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Speaker 1: OTAN-- Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.
Diana Vera-alba: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for being here on this lovely afternoon. My session is called Building an OER Project and Team.
My name is Diana Vera-Alba. I'm an OTAN subject matter expert. I'm also the ESL and OER coordinator at my district, San Diego College of Continuing Education.
So a little bit about myself. I've been an online instructor and teacher trainer since 2012. I have taught in the modalities of distance education, hybrid, hyflex, and fully online courses I'm also an OER and CAEP coordinator at my district. I train on Canvas course design. I'm also an online faculty mentor, OER and ZTC trainer, and an OTAN SME.
In my free time, I enjoy gardening, photography. And I'm a dog enthusiast. So you'll see some pictures here of some of my pets.
So before we get started, I'd like to find out how familiar or how comfortable you are with building project teams at your district, so just any type of project team. So if you are not familiar, please type 1 in chat. If you are somewhat familiar building project teams at your district, type 2. And if you are very familiar with project teams at your district type number 3. So if you could please vote in chat. Thank you.
So we have a mix. So thank you for voting. That kind of helps me either stay a little bit longer on some of the topics or move on, but I will certainly ask you as we get to some of those places. Thank you, Jeff.
So let's go ahead and get started with our agenda. So today, I'm going to go over three main points. The first one is building an OER project team. That's our overall topic. And specifically, we're going to look at having an OER coordinator or resource teacher lead some of those projects. Getting at least one, if not more, of these project team members create a Commons license. So I'm going to go over that, what that means, and where you can get that done.
We're going to look at committees, work groups, and meet-ups Those are three distinct type of groups that could be working on these projects. We're also going to look at funding your OER projects through strategic planning and grants. And then finally, we're going to look at organizing your OER projects.
So let's get started with building the team and the resource teacher. So you want to have at least one subject matter expert, if not more. And as your project is developing, you might start off with only one subject matter expert in OER, but as your project is developing and the participants are learning, you're instinctively going to create several OER subject matter experts.
And that's really important because if you're just starting with OERs-- like at our district, we were just starting with OERs, it was just me. And now as the year-- the two years that I've had this role, now we have several OER subject matter experts, which is great, really helpful for me, really helpful for our institution.
So regarding those subject matter experts, part of their expertise is going to be becoming very familiar with Creative Commons licensing. It's going to be really important part of the project. So there is a Creative Commons Certificate program, and it offers in-depth course on CC licensing, open practices, and sharing in our global-- because this is a global community of OER experts.
And you'll see many of the benefits of that. There are lots of benefits of sharing out-- and you're literally sharing out with the world through Digital Commons. The courses are led by expert instructors and are highly interactive, including readings, quizzes, discussions, and practical exercises to develop open skills. So when we say open, we're talking about open educational resources.
So the Creative Commons certificate offers three different tracks. So there's a Certificate for Educators, which would be a teacher, a coordinator or a resource expert at your district. There's also a Certificate for Academic Librarians. So if you are fortunate enough to have a designated librarian at your district that works in your adult education or continuing education organization, you can also get them certified. And then the last is in Open Culture/GLAM Certificate, and this would be for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.
So most of us would fall under the first certificate, which is Certificate for Educators. And the courses do vary on a 10-week self-paced course or a one-week boot camp. I attended the one-week boot camp, which is 10 weeks condensed into one week, and it is very, very intense, but I do highly recommend it. I preferred doing the face-to-face, which is the one-week boot camp, versus the online 10-week self-paced.
I do have a colleague at our district who's a librarian, and she followed the 10-week self-paced, and she said she would have really, really liked to be in person for some of those topics because they are pretty intense. Probably the most intense is the copyright section because it is taught by a copyright attorney. And so I had the benefit of having the copyright attorney in person, and we were able to ask the attorney questions that we had. And it was very, very informative, highly recommended.
So now that you have your licensed OER coordinator resource teacher, this person would be an ideal candidate to lead the OER project and team. They can also create monthly reports or newsletters to keep your entire faculty up-to-date. So that's another important aspect of this, is when you are creating this team, or your OER project, or your team, or a combination of both, you want to make sure that all of your constituents are being updated on what's happening because that's going to drive the incentive of people going, oh, what is that? I want to do that. Because eventually you're going to have to recruit others.
So keeping everyone up-to-date on the latest on OERs and perhaps having office hours or PD peppered throughout your year semester, that is a great incentive to get people motivated to see what OERs are and get interested in them. I'm going to show you-- so you'll see throughout the slides, which I will share at the end, there are links. So I'm going to show you an example of one of my monthly reports.
So at my site, I belong to academic senate. We have an academic senate. And I always have to report out every month in academic senate. I also report out to different committees.
So we have-- for example, we have a Distance Education Committee. We have a distance education work group. So whenever I can attend those meetings, I do report out.
So this is an example of what I report out. So I give them information about PD. So this is actually my May report. So I gave them information about the PD that I've been doing for OTAN. I also give them links to other-- this is a link to a survey that our district is-- sends out every semester.
And then I give them information about other open educational resources. So this is through state academic senate. It's an organization that I also belong to. And even if your organization does not have an academic senate, you can still belong and participate in state academic senate professional development.
They have a whole entire division devoted to open educational resources. It's called the OERI, the Open Educational Resources Initiative. And so I let our faculty know about the latest that is happening. The--
Speaker 3: Can you increase the size of that? I have it on full screen that's tiny, tiny. Thank you.
Diana Vera-alba: Sure. Thank you for letting me know. Yes, so this organization, again, it's called OERI. They also send out a monthly newsletter, and that newsletter is full of the latest in OER and Zero Textbook Cost Initiatives throughout the state. This resource, which you can sign up for to receive at your institution, also includes grant opportunities. And this is where I've found and searched for grant opportunities for my district.
And this is just an example of some of the events. So they promote conferences. So there's a conference coming up in August. They'll have different professional development. And then within this professional development, you learn about free resources.
So for example, I learned about H5P, and now my district-- H5P is a great-- if you use Canvas or a learning management system, it's a great tool to add on to your learning management system. And within H5P through state academic senate, they have created lots of open educational resources. So you can download them into your LMS.
And so anyways, you learn about not only the training on the software or the initiative, but you also get a lot of tips on other free resources that you can bring into your district. So that's just an example. I give my-- there are lots more of these within the newsletter that's linked here, but I give my faculty a taste of what is in there, so kind of incentivize them to open up that link.
And then I give a report on other committees within our district that are providing open educational resources. So it's just a plethora of links. Sometimes, this newsletter or my report can get a little bit long, but there are lots and lots of resources in there for our faculty. So I just wanted to share that as an example of what a OER coordinator or resource teacher can provide for their district.
And then they can also provide professional development. So this is another thing that I do. Besides professional development for OTAN, I also do professional development for our faculty I have open education office hours, usually once a month. Initially at the beginning of the semester, I have them every week because it's at the beginning of the semester, and teachers may find it that they are looking for additional resources for their courses. So at the beginning of the semester, I do that on a weekly basis.
And then the other thing I wanted to provide, if you do not have a coordinator at your district or a resource teacher at your district that specifically works on OERs, I have a sample OER coordinator job description here. And we'll give that a second to open up. And so this is the sample for my district, and it includes the responsibilities, the qualifications that they are looking for this type of position. So that is there, but you can always Google OER coordinator job descriptions. There are quite a few out there, but I just wanted to share out ours at my district.
So another description or activity that the OER coordinator or resource teacher can provide is coordination of the actual project-- oops, sorry, I didn't click-- coordinator of the project and responsible-- they can be responsible for an OER library at your institution. That's going to become really important. Many districts either have this type of resource on their website. So at my district, we do have an OER website or a section in our website for OERs, but I wanted to provide our faculty with more than just what was on our website. And so what I did is I created a Canvas account with OER resources.
So you can look at-- most colleges and universities offer something like this in a simplified manner. Some are a little bit more extensive than others. There's usually a lot of links to other resources, maybe videos, maybe some recorded professional development. And again, what I do is I provide these resources in a Canvas account because that's the LMS that is being used at my district.
And at my district, it serves both as a repository, which is where there are actual lessons and books. So a repository is like a library. It houses lessons, books, resources. And it can also be a referatory where I refer out to other repositories that faculty can search for OERs.
So mine is a combination of both. It can house an OER course for teachers, where they can actually learn about OERs. It can be maintained by your campus OER coordinator, which is one of the things that I-- one of my responsibilities, or a resource teacher, or the actual team. That can be one of the projects for the team because once you do create something like this, whether it's on your website or in your LMS, it will have to be maintained and updated. So that's also something to consider regarding the responsibilities for the coordinator or for the project team.
Sorry about that. There we go. And so again, you can look at the college, university websites for more ideas. So most college and university websites if you do a search within their website, you'll find a section for OERs.
And then on my Canvas account, I organize the materials by discipline. So we have materials for ESL, high school subjects, our health department, our emeritus department. So I organized it by our different departments. And then I included OERs for our faculty.
So this has been a lot of work. And this is also something that a whole team on the project can work on. And then also I have sections for OER topics such as getting their Creative Commons licenses, how to attribute work. The types of materials that are included on the site are also books, images, artworks, other repositories. So I'll show you my example in just a few slides.
So on the site, this is what I have. So I created it on a Canvas account, but I have also seen them created on Google Sites, and they work really nice in Google Sites. You can use design software like Canva, H5P. At my district-- I have a little asterisk here-- we use CidiLabs Design Plus, which is a paid software. It's not a free software, but you'll get to see what that looks like.
And then the repositories-- as a repository, you can add relevant OER sources to your site like lessons, books, resources, training modules, OER videos. And then as a referatory, you can refer out to other great OER sites like OER Commons, Merlot, BC Campus, Common Lit. There are lots of great ones out there that you can refer out to. So again, ideas for your OER project team.
And I'm going to share my OER site with you. If you have access to Canvas, it's already on the Canvas Commons. All you have to do is go to Canvas Commons and search for my name. You'll see this card, and this is what the card looks like. So you'll know it's my OER site. It's called OER for SDCCD, which is my district, but it's open to all.
I did license this OER site CC BY-NC-SA. So that means that you can use this for non-commercial purposes. So you can't make a profit off of it. And if you do use it, I ask that you use the same license, which is CC BY-NC-SA.
That's what the Share Alike is. And that Share Alike means that you can use it with attribution. You can adapt it. You can change it. You can only keep part of it if you don't want to use the whole thing, but you do have to license it with the same license that I'm using.
And then part of the creating this project or team is deciding what type of team you want, whether you want a committee, a work group, or simply a meet-up. And they are pretty distinct. So a committee is usually more formal. Usually, there are bylaws, agendas, and minutes. So it's very organized in that sense.
Typically, a committee is a closed membership, and members are appointed either by the committee lead, or a director, or a principal at your institution. And this type of group is a fact finding group. So projects are proposed and may be new. And there's typically one or more subject matter expert in this type of committee or group.
The second type of group would be a work group. And typically, a work group is open to all who want to contribute or be part of the work group. It's more action and solution-based. There are deliverables, and they deliver outcomes proposed by the team, or another committee, or a director. And again, they usually have one or more subject matter experts.
And the less type of group that you may want to consider is a meet-up. And a meet-up is the least formal of the three. It's typically a space where people can share ideas. The participants in this type of group are already doing the work. So maybe they're already using OERs. And usually, there are many subject matter experts within the group.
So I see this as a potential of a combination of all three. Especially if you're starting off new, you might consider a combination of all three. Or if you start with one, it might evolve into one of the other or all three.
So like I mentioned, it's a progression, and if you are just starting at your district with this type of committee or this type of group, you will eventually end up with lots of these, lots of subject matter experts, because the people working in the group end up becoming subject matter experts, whether it's for their department or their discipline. So this is just some ideas. At my district, we're kind of a combination of a committee and a work group. And again, because of the progression, we have lots of subject matter experts within the work group.
So here we go funding for your project. This is probably something that usually attracts most, but you really want to consider your group. That's why I started off with the group or with the OER coordinator because that does need to be thought about.
But funding for your projects, so you definitely want to start with strategic planning because before you can apply for grants or monies, you already want to have a plan in place, just like all other types of grants and asking for money within your district. So strategic planning is really important. It can be part of your accreditation plan, and it should be part of your accreditation plan, especially if you're going this direction, because we all know that they are looking for innovation when those teams come and to your district and look at your plan, and OER and ZTC are an important part of that. It can be part of your tech plan as well or your Triple E Framework. So OERs can fall under several different types of strategic planning.
So once you have these goals in your plan, then you can start looking at grants. So you can use WIOA dollars. That can be written as part of your goals and strategies to increase student enrollment, student completion, student persistence.
There's a great organization called Michelson 20MM. So we're going to look at their website. And they have a grant called a Spark Grant. It's a great organization. They do a lot of funding, a lot of philanthropy work. So let's take a look at Spark.
So the Michelson Spark Grant, there was, unfortunately, just an informational webinar, but all the information that you need is on their website. So I did attend the webinar. We just got a little bit more insight, but again, they added a recording, I believe, to their site, and also, the information that they went over with us last week is on their website as well.
So this is a grant that opens next week. And it's open from May 30 through June 13, so very timely. So let's take a look at the informational webinar info-- oops, sorry. The informational webinar for you is here. So if you missed that date, you can definitely watch the video. So we're not going to watch it here, but you can look at some of the resources here.
So there are two steps to this grant. The first step is writing your letter of interest, and that's what's going to be due within these dates, May 30 through June 13. They have copies of past letters of interest because we did request that. Those of us that attended, we asked if they would add that, so they did. And then if your letter of interest is accepted, then they will invite you to fill out the full application.
So if you watch the webinar information, they'll explain that process to you. So you don't want to go to the full application yet, you want to start off with the letter of interest. And what they're looking for is innovation within a district. They are not looking at this moment to fund grants that are OER producing but OER related. So if you watch the video, they go into detail of what that means.
And this grant is an ask up to $25,000. And here you'll see some information here on what they're looking for. So for this grant, they're not looking to fund primarily grants that are seeking to develop OER, but they are-- that should be OER related. And there's information here about the funding cycle. And what they're looking for.
So if you are interested in applying for this, I highly recommend that you watch that webinar. It's only 50 minutes. It wasn't super long, but it was full of information and great questions from everyone that was there.
So if you scroll down, they go through the process of how to apply for this grant, which I've explained a little bit of it, but you definitely want to make sure that you go through this. Here is the Grant Committee. When you watch the video, Cailyn was there. She's a great, great resource, and she has opened herself for questions. So make sure you take advantage of that.
And then you can look at their past recipients from the last cycle from 2019. So this is something that's very timely right now. If you're interested, make sure you check out the Michelson Spark Grant. Any questions so far?
The other type of funding-- and this is some of the funding that we received at my district-- is local funding. And local funding can include reaching out to your local state representatives, or congressman, or congresswoman. I'm going to show you some information-- I have the link here. We won't go through all of it, but you can definitely look at the link.
This is the website at district, and it's linking to one of the grants that we received. So this past year, in 2022, we were awarded $975,000 to provide-- to expand our OER and ZTC resources for our students. This is a really good article, and it will give you ideas on what your local constituents are looking for or your local representatives are looking for as far as OERs and requests for monies for OERs. So that is there.
And what we did with those funds-- I'm currently part of a project right now where we're revising OERs. And so my district has distributed those monies, not in a one-time thing, but they're going to distribute it over a couple of years. So there's going to be grant opportunities that faculty can apply for every semester.
So I applied for the first semester, and I'm currently working on revising-- with a team, currently working on revising an existing OER book. And so we did apply for the second year, and we didn't receive it, but I completely understand why. It's a lot of work.
So if you're interested in finding out how to distribute monies, I highly recommend that you don't do it in one shot because it really, really is a lot of work for faculty. So I really liked the way that our district divided the grant. And it also gives others opportunities. It's not the same people constantly receiving those grant dollars. Any questions so far?
So organizing your OER projects. So one of the many ways that you can get buy in is by providing incentives. So many of your faculty may already be doing this work, or at least exploring the possibility of writing and producing OERs, so providing faculty with financial incentives through grants or existing funding earmarked for student resources for creating new OERs or revising existing OERs to meet the needs of your student population.
So to avoid duplication of effort, you can also assign projects by discipline, or subject matter, or types of deliverables like books, modules, lessons, videos. So there's a plethora of different types of materials. But as you're thinking about this project, I think it's really important that you decide on the type of assignment of projects to avoid this duplication of efforts.
And then you want to think about timelines. So you'll need to establish timelines for completion of these projects. Otherwise, they will have a very long tail. So most projects are completed within one to two semesters. And I can tell you we-- for my project, it's a revision of a book, and we are taking the full two semesters plus summer because it is a lot of work.
I have a sample here attached of my OER team. We have a continuous planning Google Doc that my team can refer back to on some of the items. And you'll notice that in the sample, there's a lot of repetition because we do have to-- just like any project, you have an idea, and then you try to move forward with that idea, and you realize, oops, I missed a step here. We need to go into further detail on this other topic. So you'll see some of that in our sample there. So let's take a look at that.
So that we're not duplicating efforts, what I did-- because I am the project lead on this, I created a continuous document so that-- and I created a Google Drive that we are all sharing. So I created this continuous document. At the very top, I have the resources with links of what we are using so that we're not scrambling. Where did we save this? And where is this at? So we have this continuous document of what we're working on.
And then I have our meetings. So we meet on Zoom, and I do record the meeting, so you won't see the meeting link here, but it's just to give you an idea of how to organize this. And then there's details about-- I usually have an agenda. So this is for-- actually, that was supposed to be for our next meeting.
But anyways, I start off with an agenda, and I start adding items, and everybody else can add items to the agenda as well. And then we just-- I'm usually the note taker. So I'll type my notes. We decided that the new stuff was going to be in purple just for our organizational purposes, but you can decide on a color or the way you organize it.
So we've gone through this several times. This is our table of contents for the book, and we're changing even the table of contents and adding things on there. We've assigned who is taking lead on those units. Again, we're revising a book. And so you'll see that there's been a lot of organization, a lot of links that we're adding for our purposes of going back and working on this project.
So we started this project at the beginning of spring. We did some review, and our notes for the review are in here. So that was really helpful to all of us, to see each other's notes. Excuse me.
But you'll see that there's probably about six of us right now working on this. So that's a good sized team. You don't want to have something too big or too small. If there are not enough participants in the team, then it's a lot of burden on those that are working on it. So you can decide how many, but yeah, in our team for revision of the book, we have about six people working on it.
And they all had different roles. There are four writers, and then we have two to people in our group that are helping with the, maybe, bringing in OER pictures or open pictures and then creating the attributions forum. So the writers are not doing everything. The writers are writing and then someone else is in charge of the attributions at the-- as we finish each unit, someone is in charge of accessibility and making sure that everything is accessible.
That's how we decided to break up our team so that the writers are just writing. So that is the ideas for a time-- and then our timelines are also listed in there, so you can take a look at those. Excuse me.
And then the deliverables, so you have to decide how or what is going to be part of this project deliverable. So initially, we had these big ideas, and we said we were going to create a book. We were going to create lessons and a workbook to go with it, a teacher's guide, and we were going to create Canvas modules, all in two semesters. And as we started, we realized that was impossible. That was a lot of work for that short timeline. Excuse me just a moment. Sorry about that.
So we decided as a team to only create the book, create the book with the teacher's guide. Someone else can take our book and create lessons. That can be another project. And then another project could be taking our book and creating Canvas modules from it. So all of these that we thought were going to be one project can end up being three separate projects because it's that much work.
So once you decide what the deliverables are going to be, where will your resources be housed? So these are intended to be open educational resources, and open means easily available to not only faculty but students as well and perhaps the open community, worldwide open community. So you want to think about, where will these deliverables be housed?
So some of the places that they can be housed are in your LMS. You can house these resources in your Canvas account. You can share them in Canvas Commons. And if you share them out in Canvas Commons, you can share them either with only your district or anyone who has access to Canvas.
You can share them on your website. And if you share them on your website, then they're open to all that know your website. But you can also share them with the OER community, which would be even a larger community. It's a worldwide community.
So some of these great organizations like OER Commons and Merlot-- and there are others. I'm just listing a couple here, but these types of repositories are open to anyone in the world. You don't have to have a membership to access OER Commons or Merlot. However, if you house them in your Canvas account and only share them with your district, then they will not be available to everyone at large.
And you might want to consider sharing them out with everyone because that might be one of the requirements of the grant. So if you're asking for grant dollars, if you're using federal funds, the idea is that we're not all reinventing the wheel, and you are sharing them out with others. Any questions about that? So far, we're good?
When you do share them out with others or when you create your own, one of the projects could be for your team not only to create OERs but also to curate them and house them so that your faculty has access to them. So I mentioned earlier here state academic senate, which is ASCCC, and ASCCC OERI has their own version of grants that many community colleges received. Many community colleges received millions of dollars within the last year to develop new OERs. So I have a list here, a link out to OERs by discipline. So let me show that to you.
So if your group is thinking of a project and they might want to revise an OER, an existing OER book, this might be a place where you can look at what is available out there. So these resources were created by community college and university districts. So this is a great place for us in adult education or continuing education to look at the resources that are there and perhaps rewrite them to meet the needs of our students because, again, these were created by credit colleges.
So I teach in ESL, so I can go to the link here for ESL, and I can look to see what was recently created through the grants received by the community colleges and universities. So if there's something that I like here-- maybe I'm looking for ESL writing, and I take a look at it, and I think, wow, this is great, but it's very high level for my students. I can take this book or parts of this book and rewrite it, and that can be a project for your project team.
So there's lots of ways of doing this. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, but again, a lot of the recent-- you'll notice if you're searching for OERs, a lot of the recent OERs that have been written have been written for a higher level that I know that-- I teach and continuing ed, and I know that some of these might be a little bit higher level than my students can handle, but I can always modify them because they are OERs.
And you'll see the license here, like this one is CC BY, so it's one of the most open licenses. I can definitely revise this. All of these are going to-- I don't believe any of these are going to have the ND.
The ND means non-derivatives, means you cannot change it. So due to the funding that these colleges and universities received, one of the stipulations was that it was-- that you can review or revise the materials. So most of these or all of these should not have the ND on there, so you can definitely revise them.
This is one that I use, and this one as well. So I've personally revised this one for my students. I haven't officially written the book, but I've revised some Canvas modules based on this book for my students. So there are lots of materials on here.
If you see BC, British Columbia, they do a lot of adult ed level OERs. So I highly recommend them as well. And Tim Krause is a great, great author. He has some great, great resources. I'm going to share-- actually share some of his resources with you at the end of the presentation.
Let's see. So oops. Let me go back. I think I went a little too far. Here we are. So those are the OERs by discipline. I have some samples here as well. And these all appear in the OER by Discipline.
As you saw, it's listed in alphabetical order. So lots and lots of topics for adult education, CTE. So you'll definitely see a lot of that. And again, those materials that are here on this list were written less than a year ago, so they're brand new materials.
So where else can your group or project group find OERs? So Canvas Commons has lots and lots of resources. Some of the newer materials are being added to Canvas Commons that we saw in the previous slide, but in Canvas Commons, you can find full courses, modules, single lessons, lectures, slides, assessments, quizzes, and more. So if you see something in there with the CC license, especially CC BY, you can definitely revise or you can adopt those materials, but that's another area where your project team can look at.
So some of the benefits of Canvas Commons is that if you're using Canvas as an LMS, you can directly download those materials into your Canvas course. You can search by discipline. You can search by name. I've added several resources in Canvas Commons, so has Monica Cueva who's one of our-- who is our technology coordinator at my district. She's a great, great resource as well.
And I have a link here for you. If you don't know how to import or view these resources in Canvas Commons, there's a link here for it on how to do that. So OER Commons is a great resource as well for your project team. It's basically a giant digital library, which is called a repository, of open educational resources. So this can be another area where your project team can look for resources to either adopt, or add to your digital, your own digital library, or use as a project to revise.
OER Commons is open. You don't have to have an account. But if you do create a free account, you can store all the resources that you like and you have found on their cloud. So that you're not taking up space in your computer, or on your Google Drive, or something like that.
And then also, if you do create resources, OER resources, you can add them to OER Commons. They have this video on how to use their Open Author. That's the name of their template. So if you do create resources, you can add your resource by using their Open Author template.
So I have some resources here for you. Earlier I talked about Creative Commons certification, so Creative Commons has the certificate program, and the link is here. So the certificate program offers an in-depth course on the Creative Commons licenses, open practices, and how to train your faculty on using these types of licenses.
Courses are comprised of readings, quizzes, discussions, practical exercises to develop your open skills. They provide personal engagement with expert facilitators. Again, I had the access to that copyright lawyer.
And because I am certified now with Creative Commons, the copyright lawyer is available to us. I believe it's like the third Friday of every month. So lots and lots of resources through Creative Commons certification.
Typically, if you do go to one of the boot camps, it is a 1 to 25 ratio. We had two facilitators in my program. I just went through this past January. And there were about 20 of us that participated. So it was a great, great ratio for us
Creative Commons also has an Open Education Platform. And this is a space for open education advocates and practitioners to identify, plan, and coordinate multinational open education content, practices, policy, activities to foster a better sharing of knowledge. So once you-- if you haven't already started with open educational resources or gone to professional development, once you do attend professional development, it's really exciting because everyone is there to share.
Everyone wants to share their information. They provide a lot of resources for you. So it's a great place for sharing, sharing your own resources and receiving content from others. So I highly recommend also belonging to their platform.
And then Creative Commons has trainings. So besides their certificate program, they all also offer other learning and training opportunities to support the global community in developing open educational resource expertise. So I love attending their presentations. They are very professionally done. And I always get a lot out of them. So these are linked out to the different parts of Creative Commons and their certification programs.
I also have some other tools here for you. So if you're just new at getting into open educational resources or you want to provide resources and links to your faculty, I have some information here. Again, the Creative Commons licensing.
And then once your faculty is wanting to create OERs, you would definitely want to add the licensing to those OERs. And there's a great chooser that Creative Commons has created, easy-to-use chooser here. There's also an Open Washington Attribution Builder for those that are already more advanced in understanding the licenses. They can use this attribution builder is a great resource. It's also open.
And then many of those repositories have their own remixers, and these remixers are really helpful if you're new to revising OERs. So let's say you found two books-- your project team decided they found two or three books that they really liked, and they want to take bits and pieces of those books to create a new OER book, LibreTexts, Merlot, and OER Commons all have these remixing tools to make that process a lot smoother, a lot easier for you.
Again, there's lots and lots of OER PD opportunities. Creative Commons has some great resources here for-- there's also a great training on open for anti-racism, which is also included in lots of trainings now. We want to be inclusive of everyone. And so there's lots of training and support for anti-racism as well.
I've included a resource toolkit that was shared with me at one of these trainings that I attended, one of the professional developments that I attended. When you click on this link, it'll prompt you to create your own copy. This is a great toolkit. I've shared it several times, but I can't emphasize how wonderful this toolkit is. So please check that out as well.
There are lots and lots of new open educational sites that are DEI-- that promote DEI. So lots of these sites have images-- for example, if you want to use for your presentations of people of color, disabled individuals-- so again, what I like about this is it's representative of who our students are. So whenever I'm looking at images, live images to add, I want to be inclusive and feel help my students feel included. So there are some sites here that follow that inclusion.
There are also other sites that I added here for icons. Pixabay on Unsplash, many of us use these already, but many of these sites are also being very inclusive in their projects. I've also included some videos here that will help you get started on attributions, Creative Commons licensing, and what those are. And here's a video that I created. That's on there as well.
And any questions? I know I went over a lot of resources, but any questions? Yes, ISKME is great. Thank you. Who shared that? JG, thank you.
Yes, ISKME is a great, great resource. They have a great conference. I think it's like every two years, but it's a great, great conference as well. So thank you for sharing that. I'm going to go ahead and add that.
Any other questions, comments? I know I went through some of these rather quickly. Any questions?
Speaker 3: I have a question.
Diana Vera-alba: Yes.
Speaker 3: So you mentioned a Canvas site. Is there a link to the site to--
Diana Vera-alba: Oh, yes, yes. So let me go back. So if you go to Canvas Commons and you search for my name-- let me-- let's just do that search together. So this is it, but I want to show you how to get to it. So if you log into your Canvas account-- so Jacqueline, do you already use Canvas?
Speaker 3: I don't use Canvas for this. I have Canvas for something else.
Diana Vera-alba: But you have access to Canvas Commons?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.
Diana Vera-alba: So when you log into Canvas, look at your global navigation bar here in the far left. So you should see Commons, so you're going to click on Commons. And you're going to-- in the search, you're going to type my name, Diana Vera-Alba.
So there's my name. And the resource page that I created is this one here, OER for SDCCD. So when you click on it, it's going to look a little bit different than when you download it. So what I want to show you what it looks like when you download it.
So this is everything that's in there. So I have modules, lots of pages within the modules, but it's at least organized. You'll see the organization here, the way it's being organized. Let me show you what it looks like once you download it, or it'll be similar to this. So let me just give it a second because this is what--
Speaker 3: And the Canvas Commons, I get through OTAN, right?
Diana Vera-alba: Well, if you already-- you already have access to Canvas or you don't?
Speaker 3: I don't have access, not to this Canvas. I have access to an entirely different one.
Diana Vera-alba: Oh, that's fine. Yeah, you don't need to go through OTAN. If you already have access to Canvas and you see Canvas Commons, then you will be able to download what I'm going to show you. Yes, if you already-- as long as you already have access to Canvas. When you don't have access to Canvas, then your district can inquire about Canvas through OTAN, but it has to be your entire dis-- or your--
Speaker 3: The entire district, OK.
Diana Vera-alba: Yes.
Speaker 3: All right.
Diana Vera-alba: Yes, or your program, your adult education program.
Speaker 3: OK, all right.
Diana Vera-alba: So once you download it, this is what you'll see. You'll have the home page. I believe the video transfers over. If it didn't transfer over, I can give you access to the video, but you'll have some resources. These are buttons to access the different parts of the Canvas account, but you can also access them here and modules, on the left here.
So I have some coordinator resources here. So I do have them subcategorized. And then I have Creative Commons licensing information here. I have attribution information, finding and using OERs, and then I have some repository information.
So these also have subcategories. So these are images and artwork. The ones that are starter, the ones that are frequently used, because I was asked which one which ones do I frequently use, so I have starred them here.
Then I have large repositories. And then a section for open access books. So all of the materials in here are open resources. And then under the repositories, I have OER by discipline.
So again, I created this for my faculty at my district, so you may or may not use some of these or have some of these disciplines. But I do have them in alphabetical order. So I have child development, emeritus, ESL. And within each of these subcategories, I have the different types of courses that we teach.
So let's say you're looking-- you're interested in looking at ESL resources that are reading resources, so then you would click here. And within that page, I have lots of resources. So I'll have the title of the book-- for example, this is a book-- and the link to the digital book, the type of license this book has, some information about that resource, and then this resource happens to have a student book and a teacher's edition book.
And this is actually the book that my team is revising because this is a book that I use for my ESL reading class. So there will soon be another copy of this book, but there are more resources here. So each section has the resource, the license, the links out to the digital version of those resources.
So again, this is something that I created for our faculty at my district. I shared it out to the Commons. So if you want to revise a version of this for your own purposes, at least there's a shell already out there for you to take a look at how to organize something like this.
When I created this, I didn't have a template, so it took-- I didn't have a Canvas template. But what I did is I went out to the different repositories. I searched through different community college and university sites to see how they organized their materials. So if you're interested in how I-- the nitty-gritty of how I went through this, please feel free to contact me, and I'd be happy to help you out with that as well.
Any other questions? Let's see. Jeff, thank you, Jeff Yes, because it was a huge project. And believe it or not I did it all in one semester, but my shell was all done in one semester.
But of course, I have been adding and revising and adding, and I'm so excited that next year, I've already recruited some people to help me out with it because it's a lot of work because something like that, whether it's on a website, or Google Sites-- or this can also be created on Google Sites. Once you create something like this, you have to maintain it. You have to make sure those links are working.
Thank goodness, Canvas has some resources. So I'm glad I did it on Canvas because there are resources where I can check links, but it is a lot a lot of work. So I'm glad that I already have a team that's going to help me next--
Speaker 3: On paper, yes.
Diana Vera-alba: Yeah. So any other questions?
Speaker 3: Next week? I don't know. I'll check. Let's see.
Diana Vera-alba: Oops, Jackie, we can hear you. I think it's Jackie. Jacqueline?
Speaker 3: Oh, sorry.
Diana Vera-alba: That's OK. Any other questions that I can answer for you? Well, thank you again. Thank you very much for being here.
I hope that this was helpful at least to get you going on your OER projects and teams. And again, if you have any questions beyond this, please feel free to contact OTAN. You can also contact me, and I will be happy to help out.