Cori Wilhelm: Okay and joining us today are Elise. Vote from University at Albany, and Nicole Simon from Nassau, Community College. Um. Both Elise and Nicole are,
Cori Wilhelm: I would say, experts at using oer using oercourseware, and they're going to share today about making that transition how to use the course we're in their courses um things like that. If you have questions, throw them in the chat, and we'll either address them if they fit in, or at the end of the presentation.
Cori Wilhelm: So welcome, Elisa Nicole. Um! Would you both like to just do a relative brief introduction? Share what you teach and what you use for courseware. At least you want to start.
Elise Vogt: Sure, i'm a lease vote. I teach biology at the University of Albany. I teach the second half of Jen Bio, so just the
Elise Vogt: that course, but every semester um. I also teach a handful of upper division bio courses, and I use oer for pretty much all of them. I use Lumen's waymaker platform for my Gen. Bio course, and then the other courses i'm either using an open ed textbook or just a sort of conglomeration of other resources that I've thrown together over the years for whatever the other courses are.
Cori Wilhelm: Thanks to nickel
Nicole Simon: Hi, Nicole Simon from Nasa Community College, I teach general science courses. So I teach optics, which is the second half of physics, and I use Oli for that. And I teach a sustainability course that I've actually created my own. Ah, we are in a forensic science course that I've prayed. I don't know we work for
Cori Wilhelm: it's great,
Cori Wilhelm: and I like that. You you both use your own oer. You both use things you've found on the web, and then your book, using a different courseware waymaker for Elise and all I for Nicole? Um, so can you share? Why you decided to transition to oer, and what that process was like.
Cori Wilhelm: Um, Nicole, Let's start with you
Nicole Simon: for one and more equitable access for my students. Nasa. While we're in the heart of Long Island, our students have a lot of difficulty with
Nicole Simon: being able to access course, materials and financial obligations all rounds are expensive, so to make it more equitable for my students, I figured if we were able to give them all your material. They would have that access from day one. They wouldn't have that obstacle in front of them. And more importantly,
Nicole Simon: we're setting them up for success. They're understanding what it is that it to be a college student what it is that they need for their course material, and it also allows the flexibility of what I can put in the course, knowing pain points and money areas for my students, i'm able to customize not only my course, but my course material,
Nicole Simon: knowing the population students that we serve.
Cori Wilhelm: Thanks at least
Elise Vogt: my sort of impetus for changing to oer was right along the same lines. I teach Jen Bio at Albany, which is a big course in the first semester. It's about one thousand students in the second semester. When they come to me it's about eight hundred um to get that many kids on board with textbooks that cause several hundred dollars each is a big ask, and my colleague, the teachers, the first half, and I really were starting to struggle with the big um textbook companies. We were getting
Elise Vogt: constantly changing reps. The costs were going up. We were getting bad information after bad information. We loved the book and the
Elise Vogt: homework program, but it wasn't sustainable. We started having kids tell exciting to us that they couldn't afford to do the homework, and they couldn't get a grade or get a passing grade, or get a good grade, because they couldn't afford to do the homework, and that really hit us pretty hard. Um! So the affordability issue was a big piece of that.
Elise Vogt: I didn't really
Elise Vogt: understand how flexible oer was going to be for me until after I really jumped into it. So making the textbook switch, and then finding waymaker and figuring out how flexible that could be was sort of like a extra little gift for us. My colleague doesn't use waymaker, but she has her own sort of group of homework assignments that she has made to add to the openstacks textbooks that we switch to.
Cori Wilhelm: Awesome. Thank you. Um, And I guess, kind of
Cori Wilhelm: in general. How do you use o our courseware in your classes,
Cori Wilhelm: because you do both do teach online or in-person or a combination
Elise Vogt: over the past couple years, a little bit of everything.
Cori Wilhelm: And so how does that course work for you?
Elise Vogt: So for me, in my big class, for the the course I use waymaker for um. The textbook actually lives within waymaker. So Wemaker lives in blackboard. The students access it through a link there, so it's free to get to it. It's not navigating multiple websites which can be lost on a very large number of students. Um! So they get to it right through their blackboard page, and in each chapter Um, it's sort of broken up into chapter. One point, two, one,
Elise Vogt: three, one point, four whatever. In each little tile they read through the textbook. There are links to videos and practice questions. They get to the practice questions at the end of each section that counts for sort of like homework points. And then there's a quiz at the end of each chapter. That also counts for part of their overall grades. So it's a way to do
Elise Vogt: a formative assessment. As we go. I can keep up with their progress as a course or as a class group, and kind of see what percentage of them are doing well or not so well on any particular topic. And look at that before I go in to teach on that content. And then I can kind of amend what i'm going to spend more time on
Elise Vogt: in my other courses, where i'm not using waymaker as the platform we're using an an oer textbook. The openstacks textbook for my human fizz class. I also recommend that for my human disease course,
Elise Vogt: and then for my human disease course. I'm also just pulling in a lot of links and articles. I link to the Cdc. And Mayo Clinic and Nih, or whatever branch of the Nih is appropriate for that lecture. So they're getting more sort of hands on, and the types of resources they might use in a future career. They're getting to interact with that
Elise Vogt: in an undergrad course where We're giving them a little more guidance,
Nicole Simon: Austin. Thanks. And Nicole, can you ask?
Yeah,
Nicole Simon: i'm a little bit of a combination with my courses? Um, my forensics course they have a really interactive textbook which is great. They can access it again right through, like we said their blackboard course, and since it's a pediat, they'll carry over very easily to to D two l. So that should be an issue
Nicole Simon: with my optics course. It's a light and color, of course, for general science students. So being able to have that assessment component through the olive platform is fantastic,
Nicole Simon: they said, you know, being able to go in and take a look at where my students have those pain points before class. You can adjust pretty quickly what it is you need to focus on for the topics. It's again fully interactive. They can download it if they want. But more importantly, you have that formative assessment. Students will go through. They have
Nicole Simon: the obviously the notes, but they have short tutorials. I've embedded um work problems that I've created, so that the students can actually see. Okay, This helps me beyond the lecture, because I didn't take notes where I put it involved the first time I have that information, and I can always reference it.
Nicole Simon: And then you have that formative assessment. At the end I also wrote all new labs. We went remote, so that they have full simulations and full labs, right of a textbook,
Nicole Simon: my sustainability course. I've been writing it in years, and I use that for my coil course as well. So students have been able to add to it. What's nice about it is. I have to have things going on with different countries for different projects. So it's building on itself, which is great. Now, students can reference. What's going on throughout the entire world? What sustainability issues It's more real pedagogy
Cori Wilhelm: that's awesome, and it ties to the sustainability theme of open access week this year. So perhaps you want to share that out.
Cori Wilhelm: What is your perspective? Um. This is kind of a a two-sided question. What impact has using oer? And using only our course we had on your approach to teaching,
Cori Wilhelm: then the other side. What impact do you feel It's had on your students?
Cori Wilhelm: Um, and Maybe we'll start with Nicole this time,
Nicole Simon: I think, having the flexibility in teaching, you know, you don't want to just keep going in and teaching the same material over and over. If the students are changing. Obviously you should be changing with the times. But having that ability to you're not recruiting your material, you're just formatting it in a different way that meets the needs of today's students
Nicole Simon: also being able to take a look at where students are succeeding, and where students get a little bit more help and love the assessment component.
Nicole Simon: I'm an assessment fellow on my campus. So when people see me they immediately go, they run. They they don't want to deal with assessment, but to be able to say You have a platform with an oer that. You pull the data from
Nicole Simon: not just for your campus assessment, but for your students learning, for your understanding of where they're failing in being able to tie topics together, or where they're succeeding and being able to tie topics together, is so vital for the students to be able to have that information right at their hands.
Elise Vogt: I agree The flexibility is a huge piece of it. Then, like I said before, it was sort of a surprise to me that oer would be that flexible because we sort of
Elise Vogt: picked this openstack's book, but with waymaker I can move the things around. I can reorganize the chapters. I can pull stuff in and out of specific chapters. It doesn't cost anything or really change the way i'm using the
Elise Vogt: the program. So if I decide I want to teach this section of ecology, but I want to put it in that chapter. When I move that section. All of the assessment questions go with it. So I don't have to sort of dig through all of that. It's sort of built in.
Elise Vogt: So I I like that. I can add and take away things year over year. You know the students really liked that topic last year. Let me add more of that. Maybe take away something that feels a little dated, or needs a refresh or something like that. Um. The openstacks, books, and waymaker come with slide decks and assessment, and you know, homework,
Elise Vogt: written homeworks that you can use or not. I don't use the written ones during the regular semester, but I do for my summer course. I just assess my summer course a little differently.
Elise Vogt: The other thing that I love about waymaker that I was really iffy about the beginning. I did one of the Lumen circles for using waymaker when I first started using it. I was a little antsy about all the stuff that came with it. I mean It's a cool program. It's the homework program, and I was just antsy about the assessment piece of it. One of the things they offer is a communication tool that basically allows you to automatically communicate with the students when they've hit or missed specific goals that you set
Elise Vogt: so you could set your mastery level at seventy five percent. And if a student has taken the quiz, miss that seventy five percent. It will automatically send them a message that you can sort of adjust, and I ah personalize them quite a bit. So it sounds a little more like
Elise Vogt: I would use instead of robot verbiage. Um! But then the students get messages from me that say, hey, it looks like maybe you're not doing so hot on that. Let's review that here's when my office hours are whatever, or if they're doing really well, it'll say, Hey, great job! It's great to have students that try as hard as you do something like that. It always has my name at the bottom
Elise Vogt: way. More students that wouldn't normally reach out, reach out in response to those. So it really has a big impact on the students because they're not paying for it. They're getting a really good quality textbook that I've sort of phoned to meet our course's needs,
Elise Vogt: and even though some of those, most of those messages are automated Um, they feel like It's a direct communication from me. It's a little bit of handholding or a little bit of cheerleading that I can't do with eight hundred kids, but they're still getting it,
Elise Vogt: and sometimes they catch me and they'll send me an email and say, did you really email me this at three o'clock in the morning when I did that quiz,
Elise Vogt: and i'll say you know what? No, but I am really proud of your work, and and keep it up, or whatever. But a lot of times, those sort of the students in the middle, in sort of that B and C. Range that I don't usually have as much contact with are getting all those messages, and then are emailing me and saying, Hey, I saw this message, you know. Thanks for saying that Also, I had another question about this,
Elise Vogt: And so it's getting me in personal contact with a lot more students than I would normally be in contact with. Ups. The number of emails per day a little bit, but I think it's worth it to have that sort of one on one connection in a really big class that you don't normally have.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, that's great. And um, you said, at least you learned about that during the Lumen circle. Is that correct?
Elise Vogt: Yeah, I did. The there's an onboarding lumen circle. I don't know the exact name of it,
Elise Vogt: the using waymaker. And when I first started using Waymaker I was itfy about that I thought it was going to be really sort of stiff, or feel really
Elise Vogt: too formally, or something I don't know. And you're actually able to go in and personalize the exact message the students get and make sure. It really sounds like you and I've found it to be very, very effective.
Cori Wilhelm: That's great.
Cori Wilhelm: And Nicole just jumping. You um also participate in lemon circles. Correct, I think you facilitate What's your been? Been your experience with that
Nicole Simon: I went through. Well, when it was Faculty Guild. But I also continued through women's circles, taking their oer and a pedagogy course, and then I came back as a facilitator, and being able to share your experiences, share your resources
Nicole Simon: and get faculty to just take a step back and realize that we are is not something that you have to create. There's so much material out there. It's a matter of finding a material that works best for you and your students, and we've all changed textbooks over the years.
Nicole Simon: But here you have an opportunity to not keep looking for the same material. You know. Everyone always worries about my ancillaries. You're getting more and more ancillaries that are coming out with who we are. People are taking a stand and saying, That's what I miss. You know what I'm going to either create it,
Nicole Simon: and I have it, and i'll just share it out. But more importantly, to take a step back and not be so scared of what o ours are. It's the same thing as a publisher's textbook. The only difference is, you're passing along the savings to your students, and you're passing along your knowledge and insight of one hundred and fifty
Nicole Simon: being able to be flexible and teach what your students need to learn, not with somebody else who's not in the classroom thinks they need to learn.
Cori Wilhelm: Thanks, Um! And so it sounds like both of you. Put a lot of time into your courses, into your course prep and into kind of customizing,
Cori Wilhelm: I guess. What would you say to faculty? Who say, You know I don't have the time, or you know I don't know if it's worth my time to do this. Um, you. You are obviously both pretty dedicated to your students. So what would be your response to that question or advice. Um, and we'll start with the least.
Elise Vogt: It's not no work, I mean It's not like you're going to flip a switch and go from your standard publishers textbook to a full oer course,
Elise Vogt: but making that jump wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be like. Nicole was just saying, You know you're going to go from a publisher's textbook that's costing several hundred bucks per kid, and there's going to be, you know, issues with getting grades, and it's down this day. You know things like that.
Elise Vogt: It's not a
Elise Vogt: it's not just taking one step, and then everything's, you know. Poof! It's done for you, but a lot more of it already exists than you'd even think. Oh, we are, I think, when I first started looking into it, it felt like it was going to be this huge leap, and I was going to have this huge onboarding,
Elise Vogt: and it's not nothing. It's still changing textbooks, but there's so much already that exists that you can just take and tweak a little bit instead of totally starting from scratch. Um. So I took the steps with my upper division courses. First, because they tend to be smaller classes. They tend to be a little more flexible than the mass of of freshmen that we have in Genbio. So I kind of got my feet wet with some of my smaller classes that
Elise Vogt: can be a little more flexible, and then moved in to
Elise Vogt: taking the big jump with my big class, and that was even, I think, easier because of the waymaker platform and all of the the flexibility of that, and the existing homework and assignments, and slide decks and assessments, and all of that. And i've sort of just added in as I go here over a year. I add me exam questions. I move things around a little bit. It doesn't have to be this sort of all or nothing. You can take that transition over a couple of years, and and kind of see how it works, and continue to amend it the way you would normally do.
Elise Vogt: But This gives you that extra little bit of flexibility, I think.
Cori Wilhelm: Great and Nicole,
Nicole Simon: I agree. I mean either it goes slow or go all in there. There's really no middle ground if you're going to go all in. Then again, it's just like switching a textbook from a publisher.
Nicole Simon: Take a look at what you need for your course and what your students need, and then you're just matching up what O or works the best for what? All your platform, and then customizing it by just having that ability to change topics and change order. If you're going to go with a dedicated platform like Oli or
Nicole Simon: Lumin waymaker, certainly go through Lumen circles and learn about the waymaker program,
Nicole Simon: other faculty who have been using it, and they will give you experience that will give you insight, and we'll learn more and more about it if you're using another platform like a will, I? Or if you're using a standalone book, one
Nicole Simon: through a variety of different sources go through them in circles again. You have that opportunity to work with other faculty to for the insights, to see what's going on. And to understand. This is what I should be looking at, what people think. Oh, we are not just a textbook. So many options for your students.
Nicole Simon: Empower them, give them the option to to learn as much as they can in such a variety of formats that are flexible for them.
Elise Vogt: I think it's important, too, that as the students move on, they graduate and go to graduate school or end up in a in a career for a lot of my kids. It's something medically relevant. They're not going to have a textbook that has all the answers using open ed resources allows me to sort of push them out of the nest a little bit and away from a standard textbook and toward the types of resources that they should be using when they have a question in that field, you know, teaching them how to find appropriate, scientifically accurate
Elise Vogt: and reputable sources. So we're sort of bringing in that scientific literacy in all my courses by sort of
Elise Vogt: pushing them away from the standard textbook and forcing them into finding good videos, or finding good websites, or finding scientific papers, and understanding what those mean as a resource. I think that's a really big piece that we can bring in, and that could work for all stem faculty, just teaching them how to find good resources. Um is important everywhere,
Elise Vogt: but the the flexibility of oh, the oer anything allows you to add that in to sort of bring that in where the the regular textbook they get so stuck in using that to find all the answers o we are allows you to sort of,
Elise Vogt: I don't know, get them moving towards actual real-life, resourcing for for all kinds of topics
Nicole Simon: to add to that. What's wonderful about it is! It's not just you finding the material. Give the students the ability to go out and find it.
Nicole Simon: Once you empower them to find where to look for it, let them go out and curate it, and you're building up their knowledge base, not just in your discipline, but in the whole idea of going out and doing actual research to find material for courses,
Nicole Simon: and then you happen, for later on as well.
Cori Wilhelm: There are many librarians on this waiting right now, so I think they're all you know, silently cheering, that you want students to learn proper research and and finding resources. Thank you for that.
Cori Wilhelm: What? This is my last question, and then we'll certainly open up for um questions from the group. Um! What advice would you give um to a faculty member interested in incorporating um aware or specifically um courseware with who we are.
Cori Wilhelm: Well, certainly, Nicole,
Nicole Simon: I'd say, absolutely try it.
Nicole Simon: But what is the worst that happens? You're giving your students an opportunity that they hadn't had before. You're giving them the flexibility that they hadn't had before, and giving them the financial freedom that they haven't had before. You can always start small and introduce small components until you feel comfortable, and then make the full switch for those people who are going out and finding their own out who we are material. You're not alone. There are people throughout all of Sunni who have all of this resource that are willing to share that it's the whole part of who we are.
Nicole Simon: We have the information we're here to share, and we're here to help. If you're building your own material, start with the end of your semester, so that you're starting to curate that information by mid- semester. You have that. Oh, wait a minute. I have the second half of my semester I found stuff for, and I can start incorporating it without having to have that Sunday night
Nicole Simon: worried that you know I don't have anything for tomorrow. I mean, you still have your old material. But now you can start bringing it in slowly and starts making that switch over time.
Cori Wilhelm: I'm A: very good. Yeah,
Elise Vogt: I kind of took this step of making my textbooks recommended instead of required, and then not relying just on that one book for all of the resources, and adding, in some things, you know, just linkedin and blackboard. Here are some links to some resources and stuff,
Elise Vogt: and then the textbook was optional, and then eventually I pulled away from an optional textbook that cost any money, and use the oer textbook as an optional resource,
Elise Vogt: and kept all of those other things that I had built in over time with Jen Bio. It was a little bigger of a of a thing just going straight to the textbook, but
Elise Vogt: the textbook exists. There are more than one option, even for general courses that tend to be larger and tend to be sort of broader in what they cover. There's a couple of options for the general biology textbook.
Elise Vogt: Pretty sure there's ones for chemistry and physics, and some of the other bigger gen stem sort of courses. Um, there! There are books out there with all of this stuff that the package looks just like a publishing company's package, but it's free, and that to me is is enough of a a motivator to to take that jump,
Elise Vogt: because so many of our students have so much financial obligation.
Elise Vogt: Tuition enough is is enough, as on its own, adding several hundred dollars of textbooks per course. It's a major hurdle for some of these kids, so if we can give them mostly the same resources for free.
Elise Vogt: I don't know anybody who uses oer who wouldn't talk at you for an hour about it. So anybody on your campus that's using it is likely to want to talk your ear off about it.
Cori Wilhelm: We hope so, like I said, I, I think faculty um really appreciate and benefit from hearing from other faculty. Um. And so this has been
Cori Wilhelm: extremely valuable to hear both of you to speak about. You know the reasons behind using it, and then how you're using it. Um, do. We have questions right now from the audience at all,
Cori Wilhelm: and you can feel free to unmute and ask or throw it in the chat.
Cori Wilhelm: And maybe while we're waiting um do either of you have any
Cori Wilhelm: resources or things that you feel really really helped you make the transition, or after your transition that you would want to share out with the faculty. Is there any kind of take away from your experience,
Cori Wilhelm: and I know i'm just throwing that out. I didn't give you that question ahead of time. Sorry
Elise Vogt: I used the the Lumen circle for Waymaker. That was a huge help, just in finding all the little sort of the nitty-gritty pieces of it that I might not have even found on my own um, and then using it in slightly different ways, implementing it in slightly different ways in your course.
Elise Vogt: Um. And then I've done a couple of the other Lumen circles, too, that I found really really helpful for using and implicating. You know, sort of implementing different kinds of oer in your courses in ways that I hadn't thought about before I found the Lumen circles to be incredibly helpful with the transition.
Cori Wilhelm: Great thanks,
Nicole Simon: I agree. I mean it. It's just a a fantastic resource to have, I will usually go in and populate as facilitator whole list of oer resources to tell people that if you haven't found something, yet it's because you're not looking.
Nicole Simon: It's not that you're not looking for You're just not looking.
Nicole Simon: It exists. There are very few courses that I've come across that don't have an O, we are somewhere, and for those I say, go forth and create um. You have the resources everybody shares, and just being again being able to see how people use it for different reasons and different ways in their courses, whether it's your discipline or not,
Nicole Simon: I mean, I still learn from the fellows that I have in my circle on how they use, and why they use, and where we are with their students. It just gives you more ideas that you can then share with your students to help them one hundred and fifty
Cori Wilhelm: and one last question I just kind of thought of over here, both of you. Um! It sounds like have had really positive experiences using where we are, and kind of crafting it to be what you want?
Cori Wilhelm: Have you found a downside or a negative to using oer over the years,
Cori Wilhelm: and we will start with Nicole
Nicole Simon: I. Haven't found any downside. In fact, I've never come across a faculty member who's used. So we are and has gone back. The publisher's material.
Nicole Simon: Um, I love the flexibility I love that I can add to it. I love that, you know. If i'm stuck with somebody with something, somebody's always there to help put it into a course. Um, you can change things as often as you need. You have the ability to pull out assessment information. You have the ability to customize it for your students. So no, there is no downside, I mean for students to turn around and say, I have a book from day one, and i'm using it and it's helping me.
Nicole Simon: It's it's it.
Hm! Hm!
Elise Vogt: I don't think there's necessarily a downside to it. Um like I said it's not no work, but I enjoy the kind of work that it creates for me. I've learned a lot about the topics that i'm using oer for
Elise Vogt: more than I would have, or maybe just teaching that thing right out of a textbook, because I'm having to really critically evaluate the source material i'm putting up there and create the material kind of from scratch. It's not
Elise Vogt: that that's work, certainly, but that's what I like to do. That's why i'm in education to begin with. So creating those materials and really digging into a content. I've never taught before, or Haven't really taught on that level before is fun, I think
Cori Wilhelm: All right. That's that's wonderful to hear from you um in that way. Um! And so I don't think we've had any questions in the chat. Um, Is there anything else before we let our speakers go?
Cori Wilhelm: Um, Nicole and Elise, I really appreciate you presenting today. I think this has been really helpful, and, like I said, we'll make this resource available to faculty.