higher education and the typical practice of teaching  and learning certainly in North America. But I do want to say that OER includes any  kind of teaching and learning resources that are released under an open

license. So, for example, it includes images. If you think about these masterworks that  have been released under the public domain, openly available out of the  Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands. Alright, this is all openly available right? This could be considered OER and so I share this as well as an example, because the  study of art history is often incredibly expensive with the textbooks, in part  because of the permissions involved. So images could be OER, right? Videos can be OER. There a

re many Tedx videos  that carry an open license. For example, you don't have to ask for permission  to reuse them to support teaching and learning. Colorado, of course, at CU Boulder, I should  say has been incredible with putting out the interactive simulations, the fed simulations. I certainly use them to teach neural transmission, for example, in basic psychology courses  as well, this is all available. You can download it, put it into your  learning management system, if you like. It doesn'

t require forking over detail, for  example, or students being a fee to access high quality resources like this. But you could also look at the use of open platforms, tools like Webwork. I know my university, my former university, and many others across the world, use this endorsed  by the mathematical association of America. But it's used often for quizzing, for  formative quizzing, or even summative, quizzing potentially in physics and  math and other disciplines as well. So you can really loo

k quite far for the types  of OER, and of course, with open textbooks. This is one of the main places. I typically point  people to the University of Minnesota, still hosts the Open Textbook Library, which has over a  thousand textbooks at this point, and I'm proud to say, one of the books that it includes is one of  the books that I have the privilege of working on and Nancy referenced this in the introduction. But I do wanna say as an open textbook author I will tell you firsthand, when I fir

st began  doing this work I didn't know that I could have anticipated the impact this work could have  had, I mean, I remember spending a summer editing and localizing this text along the way, but even  now or this is about 10 more than 10 years later, after I began working on this text, as you can  see we’re at the fourth edition at this point, and I still receive emails from faculty members  across the world, but even more powerfully, students from across the world who tell  me about the impac

t of this work. And so at this point, you know, this work has  been translated into different languages. There's an addition in, you  know, for example, New York. There's an example in New  Zealand all over the place. And so I think about OER at this point,  as the gift that keeps giving but one that actually gets deer every time  it is re-gifted, if it's benefiting from the intellectual labor of everybody who's  touching it after I've been involved as well. So it's been really quite a privilege

. But I will also point beyond the open textbook library and the issue of textbooks  to this wonderful, wonderful tool search tool built by the folks at Suny Genoco. This effectively digs into many of the major repositories for open textbooks and  other kinds of open educational resources, and so it allows you to to avoid having  to actually visit too many websites to look for all of the available, all yours. So if you're an educator attending this talk and you're interested in ‘where do I get

started? How  can I possibly find something that's relevant?’ This is one of the places I would bookmark along  with the open Textbook library, certainly. But of course one of the things that  should go without saying at this point. But I'll still say it is even as you're  interested in looking at these things. Believe me, your local textbook  affordability librarian in Nancy, or certainly your local librarian, who may  be an open educational librarian, or even a you know a liaison librarian wo

uld likely be  delighted to help you conduct that search. Now I do wanna talk about the impact  beyond cost savings over here as well. And so again, like, I say, I speak from  experience over here, certainly as an author, but also in terms of being a researcher. This is one example of the studies that I ran. This was a Canadian open textbook efficacy  study that found what many of the other studies in this space have typically found,  which is typically there's really not much of a difference a

t all when it comes to student  performance if you're looking at the use of OER versus commercial textbooks But often there is a difference, and actually favors the free and open courses  rather than the expensive commercial textbook adoption courses as well. But don't look at my work as much as look at larger scale work. This, for example, this was a really impressive study coming out of the State  of Georgia just before the pandemic. And, as you can see over here, it's looking  at the impac

t of who we are and on a variety of student success metrics. And I'm quoting over here from the abstract which again encapsulates that typical finding. On the one hand, you do find again that OER improves, and of course, grades. It decreases DFW rates for all students and for those of you unfamiliar with that, that's  often a term used in student success metrics. It's an aggregate measure of the percentage  of students who've earned A, B and F, or who have withdrawn from the course. So it's re

ally an aggregate measure of sub optimal outcomes of various types. So that happens in general. But the use of OER also improves course grades  at greater rates, and it decreases DFW rates at greater rates for pell recipient  students, part-time students, and populations historically underserved by higher education. And I think this for me is one of the big reasons why I am so drawn to supporting  open education within higher education. It is just as the very same students who are  typically mar

ginalized by way of economics or their backgrounds within higher education. Those are the ones who I showed you earlier, Florida textbook surveys are typically  suffering at the hands of high textbook costs. They are the ones who are  disproportionately benefiting right? So the benefits of OER disproportionately accrue  in favor of those same students, which is why, for me, it's such a powerful intervention. And, as I said, things have changed, and they continued to change one of the reports, 

I'd love to point out here the excellent work of Julia and Jeff Seaman, and this study, which was,  or this survey which was published in 2023. The survey itself was actually  conducted in April of 2023. So just under a year ago about 2,500 faculty  members, and about 641 administrators. But the respondents came from  all 50 States as well as DC. The data from this report came from survey  results, using a nationally represented example of teaching faculty. And so I'll show you over here what s

ome of it tells us. On the one hand, you can see the steady increase in faculty awareness by just about what is OER. And I remember doing this work 10 years ago, and many people would look at me with a  strange look: “And what do you mean by OER?” And of course we still have a way to  go but it's really really changed to the point where look further, as of 2022,  2023 as an academic year, about one in 2 faculty members in North America using artists  in the United States are using OER in some w

ay. It could be a supplementary or required right. It could be in one course. Maybe not all, but that's about  half ,and one in 3 require OER in at least one of their courses. Right? So it's not supplementary, it's not optional, it's actually required in a core way. This is quite dramatic, and there are many things that have changed this landscape along the way. Of course the pandemic provided another assist, certainly in terms of attention to who was  being left out by traditional campus sup

ports. No doubt the hard work of  librarians plays a huge role. And of course there have been  major state initiatives. So in the State of Colorado, for example, I  do wanna tip my hat to the great assistance provided by the State of Colorado, right? So both in terms of the Senate bill in 2017, that made an appropriation to kick. Started some of this work as well as this House Bill in 2018, but actually helped create the  Colorado OER Council kick starting grant programs as well, and continuing

support for this. And I know the University of Northern Colorado has really benefited from this greatly. And certainly other institutions in the State have as well. But of course it's a joy to see this. UNC has been running a tremendous grant program. And at this point, about 74 instructors and faculty members have received OER grants. It's really, really impressive to see what they've actually done, but 71 courses  have been converted to incorporate OER and 29 different departments have benef

ited  in turn right, and with so many champions. Of course it's hard to sort of  have all of them in front of you. But I did wanna at least show you a quick  representation of some of the incredible faculty champions when it comes to OER at UNC. So from left to right. Starting on the top row, I'm gonna call  out Oscar Levin, Mathematical sciences, Bailey Peterson from philosophy, Ryan Darling,  from psychological sciences, my home discipline. Thank you. We have Mike Aldrich from nursing. Hesung

Lee from music de long ma for management,  and of course, along with all of them, I do want to also shout out the incredible  helpers and builders along the way. And so Kathy Zellers, the director of  instructional design and development. And of course, Nancy, who kicked off  today's session as well, is, of course, UNC's textbook affordability librarian, and both  Kathy and Nancy are members of the AOER committee, and it's because of their support and in  terms of State support that UNC has been

able to publish OER and books like this. Discrete mathematics, open listeners in terms of American music leadership, In  practice when it comes to nursing. This is fantastic work, right? So this is not happening somewhere else. This is happening on your campus. Your colleagues  are availing of the support it is doable. And it's happening, you know, with the resources  and expertise within your own institution. And if you're joining us, as many of you  are from other institutions for the field

. They should also tell you that your  institution is able to develop and build some of these supports as well. It can be done in house, and it makes a great difference when you can  build that internal capacity. We'll talk about that a bit along the way. But beyond the grant program beyond supporting the publication of these resources. UNC has also done a terrific thing by integrating the discoverability of courses  that are utilizing OER in the timetable. When students register for courses.

Right? As you can see this beautiful  video that shows students gives them a bit of a walkthrough jow to do this. This is again one of those critical pieces, and from my experience at my former institution  where we were building 0 textbook cost programs, I will tell you that this is actually one  of the most powerful things you can do. Because, on the one hand, you're  not giving it a chance, right? It's not a happy accident anymore. But a student walks into a course and says, “Oh, I'm gonna

save money.” I didn't realize  they don't have to go to the bookstore right? They can see before they register. If this is really critical to them, where they can actually enroll in a section of  a course that doesn't have textbook costs. It's a game changer for students. But it's also a game changer for evaluation, right? And so from a researcher's perspective, you can then actually look at data and the student  information system and slice and dice it to see what is the difference in enrollm

ent? What is the difference in withdrawal rate? What is the difference in student course  performance for courses that utilize OER? Don't utilize OER? So it's really quite a game changer. And there's a wonderful guy who, by the  way, published about marking OER courses that I'll try to share in the chat later  if Nancy doesn't get to it before me. That can teach you how to do  this within your own institution, despite whatever your SIS happens to be. And so I mentioned this in terms of evaluati

on. This is certainly what we did at  Quantum and Polytechnic University, where I used to work prior to 2022. And so this is the kind of data that we were able to gain. Right? So you're seeing over here at KPU  at the gain when it comes to DFW. Rates that same metric that the folks  in Georgia were looking at right? So there were 4% fewer students either  earning a D or an F or withdrawing from the course performing better, or they staying in  and even courses for filling at higher rates. So you

can talk about the tuition  impact on the institution if you really want but the fill rates right? Everything from students entering the course, students staying in the course. And then, in fact, performing better you see the entire impact on the student  journey through the use of OER. And of course I'm talking about this as  though this is only happening elsewhere. Again, I wanna applaud the work  of Jennifer Mayer over here, who, of course, is not just a member, but in fact,  the chair of

the AOER Committee at UNC. And I recommend that you read this fantastic  report that's published this article that was published, and there's a few things that are  takeaways over here, one of which is, in fact, like suggested most just that most cases. The passing rate for OER courses was higher. As for Jennifer's research, compared to  courses not utilizing OER at the University of Northern Colorado, 7% higher, in fact. And I should say, this study includes data from, you know, over 6.5,000 st

udents between  the fall of 2019 and summer of 2021. Importantly, once again, the  same point will be made. This gain is a general gain, but this  gain was higher for first gen students, higher for pell eligible students and higher  for underrepresented minority students. So that's passing, you can also look  at completion which bumped up 10%. And once again that percentage was higher  for first Gen, Pell Grant eligible and underrepresented minority students. So once again, you're seeing the po

wer of OER and intervention in a way that  disproportionately benefits those who most need this kind of support. So there's a lot that I think UNC is doing really well, and, in fact, that can serve  as a model for many other institutions as well. It's incredible work, and it needs to continue. These are still early days, and so I would encourage you, whether UNC  or elsewhere, to also think about broader forms of institutional support. So in some cases this might involve policy. So here's an ex

ample of what I mean  as an academic administrator. I'm often thinking, what can  we change within the system? So people who want to do right by  students are not swimming upstream. Here's an example, you could look at your  IP policy as we did at Quantum Polytechnic University, encouraging not just the creation  adaptation of who we are, but also publishing open access journals, also adopting open science  practices right openness across the board, serves access, serves equity itself transparen

cy,  and that actually improves quality. In many, many cases you could  look at a curricular policy. There's an example of one that we pass  through our Senate at KPU, which involved every new course that was developed, or  every course that was coming up for review, which happened about every 5 years now has  to undergo a search for relevant OER. I wanna be clear. This is not some, you know, top down, mandate, to adopt who we are. Faculty have academic freedom. They are, and they should remai

n the only people who make that call about  what's appropriate for their courses. What this was was a mandated search to make  sure it's an informed decision, right? You have people sending you these  expensive ways unsolicited in terms of expensive commercial textbooks. Nobody's doing that with OER. So what we wanna make sure is that faculty  are aware of all the available we are. Look at them, and then they could look at it  and say, “Well, there's nothing available, or there is something ava

ilable. But it's not  good enough from my perspective. It's not a good fit,” that's fine, that's their call. But the library was going to support every faculty member going through that process  of developing or reviewing a course. And that's the kind of systemic nudge that  can really change the landscape right? That means within 5 years every single course  at the institution underwent a search for OER That's powerful, right. You could also look, and I will say, this is another important piec

e for  educators at tenure and promotion policies. And so I'm going to give you a  couple of examples over here first, maybe at the bottom. The University of  British Columbia, the big sort of R. One institution on the west coast  of Canada includes the or recognizes the creation of OER as part of educational  leadership in the tenure promotion process. And of course, Brock University, where I am  right now, considers the development of OER when it comes to evidence used to demonstrate  the qual

ity and effectiveness of teaching. By the way, I mean, these are really  really powerful levels, right? As many reasons why we do this work and  recognition is not necessarily top of the list, but it is important to try and find ways to  align these incentives, to make it, as I said, so that educators who care passionately  about widening equitable access are not swimming upstream over him. It needs to be recognized. So this is sort of fresh  off the press as you will. We're releasing this softl

y today, and then in  the coming weeks, you'll hear more about this. But I wanted to share a tool that we've  developed as part of a research project in the province of Ontario. We're calling it the ISAT 2, because it's really the second version of an  institutional self assessment tool that may be used by both secondary institutions anyway,  to self assess their capacity to support open educational practices or even just assess the  majority of their open education initiatives. It's openly lice

nsed as a tool that's  available in English and in French, as that's how we are all in Canada, of course. But of course it is available to you publicly. So if anyone's interested in popping  in now, it's available anonymously, and if you complete it, you'll get a sense  of the different dimensions and the levels. You will get an automated email with  a copy of your responses that you can then use to consider your next steps. So I do think there are few things you might consider right from inte

rnal and external  partnerships, whether it's with the Student Association or the campus store registrar's  office. You might look at incentive alignment, and I said, tenure in promotion. But there's many, many other examples of this professional development for  educators of course, which is critical, not just for who you are, but also for what we  will talk about next, which is open pedagogy. We'll talk about curricular integration,  evaluation, and much, much more. And of course, all of this

alliance  with UNC’s strategic plan, your values, your priorities right? Even if you just  look at the first element of students. First, that includes, if you read the details of  that strap plan, it talks about things like equal opportunity being afforded teaching and learning,  flourishing diversity of thought and culture, flourishing and eliminating systemic barriers  and institutional barriers to student progress right? But of course it goes beyond students. First, you can talk about inclus

ivity as well, because open education is not valuable. Neutral University certainly isn't either. And so it is important to understand  that while cost savings, affordability and access are important. They are really just the beginning of what is possible with open  educational practices at large. So I want to call attention to a  work of scholarship exemplary really, by Sarah Lambert out of Deakin University in  Australia, who wrote this important article, pointing to the deeper levels which

you can go  to when it comes to serving justice with OER. So she talks about redistributive  justice, for example. And this is what many of us think of  when we think about adopting OER right. Maybe it's a good fit, fantastic. Maybe you get a grant to adapt it, Excellent! You're saving your students money. What you're really doing is serving redistributive justice in many ways right. This is the allocation of material or resources towards those who by  circumstance have less is fantastic. But

you can go further. You can also look at recognitive justice, which is recognition and respect for  cultural and gender differences. So you can think about this as this chart  shows you the social cultural diversity of the open curriculum. I'll give you an example of what I mean over here. Here's an example of a fantastic project published in studies you can see talking about  textbooks that teach the history of psychology, and how many of psychology's hidden figures were  actually invisibil

ized in these history textbooks, but the faculty authors over here were able  to take advantage of open licensing to, in fact, make them visible. That's a way of using the permissions of open licensing to advance what  Lambert describes as recognitive justice. And then you can go further still. You can look at representational justice, which is about more than just  diversity in the curriculum. It's about equitable representation. It's about political voice. So you can, for example, involve s

tudents  of color in constructing OER that's about students of color that are pushing back  against the systemic academic gatekeeping that we often see in the Academy as well. And so I want to point to again some lovely work here by Amy Nussbaum who talked about this in this  wonderful article about who gets to wield this power, who gets to actually produce or we are. And we'll talk about that as well. And so this is why, as we move to evaluation of efforts that may be nascent or  even mature

to institutions. It used to be that we used to really focus  mainly on things like cost and outcomes and use and perceptions of OER . But increasingly, even the research, community and open education have come to  realize that we actually need to foreground the question of justice attending to it, and,  in fact, evaluating our progress towards it. And so again, Virginia Clinton, Lacelle, leader  in the space along with Jasmine, Roberts, Cruz, and Lindy Kavush published this fantastic  framework

for research in open education that I want to point to, and I in the acronym is scope. Well, what it really means is that when you're evaluating progress with open education  on the impact of this kind of work, you want to first attend social justice,  and you can look at those different dimensions that I just outlined as well. You could certainly look at the cost. You can look at the outcomes like the educational  outcomes we've discussed DFW rates and the like. You can look at perceptions, a

nd  you can look at engagement. You have a fuller sense of what is possible  with adopting, certainly who we are. But just as cost savings, as I said, is not  the full measure of the impact of what we are. OER in turn, is not the only powerful example from  the spectrum of open educational practices. And when I refer to this I'm certainly  referring to open pedagogy in particular. Now, open pedagogy is many things, and certainly  many people embrace open pedagogy without even knowing, being awar

e of or using that term. But open pedagogy goes beyond the use of OER. It involves the embrace of  broader open practices. Robin Derosa, dear colleague and collaborator of  mine, and I think about who we are, as on the one hand, it's an access oriented commitment,  if you will, to learner driven education because it involves more than just access. It also talks about giving learners more agency in the context of their learning experience. But open pedagogy is also the process of using tools for

learning, or even building  architectures for learning that allow students to shape the public knowledge,  commons of which they are a part, of course. And so I know I'm talking in really lofty  terms over here, so I'll try to illustrate this in a way that perhaps gives you a sense  of what open pedagogy may be through relief. This is one of my favorite images. This comes from a French text published over a hundred years ago, and the text  depicts various scenarios of the future. Interestingly

, this image is  actually in the public domain. So this is technically, you are as well. But this particular slide depicts the classroom of the future or the classroom of the year 2,000.  So the recent past and I'd love for you to study this image because I mean, I find it hilarious on  the one hand, but it's revealing at the ideology that's baked into this illustration. You think about who is permitted to be the educator in this classroom who  is permitted to be the student. It's not a lot of

diversity  in the room, for example. And what about pedagogy? You have this, this individual who seems to be feeding, receiving wisdom that's  been bound and published and feeding it into this electronic relay system that's somehow magically  transmitting information into students minds. There's no active learning. There's no pure collaboration. There's not even a name to take notes. And in case you're missing it. Here my mouse goes up. There's your graduate student teaching assistant on the

right hand  side doing a lot of the manual label. Right? So it's easy to laugh at this. But at the same time, I think if we're honest with  ourselves, is this really terribly different? If you think about large lecture  halls at large universities. You think about 300-400 students in a class,  never really interacting directly with the professor being given multiple choice,  dominant exams, high stakes exams. There's a lot of this kind of  philosophy in education still today. And so this to me,

that image that I  just showed you for me is many in many ways reminiscent of what Paolo Fleury,  the Brazilian educator and philosopher, referred to as the banking concept of education. And in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire, described that model as estonning students  into containers to be filled by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles. The better a teacher she is. He wrote the more meekly the receptacles  permit themselves to be filled, the better students t

hey are. And so education thus becomes the act of depositing in which the students are the  depositories, and the teacher is the depositor. In the banking concept of education knowledge  is a gift, he writes, bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon  those whom they consider to know nothing. There's a lot going on over there  but it does challenge us Right, even if you think about something as  straightforward as the learning management system, today, at Brock for Example We

Use D2L  Spritespace, it's an important tool for communication, sharing resources. Other things like that. And many of us use the LMS to support teaching  learning to provide that structure right? We might, let's say we teach a course. Maybe you will archive that architecture because you wanna reuse it in a future offering. But if you think about it. The one thing that we typically tend to wipe from the archive before we  save it is any trace of student activity. It's really quite fascinating

right,  all of that student labor effectively being indicated as not really having value  beyond the student's personal learning. And that's what open pedagogy  pushes back on in many ways. So open pedagogy could be a whole lot of things. It could be co-constructing course policies with students. It could be looking at schedules of work with students. It could be looking at what topics are actually covered as well, not pretending that  the learning outcomes for the course are not, or should

not be, influenced by the people who are  actually with you on the journey, for example. But very often open pedagogy takes a particular  form when it comes to assessment, and it's the use of what are known as non-disposable  or sometimes renewable assignments. And as this article from the journal “Psychology,  learning and teaching” points out open pedagogy, or in this way, with non-disposable assignments  typically, you know, vary at least on 3 dimensions from traditional course assignments.

On the one hand, they typically have a larger audience than the course instructor. It might be a public scholarship, for example, it could be the next cohort of students that is  actually the recipient of the student label. If it's like building a guide, let's  say, or identifying bottleneck concepts. So a larger audience. It has a longer life. It lives beyond the film, beyond  the semester it might live on. For example, if they're editing Wikipedia,  which we'll talk about in a moment of cours

e it has a greater impact. It, of course, serves as student learning and skill development,  but it goes much much beyond that. And so, as I said, Wikipedia is  a really good example of this, and the work of the Wiki Education Foundation with  supporting many instructors for the hundreds of instructors with working with their students,  so that as part of their coursework they're writing and editing articles in Wikipedia. You can look at the work of Amina Azam, for example, at the University of

California, and  his students in the Medical school over there, writing and editing articles for a  variety of medical topics, and if you think about somebody who's preparing to be a GP. Take, you know, somebody walks into your clinic. You have to explain in a couple of minutes  complex medical concepts in late terms. It's actually a terrific way to practice. It's also an amazing public service. And you think about the effect of students  when students see that their work is not just meaningle

ss, that it's not just another hurdle  over here, that it's an authentic assessment. Yes, and it has real tangible  value to the real world. And you can see that in student testimonials from  these kinds of projects, right, knowing that the information presented is valuable to someone  freeing up information that's hidden behind paywalls, wanting to contribute to something  long, lasting, something bigger than myself. And of course, as an educator we may,  as a scholar, we should, we should be t

hrilled on the one hand and humbled at  the same time that whereas, you know an article we may publish in a peer reviewed,  scholarly journal may be read by, you know, couple of dozen people typically hopefully, more  articles that students may edit in Wikipedia will be read by thousands and millions. In fact, it's wonderful. So maybe we think about replacing  the traditional research essay with something like a Wikipedia assignment. Maybe we think about replacing the traditional classroom pre

sentation with the creation of  instructional videos that students can create like these students at Simon Fraser University  in British Columbia, right, whose video on the science of persuasion is not just fantastic and  openly licensed than living on Youtube today, but is now being used by other educators across  the world to teach the science of persuasion, which is incredibly powerful for them. You could talk about educators working with students to annotate existing open textbooks. So a co

uple of screenshots over here from a social psychology course that I taught. And you can see one student of mine at the top is augmenting the example and the text  to provide an illustration from her own life, to illustrate a particular concept and  another at the bottom, sharing a resource or an example of a video from the show in the  office to illustrate a particular concept. And again, when you're looking for cultural  references, relatables, wondering about what resonates with students tod

ay. No, it ain't Seinfeld, but you don't even have to worry about what it is. Let the students do that, they're a much better place to do it, and in doing so they enriched  the margins of the open textbook that I used for successive cohorts of students. Right? So it's a very low threshold  entry into open pedagogy, something like this, annotating resources  and including open textbooks like this. And the tool, by the way, I'm using is a  wonderful open source tool called Hypothesis that integra

tes in many browsers. But you can go beyond annotating. Students can edit OER. I worked with a faculty member who was teaching a course in economics where the  theory of macroeconomics wasn't changing from one semester to the next, but the students were  actually going into statistics, Canada database and actually updating the charts, every semester  because the unemployment rate would change. And so they exercised their research  skills, their graphical skills. But they were actually helping c

ontribute  to the book, being more up to date than any potential commercial textbook could ever be and  students cannot do more than adapt and edit. They can actually write both the  OER, fantastic examples of a hero, and this is one of a series several volumes. Now, Environmental Science bites from students at the Ohio State University, again edited  by the faculty members in the program. Terrific illustration of what's possible. So again, we're not just talking about access and cost savings a

nd redistributive justice. We're going further over here by giving students a lot more agency in the context  of open educational practices. And one of the reasons why I love open  pedagogy is, it doesn't just draw on open licensing, which is powerful by itself. It also very much as you're probably seeing drawing on the tradition of critical pedagogy  and you may have already understood this from my references to Paul Leif Belle Hooks at the start.  But Henry Jerou over here as well. from MCMas

ter University has written about how critical  pedagogy asserts that students can engage their own learning from a position of agency. It takes seriously the educational imperative to encourage students to act on the knowledge,  values, and social relations they acquire by being responsive to the deepest and  most important problems of our times. And when I think about the deepest and most  important problems of our times of course my mind, among other things, goes to those grand  challenges fac

ing humanity, the Sustainable Development Goals, the 17 of them articulated by  the United Nations and UNESCO in particular. And so again, I want to point to the  wonderful work being done at Montgomery College in Maryland. Absolutely fantastic. It was a joy to join them for my former  institution, so we made it so that it was an international interinstitutional initiative. But we built a fellowship for faculty members, where we provided them with training and  support to design these non-dispo

sable, renewable assignments. But beyond just being open pedagogy it was designed so that students  would work with the faculty members to create OER that would serve progress towards  a specific sustainable development goal. So it's that direct connection in a way that's  really clearly meaningful in a public sphere. And one of my favorite examples,  and this I should say, this fellowship has grown by leaps and bounds. Maybe the Arizona Maricopa Community college system is a part of it. Ther

e's partners now in other continents as well. I recommend looking at this as well as a really different way of engaging folks when it comes to  innovative pedagogy that's meaningful and open. But my favorite example is at the bottom of  this slide, where I had 3 faculty members, as you can see, one from urban ecosystems,  sustainable horticulture, and anthropology, different institutions, and they worked with their  students to create a scientific quality database, or at least add to one actual

ly that involved  mapping all of the edible weeds on the different campuses of the different institutions. So it was a local focus on food insecurity in a way that connected with a grand challenge. One of the SDGS, but obviously involved the creation and publication of OER as well. And so I do wanna share just a brief testimonial over here, but also a remarkable insight from one  of the faculty members who I was working with. This is at my former institution, KPU, Jennifer  Hardwick, and, as y

ou'll see, Jennifer is one of these people who, as an educator, she  was a joy to work with, a joy to support, and certainly someone I admire greatly. But I'll let her speak for herself in articulating why she was particularly  drawn to this form of open pedagogy. Jennifer Hardwick KPU: “Because I've been using open pedagogy in my classes for the last 5 or 6 years, and I've used  renewable assignments before in media assignments before, and I think they're very effective. I think they allow a k

ind of creativity and engagement that a lot of  other assignments don't. And I am a writing instructor. Primarily I'm interested in good communication, and I think that that communication  should extend in the digital age to different kinds of assignments and different ways of  employing rhetoric and self expression. And so this is a good opportunity to encourage  students to think about those skills. I'm also interested in using open pedagogy because  I want students to think deeply about it.

And I want them to think about access to information  and the ethics that guide, that both the ethics of what we see now in education in terms of the  high costs of textbooks and the inaccessibility of a lot of resources, but also on the other end. The way that the Academy has been complicit in extracting knowledge and in monetizing  knowledge that doesn't necessarily belong to the people who are doing the extracting. And so I want students to think carefully about the information that they ga

ther,  and the information that they share, and how to do that in ethical ways. And I think that open assignments are a great way to introduce those conversations Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani,: As I said Jennifer's just an absolute superstar,  and so I love to share her words directly. I do wanna illustrate these,  you know, trying to provide some different examples for inspiration over here. I do wanna point to a couple of resources. For folks looking to dig deeper into what  open pedagogy looks like

in practice? What might it look like in my discipline at  the assignment level, at the course level. One is the open pedagogy notebook that  Robin de Rosa and I created some years ago, but we no longer actively add to this site. And so increasingly, even though there's a good set of resources over here, we're pointing  people to the open pedagogy portal which has been developed by the fine folks at the  Open Education Network, which is a very large and expanding international consortium  at thi

s point of like minded institutions. And so I recommend that you look over here. Consider drawing inspiration, but also frankly consider contributing to it as well. And then, beyond these really well-known resources. At this point I do want to highlight some of the wonderful work happening,  of course, at UNC once again, including this wonderful resource developed by Michael Aldrich  “Tools to promote open pedagogy in the classroom” available in UNC’s Digital repository as well. Really, reall

y nice examples over there, really thoughtful. And again, congratulations to Michael and the AOER committee for supporting this work. But I will say lots of ways to get started, lots of places to draw inspiration from but like  so many things, you know, I find when I'm working with open pedagogy, I think about the impact on my  students, I think about what it does for students who feel like they have an active role in their  education, like they feel a sense of belonging, particularly where the

ir identities are a little  more recognized in the classroom as well. But I'm also sensitive to how much it  changes you as an educator, right? It really really does in many, many ways. When you're doing this work. It really helps you to, maybe for me it  reconnected me with my values, for why I got into this work in the first place, right? I remember being an international student, as I said, struggling with food  insecurity and I remember along the way, being an adjunct faculty member, workin

g at 3  institutions, trying to cobble together a full time job without benefits and feeling excluded  so that you hold out to those experiences. And there's a way the Academy has sort of, you  know, of creating a sense of almost dulling, the sharpness of your values and  what drew you into this work. And for me, that reconnecting to  those values, in the first place, is what means, what is what means so much. It changed how I approach teaching and learning, and I think it does for others as wel

l. Yeah, so I have a second. This is my last little faculty  testimonial over here. And this one comes from someone whose work I've  only recently learned about and whose work I'm certainly going to follow moving forward. This is the phenomenal Bailey Peterson from UNC Bailie Peterson, UNC: The most surprising thing, or the biggest  thing that kind of changed just from doing OER was realizing how much I wanted  to also incorporate open pedagogy. So opportunities for students to learn from  each

other, and even semester to semester. So I have some assignments that I  wouldn't have come up with, I think, without kind of diving into OER, and it's  actually made some of my teaching easier because I'm putting some of the work  on student to student interactions. For example, I have, like a living  study guide and a living glossary. Every semester where students put up potential  questions, they think they might be on the test, and other students take a stab at answering  them, and then stu

dents will respond and say, “Well, I think you could add this to  your answer, or here's an example.” And same with the Glossary students will come up  with a definition so oddly in some ways it's made my teaching easier, because that's enabling them  to kind of take that more active role. And then I don't have to just reiterate a definition multiple  times, they can say, “Hold on, is it like this?” And then they kind of are  working from each other. Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani,: It's fantastic. And so

maybe I'll just note that in my  experience supporting educators at a few different institutions in this kind of work  there are many people who come to open education for OER for the cost savings. But there are many of those people who stay for the pedagogy right? And you're seeing that with Bailey certainly. Just a few other things as I  come to my close over here. You know I will say, just as with OER, I say,  I've identified how you can go beyond designing learning experiences that are ju

st engaging  and effective to also designing learning environments that are truly just. Open educational practices, like open pedagogy, can also vary. They can be more instructive, centered, or they can be more student centered right, they can be  more content, centric, or they can be more process centric, which is perhaps even more important  in the age of generative AI, and they can be primarily designed for pedagogical purposes,  or primarily designed for social justice. And those are the d

imensions along which  you see the difference between when open pedagogy has a neutral effect, or  sometimes even a negative effect. Right? If you think about it, are you compelling your students to perform public scholarship  without adequately scaffolding their skill development without understanding that the risks  of open scholarship are unevenly distributed. When, for example, minority students are  disproportionately targeted in flame wars, online, open pedagogy can be ameliorative. You'

re having a positive impact, absolutely like when you're creating and sharing OER  for populations who wouldn't have access. But you can also design it intentionally, so  that it's actually truly transformative. Where, as I said, you're involving students who  may be minoritized, you're giving them voice. You're giving them a sense of belonging. And you're really advancing, not just redistributive justice in Sarah Lambert's  article terminology, but also recognized and representational justice a

t the same time. One of my favorite examples of those kinds of projects comes from Quantum Polytechnic  University, where a dear friend sadly passed. Arlie Kruthers was an incredible  instructor in applied communications. One of my favorite projects  was working with Holwen. She gave her students agency in  the choice of research topic. The students happened to pick  a surprise with all of the work we were doing for textbook affordability. So what they did is they ran a quantitative survey. The

y ran interviews and did qualitative research. At the same time they assembled a report, right? A research report that really looked at this,  and it was based on survey data and interview data from students at the institution,  particularly international students, minority students as well. Now, what we did after that is, the students themselves created a tabletop game,  almost sort of inspired by monopoly, with sort of chance cards based on real life events. Right? This actually happened to

you. Somebody died in your family. You had to make a trip overseas. You dropped your phone and broke it. So real life events that caused you to  know you take the person off a student, and you try to navigate through the semester  with some of these financial choices and many of those choices, as you can see over here had  to do with what books they were going to buy, what books they could afford. Are they gonna wait for the midterm exam to see if they're going to buy the  book if they really

need it or not. And it's available online. We've built it using press books, which is an open publishing tool as well  as for those of you who are familiar. It's an interactive platform that's also  openly licensed and it's available as an interactive simulation and really a  faculty development tool at this point. And so I encourage you to look at this. It's not an easy game to play. But then it really isn't for  students today, either. So that's probably by design but it was  an incredible pr

oject it drew on the real experiences of international students  struggling with food insecurity. You know, and and of course, the use  of OER to this course she assigned. She authored a lot of OER early and  assigned it to these learners. The use of OER saves the money  it advanced readers for justice. But it was the embrace of open pedagogy in this  thoughtful way that gave the students a voice, and in doing so it also advanced  representational justice and as one of my favorite authors Arundh

ati Roy has  said, “There's really no such thing as the voiceless that are only the deliberately  silenced or the preferably unheard.” And so in thinking about that, and in thinking  about even the lessons of the pandemic, I do want to say that it is critically  important that we design supports for OER, for open pedagogy, in a way that is attentive  to the experiences of folks at the margins. Right? There's a reason why we want to make sure that accessibility  is not an afterthought, that data

privacy is not disregarded, as we're sort of giddily  trying to sample the new Gen. AI platform that we think about and plan for the real issue. That is digital redlining right where I again along racial lines, access to even high  speed Internet is quite different. And the digital divide is, in fact,  reinforced along some of those lines. And so again, these are all  issues to think about. And I'm happy to share this volume with you. Open at the margins which shares a range of more critical

perspectives on open education  because there are real challenges over here, and I think the pandemic would have shown  many of us very clearly how the assumption that the digital is the solution is the kind of  assumption that can actually exacerbate existing inequities instead of actually redressing them. And so, particularly in the age of AI. what I would say is that I think we need to focus much  more on critical approaches to open education, and certainly on humanizing the  teaching and le

arning experience. And so, as I close, I will say designing  for the margins should be top of the list, but we also need a more critical, a  more inclusive and more open approach. Leaving with trust for students is  certainly one not so much surveillance. Not so much you know. Rigor in a way that's weaponized in terms of high stakes assessments where students are changed to  a desk with the eyeballs taped up, and we're sort of doing retinal scans as they engage in anything  that we might consid

er to be academic integrity. No, I think we need to talk about rigor, rigor  in terms of flexibility and accessibility. That's some of the work of Christina  Catapodis. I think if we're going to talk about academic integrity, we need to talk  about extending that concept to our own work, our own approach to technology and pedagogy. So I think we need to lead with care. And I think we need to not  forget about self-care. And so in doing, that building  supports and structures that support humans

and that foster humanity. I'll close with a couple of quotes over here, one of which comes from an amazing book  and inspirational book by Kevin Gannon, Radical Hope, a teaching manifesto in which  Kevin writes that the real work of change in higher education is done students by students,  classroom by classroom course, by course. And it's done by educators. We've committed to teaching because it and their students matter in many ways right? We need to save the soul of higher education, and we d

o it, as I said, by trusting educators,  by trusting students and building support, so that that trust, that care, that kind of  leadership doesn't swing against the current. In other words, to close with Bell Hooks, “To  teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential. If we  are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.” This is the slide that was, or the image that was looking behind my title slide at the star

t  of this talk, and I'm imagining not many of you attended to it but I will share it. This is a photograph I took when I was visiting South Africa for the first time,  and what you're seeing across the water over there is Cape Town, Table Mountain  above it and I'm obviously not there. I was across the water on Robben Island  and Robben Island many of you will know this was a maximum security political  prison for prisoners for a long time. It's where Nelson Mandela spent 18 years of his  priso

n sentence, for example and at the time you know, this was incredible, because all of the  Tour guides, when I, when I visited were still former inmates from the prison. And I'm sharing this with you, because that as an educational  experience for me was transformative. It remains with me to this day. And that's the case, because for me, education at its finest is democratizing,  it is liberatory, it is anti-racist, it is decolonizing, right, it is critical,  it is inclusive, and it certainly i

s open. I really appreciate everybody  sticking with me through this presentation, and I can't wait to hit it off. See what your questions are or your comments. But thanks very much, folks. Nancy Henke, Univ. of Northern Colorado: Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, we're gonna go to the  queue of questions in the QA. I think Melinda's gonna read the first one. We currently only have one. But I guarantee you there are other people who are  participating who have thoughts and questions. So ple

ase enter those into the QA so that  we can have Dr. Jhangiani attended them. So, Melinda, would you get  us started, please? Melinda Gurule, Univ. of Northern Colorado: Most definitely all right. So our first question, so it says, “Our  college has a textbook rental program. And as publishers have  picked up our rental model. They're pushing our faculty toward access codes  to the point that our students are now paying over half a million dollars in codes this year. Do you have any suggestion

s for educating faculty on this? So they can make more informed textbook purchasing decisions?” Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani,: Yeah, this is a really hard thing. I mean, I think there's some practical strategies, I would suggest suddenly. But you know I will not ignore the fact that there's a reason why the publishers  have had the success that they have, and part of it is the marketing machine right? I worked at 1 point in a department where it was not unusual for the textbook Rep, or the publisher 

rep to come in and say, “Well, if you adopt this book for this course for this length of time. We're going to sponsor these conferences. We're going to give you this money in exchange”. So please be aware that that's a real thing. This is not a neutral landscape. There's also a practical matter of how these decisions are made. Sometimes the choice of what book or what model is being adopted is not the choice of individual  faculty members right in some departments. It's a committee that make

s  the decision, for example. So what I would suggest is,  you know if we are educators and we care about science for a matter. I would suggest doing some research right, certainly try to raise awareness. Talk about this. Look at the research reports that are out  there, learn from the experiences, the painful experiences of those who've gone down some of  these parts before, and why, they've certainly pivoted away from those kinds of models. You know, you think about the funneling of public

education into student  loans which then goes to go to. You know, commercial publishers  through deals like this. But I would say, you know, as a faculty  member, and I am still a faculty member. I would say, you know, I'm concerned about the  erosion of academic freedom, because often you are limited to things like a particular publisher's  platform and choosing titles from there. I'm interested in accessibility,  and the work that ought to be done for books to be accessible that are being  don

e instead of retro inaccessible books. I'm interested in taking a fraction of  that investment from the institution and investing it in building robust, open community  owned supportive, inclusive infrastructure. It would take a fraction of that to  make your open program really fly. But I think you know the fact that you already  know how much is being spent over here is, I think, a good start, but I would look  at, as I said, the experiences of others. You don't have to figure this out  by you

rself, reach out to spark. They have a wonderful set of resources, research  and database that you can get some assistance with by looking at doing some actual research. Look at student outcomes. I guess what I would say just to back up over  here is whether it's a textbook rental program, or whether it's inclusive access right? I know many people are familiar with the traditional commercial textbook approach, and  it's because it's familiar that the natural inclination on the part of many edu

cators  is, what is this newfangled OER thing? Let's rigorously evaluate that  before I consider adopting that. No, no, no, it's the other way around. If you're going to ask students to spend money to access resources, that is the  approach that should be rigorously evaluated. To understand that there's a solid  basis on which you can say yes. “I've thought about this, and there's a good  reason why I'm asking you to spend this money.” Not. “There's a good reason why. I  think I need to be persu

aded to not ask you to spend money right?” So I think we do need to tail. Turn the tables over here, but so shifting  assumptions while talking to faculty. You know, even if it's your faculty  association about the agency, that faculty may be stripped off over here  thinking about accessibility and course format. Certainly looking at research and support that's  available from other places like spark and then just doing some evaluation as well, I mean. So there's some strategies over there. But

you're certainly not alone over here. Nancy Henke, Univ. of Northern Colorado: Well, as long as I'm not misunderstanding  the QA feature it looks like we don't have any in there right now. But I actually have a question I'm curious about when in conversations about  equitable access and inclusive access. I feel like I hear less about data privacy  issues than I maybe feel like I should. And I don't know, I was just curious what  your thoughts on that are because of the publisher platforms that

are harvesting  student data for the sake of all the things that people harvest in data for. But I hear that I feel like I hear those lesson arguments against those models. So I'm curious what your thoughts are on that? Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani,: I realize I muted myself over there. I was just trying to bring up something as you're asking the question, and I found it quickly. And I'm gonna put it in the chat as well. There's a few people who've been digging  into this question and I want to poin

t to this article in the Chronicle from last year last  July that cites some of the work and apologies. It is behind a registration wall,  even if it's not a pay wall. But it really talks in great detail about  the work, including of Billy Mikei at the University of Hawaii, at Manoa. It is quite impressive when you look at what is being handed over to these third parties,  particularly when a tool is being adopted at the course level, not even at the institutional level  where it may have gone

through like in Canada, we do a privacy impact assessment and a few  other interrogations before we procure and adopt technology at the institutions. But I think there are several issues over here as well. See if I can bring up one other piece, it can take me a minute to come up with it. But I don't think you're wrong, I think one of the challenges of this work is increasing. When we're publishing open work we often encounter this question as well I know, working  with BC Campus on the West Co

ast when they were publishing work a long time ago. On the one hand, you're publishing openly, you wanna see what impact it has. Do you wanna add those Google analytics, those trackers to see which country is. Where are the users? What kind of devices are they  using, those kinds of things? On the other hand, you wanna think about, are you  collecting information for the sake of collecting information? Are you? Do you want to do this? Is this serving a purpose? So there's data ethics alongsi

de  that conversation around privacy. You know, not assuming that students have  the kind of literacy, especially the most most most marginalized students in making  those kinds of choices on their behalf. And so I do think it behooves us to integrate  this more deeply, one of the things we have looked at at my current institution. We've just adopted a new academic plan, and this is happening in the province  of British Columbia as well. We're developing a framework for  ethical educational tec

hnology. And so ideally, this is something that even  intervenes in the procurement process where you know, it's not just that a tool you know, meets  legislative requirements for privacy and that we can budget for it, and we can support it. It actually has to be evaluated on its ethical and pedagogical dimensions. And by that measure tools like, you know, educational technology or surveillance educational  technology, whether it's remote exam proctoring, whether it's AI detection tools would

also have  to pass a sniff test and and more than sniff test the real thorough interrogation right? In the article I've put in the chat, for example, that identified instances of student data  sharing that actually conflicted with, or at least raised questions about the practices relayed  in publishers, privacy notices and in the case. And I'm just gonna quote from the article  over here in the case of Pearson's popular. My lab platform right? Personally, identifiable information such as a stu

dent's name and  email address was sent to Google analytics along with notifications of what the student  was reading and highlighting in the e-book. So that's just one example. But it's certainly not not the only one. So you know, as I said in the age of Jenny  there's a few things to worry about. Data privacy is part of that. And then alongside that will be the question, student intellectual property as well. So I think all of this is important to attend to. In the realm of ethical Ed Tech,

and maybe the last plot I'll make over here is  there was a book published very, very recently. It's a remarkable volume. It's called higher education for good, and I think it may be the last  chapter in the book I can't recall. But it's a chapter that's called,  “Who cares about Procurement?” And I say this because you know, as  an academic administrator, I work with my procurement department quite a lot. Those are the folks who many faculty members will never see, but obviously they attend to

anything  that is purchased or or contracted on behalf of the institution and they make some excellent,  very practical suggestions about how we need to shift that process to again ensure that. You know, we're not like Silicon Valley. We can't simply, you know, come up with a new  product that might have some irreparable harm. And we, just, you know, collapse and start again. Right, we're not a commercial textbook publisher, a publisher that's beholden to  shareholders. We need to put the lear

ners at the center of the experience. But we need to attend to those who are going to be most harmed by a particular  technology and evaluate it on that basis. Right? It's not, you know, do no harm, it is an incredibly low barrier. And I'm not sure it's being comfortably cleared at this point. So I appreciate you raising the question, and I think for me this is one of  the main reasons why I believe so strongly in building open, community-owned infrastructure. And so that's why you look at, y

ou know, I can look at tech tools like hypotheses, for example.  Yes, you can work with hypotheses as a vendor. Absolutely. They have a business model, no doubt, but their code is on Github. You can use them open source. You can control the data. You don't have to have any transfer to a third party. So all host of things you can do with open source technologies that follow  the ethos of learners first and inclusion. And I think for me, that's part of  the lesson over here as well. Nancy Henke

, Univ. of Northern Colorado: Thank you! Yeah, that's something to think about. We have a few minutes, are there any other questions or thoughts that  we have for our speaker? Nancy Henke, Univ. of Northern Colorado: Well, there are always, as I said, the beginning, always many demands on people's time  so very grateful for the people who attended everyone who registered will get  the video and I have some of my own notes, but one of the one of my takeaways of many is I  one of the things you

said at the end, but leading with trust for students, and beginning with  that in mind which I think is quite lovely. So thank you to Dr.Jhangiani. Thank you To Melinda and our it, and all the attendees. We're glad you were here, and happy Open Education Week. Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani,: Thank you very much, everybody. It was a privilege  in wishing everybody a wonderful week as well. Nancy Henke, Univ. of Northern Colorado: Thank you. Bye, bye