- Welcome, everyone, to
our Open Ed Week webinar,
"Students and OER Advocacy."
This is Una Daly from CCCOER,
and I'm really excited to
see all of you out here
to come and hear about
the power of students
in OER advocacy.
I've had the pleasure of attending about
15 webinars this week.
There's been close to 100
available all week long
during Open Education Week.
There's more later on today and tomorrow
if you haven't had your fill yet.
It's been great information.
So today we're going to be talking about
the power of students
in advocating for OER.
And we're gonna hear this
from several perspectives,
from a national organization,
and a California student
OER advocacy group
who has built a toolkit,
and also from the ambassador,
the student ambassador program that the
California State University system runs
through their affordable
learning solutions.
And I think you're going
to be really impressed
with the work that they're all doing.
Next slide.
I'd like to now introduce our speakers.
Cailyn Nagle, who is
the Affordable Textbooks
Campaign Director at US PIRGs.
And do you want to say anything, Cailyn?
- [Cailyn] Yeah, so
just a little bit about
US PIRG and the work that we do.
So we are a national
organization that works
very closely with the student PIRGs,
one of our partner groups.
And they have presence in nine states
with over 30 chapters
as a student directed,
student funded, nonprofit organization
working to protect the
public from very powerful
special interests and have been running
an affordable textbook
campaign since the early 2000s.
So I'm really excited to be here today.
- Thank you, Cailyn.
And next up is Jenifer Vang,
who is the Student Ambassador
for the Affordable Learning Solutions
at the San Jose State University.
- [Jenifer] Hello
everyone, this is Jenifer
with Affordable Learning Solutions.
I'm one of the first student ambassadors,
and I'm really excited to be here
to talk to you all today.
- Thank you, Jennifer.
And last but not least, Natalie Miller,
who was part of the California...
She was one of the leads of
the OER Student Advocate Group.
She was also the winner of the 2018
Open Education Consortium Student Award
and is a recent graduate of
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
- Thank you, no, yeah, I'm
excited to be here, everybody,
and I'm happy to represent
our student advocates group
and tell you about our toolkit,
which I'll define in
a moment, don't worry.
- Great, all right, Cailyn
and Jenifer and Natalie,
take it away.
- [Cailyn] Great, so
I'm going to get started
by just saying that
students have always been
a part of the open textbook movement.
They have been a part of it
through the student PIRGs,
through student governments,
through student groups
that are on campus.
And through their work,
they have been able to have
significant victories.
And here you can see just a
sample of across the country
everything from working on departmental
or individual change all the way up to
the center bottom you can
see one of the Cal PIRG
student members meeting
with Senator Dick Durbin,
talking about the federal
open textbooks pilot.
So from the hyper local
to the national level,
students have been driving
the open textbook movement
since the very beginning.
And it's resulted in some
pretty significant victories.
So just to kind of go over the
scope of student involvement,
students were part of
the early research into
open textbooks and the problems with the
broken textbook market
since the early 2000s.
In 2004, students at
University of California Irvine
identified the textbook
market as a place where
powerful special interests
were playing a role
in the market to the disadvantage
of students and the public.
And so they started
running the open textbooks
and affordable textbooks campaign
that has continued this very day.
And they were a central
part of our first report
that we put out back in 2004, Ripoff 101.
And then when we talk
about policy victories,
I think a really excellent example of this
was at the Rutgers University system.
Students were a central part in advocating
for the large open textbook grant program
that that university
system has implemented
and has to date saved
students over $3 million.
The graphic in here is
from about a year ago
and since then they've even
gone on to save even more.
The library there has done a fantastic job
and has worked with the
students every step of the way
and the students there are still involved
in not only marketing the program
that the university library system runs
but also in continuing
to push the envelope
on this campus and throughout the country
on how do we make textbooks
more active and affordable.
And then not only are students working to
drive adoption for open textbooks
and make sure that open textbook policies
and programs are strong,
they are also defending students
and students as consumers
from products that they just don't think
give them a fair shot.
So whether that is
automatic billing programs,
like the one cited here
at UNC Chapel Hill,
where the student government
has been an incredibly
loud and active voice in pushing back
against a single publisher
inclusive access deal
in favor of an opt in multi publisher
automatic billing deal,
which they feel is a better deal for them,
to pushing back against access codes
or making sure that they just have
the options that they need.
So whether it's research,
advocating for policy,
or pushing back against bad deals,
students have always been central
to the open textbook movement as a whole.
And to be honest, students get involved
for all of the reasons that faculty,
librarians, administrators,
and educators get involved.
Whether it is they care about...
Whether they care about affordability
or equity in the classroom
or student success
or even broader concepts
like democratizing
information and education,
students get in involved for
as many reasons as anyone else.
And often we focus on the
affordability element,
but the open movement and
the open textbook movement
has very broad motivations.
And you can find students
that are motivated
by every single one of them.
And not only is it
important to remember that
students are interested in being involved
for a broad set of reasons,
but it is important students are involved
for a broad set of reasons.
They are the most impacted stakeholder
in the textbook market,
and they're the ones
facing the barrier of cost.
So they have the most to gain through
open textbook expansion and adoption.
They also want to see a more
inclusive educational system
and be a part of building it.
And then student involvement
in the open textbook push
really speaks, I think,
to the ethics behind open.
Whether it's the idea that
students can be collaborative
partners in the classroom
or can participate
in the creation of
information and knowledge,
students benefit from all of these things
and all of these things are reasons why
you should include
students in the movement
and even center students in the movement.
So students are involved
through all different ways.
And if you are a student
looking to get involved
or you are a person already involved
that's looking for students,
I would suggest first starting
with the student government.
Th Academic Affairs
Committee for most student
governments are the ones
focusing on affordability.
The other place in student governments
that tend to focus on these issues
is the internal vice president's office.
And then it's also possible there might be
affordability working groups if a student
government senator, for example,
ran on a platform of affordability.
And then individual student groups,
like the student PIRG
chapters on campuses are also
running campaigns to make
textbooks more affordable.
But other groups also care about this.
So whether it is groups
working on affordability
concerns overall, maybe they
mostly focus on tuition,
but this is something they
also have to have a say in.
Or maybe they come from an academic field
where textbook and materials
cost are especially high.
These are great points
to look for students
that are doing good work on this issue.
And the last is actually
through the university itself,
particularly through the library.
So a lot of university
libraries will have internships,
volunteer opportunities,
or events that students
can hop onto even if they're not involved
in the day to day
activities of the library.
There might be a place
to loop them in there.
So now that we've talked
about where to find
students that are involved
or if you're a student
where to find a place to get involved,
I want to hand it over to Natalie.
She's going to talk a little bit about
the open textbook toolkit
that she worked on.
- [Natalie] Thanks, Cailyn.
So I'm gonna back up a little bit,
just explain a little of my
story just really briefly.
I started off with the opportunity to work
at College of the Canyons not
even knowing what OER was.
And I had the opportunity
to create a whole program
and pretty much help get
it started and rolling
from what they had.
And they had textbooks
and they had a faculty
but nobody to really
get everything organized
and get the numbers counted.
So I was really enjoying that opportunity.
And then I transferred to Cal Poly
and I've still been able to
do a little bit of work there.
But what I wanted to
focus on was the goal.
The goal I had at College of the Canyons
and what I continued to have
a little bit at Cal Poly
and I just graduated in December
is how do we get more
students involved in OER
and more students aware of it?
And as Cailyn was talking about,
there's a lot of organizations and groups
but overall there's still that barrier of
what about the average student that maybe
doesn't join clubs and such?
So next slide.
So taking open to the next level.
Looking at that goal.
After I graduated from
College of the Canyons
and got my Associate's and continued on,
I wanted to take open to another level,
because I didn't know
anybody at Cal Poly yet
and I was like, this is
a perfect opportunity
to really understand what it's like
to bring open to a campus that
doesn't have much student involvement.
And so thinking in a bigger picture,
I looked at a statewide
initiative and we decided,
I proposed this to a couple
of different individuals,
including Barbara, Una, and James,
who are all on this call.
And I said, hey, why don't
we take this statewide?
Why aren't all the
schools working together?
Faculty from all the schools
are working together,
but students aren't working
together as much yet,
at least in California.
And the result was a
team of eight students
from different universities
across California.
We had community college students,
we had CSU students, and some of them even
became private students
after they transferred.
So I'll go to the next slide, yeah.
So what did our eight students do?
Our goal was to create a toolkit.
So we got a grant and we just went for it.
And so I decided to
define what a toolkit is,
because yeah, I can
throw this word around,
but nobody really understands what it is.
So a toolkit is a guide
created by students,
for students, helping to
inform and give suggestions
on what open educational resources are
and how to incorporate them on campus.
So pretty much everything Cailyn said,
everything mentioned in this PowerPoint
and in this presentation
is kind of outlined
in our toolkit, and it's really amazing,
because it helps the
student who knows nothing
and it helps the student who
knows tons about open ed.
I learned from just making the toolkit,
but as well then there's students who have
never even know what open is.
And so they could start with
chapter one, what is OER?
So going on with what is a toolkit,
I'm going to talk about our experience
in making the toolkit
and just to share about
what students had to go through
and what the process
was in this kind of new
and revolutionary idea,
at least for California.
So I made it into kind of three steps.
I wanted to talk about my experience of
creating the team, what
our team had to go through,
what we had to consider
when looking for students
to get involved in this.
Thinking of the essentials.
What had to go into the toolkit?
How did we have to develop it?
What was our goal?
And our experience, so
then just a little bit more
about the pros and cons
of what we went through
and just some broad points there.
And as you can see, we
have a panelist photo
with some of our students there as well.
There'll be pictures.
I'm sorry if I forget to describe them.
But they're kind of just more pictures
showing off what we did.
We had the opportunity to
visit so many conferences
and be present in so many things,
which as a student who
wasn't even graduated
was something I couldn't even dream of,
especially when starting college.
Next slide.
So in creating the team,
we had to think about
what students are involved in OER.
Where were they at, what
colleges were they at?
How are we going to communicate with them?
Were we going to see each
other in person very often?
Our team actually ended
up seeing each other
in person maybe once or
twice as all eight students,
but we saw each other,
maybe two or three of us
would see each other at a conference
maybe every couple of months.
So we didn't really see
each other in person
that much over a full year of work.
How can each student contribute?
Where were our strengths at?
We had students who were
strong in government,
students who were strong
in creating workflows.
I was definitely a workflow
organizational person.
We had students who really
loved working with faculty
and wanted to share the communication
that they had had there.
And then how can each student
represent the community?
How can they represent OER?
What can they contribute?
We had students who ended up
joining different corporations
including, I'm blanking on the name,
but we had students who ended up joining
different organizations in open
representing them as a student,
which is awesome, after
our OER advocates group.
What can we reasonably
expect out of each student?
We have to remember that we're
still full time students.
We're still doing these things.
I was a computer science major.
That was a lot of work on my end,
but I wanted to do it that bad.
And everybody else had their
full loads and jobs even.
And so we had to figure out what to expect
out of all of them.
And how can each person
complement each other?
We ended up splitting
ourselves into groups
of about three people per group,
and we had to figure out, okay,
if you wanted to do editing,
let's go put you in this group.
If you wanted to do more
organizational skills
and maybe writing content,
the first round of content,
let's put you in that group.
Just all about how to
complement each other
and who worked the best with each other.
Next slide.
So thinking of essentials,
you actually see a
screenshot over here of
one of our first pages
of the toolkit, which is awesome.
So that's just literally what is OER.
So you can feel free to browse
that after the PowerPoint,
whatever works.
So thinking of essentials,
we had to think about
what we wanted to go into our project.
So what do we want out of it?
As students, what do we want out of it?
As the creators, what
do we want out of it?
Just there's so many things
to get out of this toolkit.
What is our goal as a
team and as a project?
So as a team, I decided
for us that we really
wanted to get to know each other
and that we really wanted
to have bonding time,
and I didn't just want it
to be a formal process.
And getting to know
each other actually made
our experience much
smoother and it made it
more fun and we actually
looked forward to meeting
versus kind of dreading them and saying
I don't know if I really want to go.
Is this going to work?
So I think that team
bonding is what really
helped us as students.
And then now we're all
friends and acquaintances
and we don't feel alone in this battle,
not battle, but in this
movement of open education.
What should meetings consist of?
We actually, we started
off by having really
formal agendas in the beginning.
Then we kind of rotated
to less formal agendas
but working sessions
and then we eventually
transitioned straight to
pretty much working sessions,
where we had announced
what we're going to do
for that day and just go for it.
And that worked well for us,
but it took a little bit of transition
to figure out what was
the best for our team.
What are reasonable due dates?
With our school schedules and
all our different schedules,
what made sense?
How else can we benefit those involved?
As I said before, it was
really important for us
to benefit the other students involved
and makes sure that each one of us
could have takeaways from this.
Because half of the reason
that we were involved
in this toolkit is because we wanted to
participate and help our peers
and speak in different things
and have unique opportunities.
And how can we get external
individuals involved?
So the whole idea of we're
creating this toolkit
just to make sure that
other students from other
schools can get involved
who may not know anything
but they just want to help out
and they think it's a
really interesting topic.
So those are just some of the examples
of what we went through and just ideas of
what went through the process of thinking
what's going to go into this book?
Next slide.
So the pros and cons.
I just made an intro here,
so you can keep going.
Next slide.
Yeah, there we go, okay.
So another screenshot of our book over
on the side there, OER activism.
So the pros was understanding
how to work with
individuals in different locations.
For us as young individuals,
we don't do webinars as often.
We don't go to conferences
and have the opportunity to even speak.
If we go to a conference,
we're usually just listening
in the back just like in a classroom.
Practicing editing and curation skills.
Just the fact of being
able to get involved
and make a book was awesome.
The opportunity to have
students fully control
a program with advisement.
Students don't have
many opportunities where
they get to control things today,
and this is slowly changing,
and I've seen this change so much
in the time I've been involved with open.
But the opportunity of
students just fully control it
but at the same time
have somebody they can
comfortably ask for advisement.
Like hey, does this
presentation look okay?
Getting to work on something bigger
than our university and colleges.
A lot of people in open, or a
lot of students, I should say,
I think they kind of get the idea that
they're confined to their university.
They'll go talk about their university
and tell about their university,
but the truth is that the community
is one of the hugest parts.
And nobody's in it alone
and everybody's trying
to get in the same pool,
so why shouldn't we share ideas
and why shouldn't we collaborate more
and go to each other's campuses
and advocate for each other?
Getting, or, I said that one.
Collaborating on each other's programs.
Once again, on our calls
there'd be times where
one of our students
would be like, you know,
I really want to do an outreach program,
but I've never done one before.
Does anybody have any ideas for campus
that has commuting students?
And then we'd all pitch
our different ideas
and propose what we had and
that was a super neat space
because it didn't just
end the conversation
on web searches and
conversations with ourselves.
Having a safe space
for students to open up
about an issue that may be
sensitive around some faculty.
So that's the whole idea
of sometimes faculty
can be sensitive to be like,
why aren't you making your own textbook?
You never want to make
it a defensive thing,
but having students or
a group come together
and just be able to talk about that openly
was just so nice.
And then just getting to
know other students in OER.
As I said before, the community in OER
is one of the things that's
always attracted me to it.
And to be able to have other
individuals my age especially
and that I know can
help carry on the legacy
has been so revolutionary.
So now let's go into the cons.
So the cons were time conflict issues.
With students that's always a problem.
We have classes at different times,
different school schedules.
There's semester and quarters
that got confusing sometimes.
As far as technicalities
go, Google Docs wasn't
able to handle a lot of our formatting,
so we actually had to
reformat our book a lot,
which took a lot of time and
just kind of a waste of it.
Having to track down
individuals who were MIA.
Students sometimes just kind of go missing
and you're like where'd they go?
And you can't get in contact with them,
so you just kind of
work with what you have.
And not having a program
like this exist before
and having to model it ourselves.
That was a whole process in itself
and just kind of trial and error
in a lot of different ways.
Next slide.
So what does this mean for you?
For students out there, it means a chance
for you to get involved and get your other
campus members involved.
For faculty and other
administrators and staff out there,
it's an opportunity for you
to hand this to students
and say, hey, this is something super cool
that you can be a part
of and you have no idea
how much impact you can make
because everything you do matters.
Our toolkit helps all
levels to gain understanding
and get started by making a plan
and acting on their campus.
I just wanted to mention
as well this is the cover
of our toolkit over here.
It's really nicely well done
by one of our students, Trudy.
And we were sponsored by
the Michelson 20 Million Minds Foundation,
which is a super awesome opportunity.
We had a great time working with them.
They helped keep us on
track and also helped us
get the resources we needed right away.
Next slide.
So just really quick,
some of the chapters the
toolkit covers are what is OER,
how to create an OER, how to market OER,
I like marketing, OER activism,
and just some basic questions.
Now, all these topics
go way more into depth.
There's everything from student government
to just campaigns and even
how to write an email.
But these are some of the basic topics
I wanted to go over to make sure you guys
had a broad overview of what's going on.
Next slide.
So our final toolkit will be released
most likely by April 2020.
That's our plan as of this moment.
Right now we're having
a professional editor
go through it just to make sure.
And for more release information,
it will be posted on the OER Commons,
but you can follow me
especially on Twitter,
that seems to be where all
the open stuff is happening, @natzattackz.
You can probably get a
copy of this slide show
afterwards if you have issues
or just take a screenshot.
But thank you guys so much for your time,
and I'm going to pass off to Jenifer.
- [Jenifer] Hello, this is Jenifer.
So I first got involved in OER advocacy
through my position as the
Affordable Learning Solutions
Student Ambassador at San
Jose State University.
And I was also a lead in the OER
student advocacy group with the Michelson
20 Million Minds Foundation
that Natalie mentioned.
And I've played an active
role in writing the toolkit.
What I'm going to talk about today is
some of the events that I'm
hosting at San Jose State
and how we can get
students to replicate that
on their campuses even without a program
like Affordable Learning Solutions.
So Affordable Learning
Solutions, also known as ALS,
is a CSU wide initiative to make college
more affordable for students.
And since the beginning of the program
at San Jose State in 2012,
the focus has been on
encouraging and supporting
faculty to make the switch over to using
OER or low cost resources
in their courses.
My goals as a student
ambassador are to first
to gauge student attitude
towards textbook costs on campus,
second to inform students
of ALS resources,
and third to get students
on board as OER advocates.
And why we need students
as advocates is because
students have a way of reaching faculty
that librarians and other
faculty usually don't
because they take the
course with the faculty.
They know firsthand
how the faculty teaches
and if they're equipped with the knowledge
of finding and using OER,
they can become the strongest advocates
in getting faculty to make
the adoption and switch over.
As a student ambassador and OER advocate,
I feel like it's important
to get to know the campus
and the student body.
In the activities and events that we host,
we want to make sure
that students understand
that textbook costs directly affect them.
Students are the ones
buying the textbooks,
and that makes textbook costs
strictly a student's burden.
So here in this presentation,
I'll talk about events
and activities that I held
at San Jose State University
that students can
replicate on their campuses
to understand the textbook
climate on their campus
and really gauge student interest into OER
and OER advocacy.
Next slide.
First to gauge student
attitude towards textbook cost,
we renamed Open Ed Week on our campus
to Textbook Affordability Week
and shifted the focus towards students.
And for each Textbook Affordability Week,
we try to hold at least three
events for our students.
At these events, we asked
students about their
financial struggles and in
addition to textbook costs.
And what we get back from
students are housing troubles,
food insecurity, and these are things that
you see on all campuses.
And so to help them, we share information
on textbook saving
resources that can at least
cut down on the cost of their textbooks.
And we finish out by letting them know
what ALS is doing and that
there are solutions available.
Some of the events that we have at these
Textbook Affordability
Weeks are coffee and snacks
while tabling, we have had
a round table discussion,
and we've also invited guest speakers
to talk about their faculty
to talk about their process
of adoption and also just librarians
who are very passionate about open.
So we try to have three things
at all of our tabling events.
Laptops, food, and librarians.
The laptops are to help students
locate savings on the spot.
Students come to us
with their textbook list
and we help them find
their textbook for free
or we help locate the best savings.
Keeping in mind that food
insecurity is a big issue
on campus, we provide
food at all of our events.
Not whole meals, but also
just having some snacks
there so that students
can come and grab some
on their way to class
or on their way to work
or on their way home.
ALS is housed in the library,
so we also have programs to make sure
that our librarians are up
to date with OER resources
and are ready to help direct
students to those resources.
One of the events that
helped a lot in understanding
the textbook climate in the student body
was the round table discussion.
It was a facilitated
discussion with questions
that invited conversation
around textbook cost.
The students were allowed
to talk about anything
they wanted to as long as it was around
financial struggles and textbook cost.
And if they strayed too far
away from the original topic,
I would ask another question
to keep the discussion on track.
And at the event, there were
only students in attendance
to create a safe space
to discuss how students
deal with textbook costs.
Because a lot of them work
jobs, one or two jobs.
I myself was working
three jobs at one time
just to pay for my education.
And some of them, they
didn't even know what
torrenting was and they
really lacked a sense of...
They didn't know what copyright was
and they didn't know that
torrenting was illegal
and all they did was look
for the PDF version online
and they said, oh, there are free versions
online and I just get that.
Some of the round table questions were
what are some pressing financial struggles
do you have as a student?
How do you feel about
current textbook cost?
And have you used some of the textbook
saving resources online?
And along with the financial
struggles and textbook
costs we also talked about
learning management systems,
about students liking
everything to be in one place,
as well as their frustration with having
to pay for homework and
supplementary materials
as they felt that faculty are just lazy
in this aspect of grading that they would
have students pay $90 to
$100 for a homework system.
Last semester we launched a
digital storytelling contest
to invite students to share
their unique experience
with textbook costs.
The general theme was
textbook affordability,
but to give students an
idea of where to start,
we asked them about their background
and where they were from,
their goals for their future,
financial struggles that they might have,
and at the start of the semester
when students have to pay for tuition,
when they have to pay for rent, groceries,
and adding onto that textbooks,
how do they feel at the
beginning of the semester?
And also how does having
or not having a textbook
affect them in their courses?
We also just wrapped up a contest.
It was a what do you
meme textbook contest.
And it's based off a comic
that's been pretty popular.
We launched this contest
as a creative and fun way
for students to express
their textbook struggles
with relatable memes, memes that students
all across campus, all cross the nation,
or all across the world can relate to.
So this week for Open Ed Week,
we actually posted the
meme on the King Library's
Instagram stories asking
simple questions like,
oh, is this relatable or
are textbooks expensive?
And just here are some of
the examples of the memes
that we created and
that students submitted.
Buying the textbook after
failing the first exam.
MFW, and by the way, MFW
stands for My Face When.
I assure you I checked it first to see if
they were appropriate before posting.
And for this last one, we
understand that textbook
costs are expensive
and can be holding back
students from taking another course,
graduating on time, taking a
break, or going on vacation.
It's similar to the question,
what would you rather spend money on
that students have been
giving us answers of
wanting to go on vacation,
transportation issues,
paying for rent, buying new
clothes, and things like that.
So are textbook costs
holding students back
from doing things like
hanging out with friends,
participating in
extracurricular activities,
just we want to make this
relatable to students,
because we know that
because of that extra cost
students have to give up something else.
Now that we've gotten
some student feedback
and assessed the textbook
climate on campus,
we want to just spread
awareness of ALS efforts
and resources on campus.
And we did this through partnering with
other resources and programs on campus
like the Student Success Center
and the Educational Opportunity program.
And we gave workshops
to those student mentors
to the students who sought out help,
the first generation students,
and students who choose
not to buy textbooks.
And the reason why we targeted
the Student Success Center
and the EOP program students
were because they are
the students who we know
are struggling in their classes
and are struggling financially.
First generation students
as well even if they have
a job, even if they
work, they still have to
spend money to help their families.
So not all of that is going
towards textbook costs.
Next slide.
So the two workshops that we gave were
how to save money on textbooks titled,
"Saving Spartans Money on Textbooks"
and "How to Navigate Etextbooks."
Some students know about
resources on campus,
but they don't know exactly
how to get to those resources
and that was what was addressed in the
how to save money on textbooks workshop.
The other workshop, "How
to Navigate Etextbooks,"
it was created to help
students build up their
skills in digital literacy
and get comfortable using etextbooks.
Because a handful of students still prefer
print over digital.
But we know that with digital, with OER,
a lot of the content is digital,
and digital offerings are also cheaper,
considering that they
don't have to go through
production and delivery and distribution.
And so we also had, sorry,
we also gave a handout
of textbook saving resources.
And tips were handed out at each workshop.
And in the future, we
hope to create a workshop
to help students on
how to advocate for OER
and how to advocate OER to faculty
to accomplish having
students as OER advocates.
Okay.
So to conclude my part of this webinar,
I want to make sure
that students understand
they don't need to be
associated with a program
to go to events on campus
and bring attention
to textbook costs.
The events that I mentioned
here can be carried out
on any campus and to get
more ideas on what you
can do on campus, think about the events
that you would go to as a student.
What events are popular on your campus?
If you can't hold contests,
host an event with
a student org and create memes for one.
By the way, we also have
a section in the toolkit
that describes how to hold events
and what events you can hold on campus
and it will be mentioned there too.
So look forward to that.
And also just one last tip.
Just be creative and have fun.
Students are also, they're taking classes,
they're going to...
they have jobs, they want a
job in a professional field,
but they also just need a break
and just need to relax and have fun.
So when you think about your events,
instead of having more
stuff for them to learn,
make it fun and make it enjoyable.
And I'll give it over back to Cailyn.
- [Cailyn] Yeah, so I
think one of the really
cool things about the
toolkit that both of them
worked on is it's a really great example
of some of the principles of open.
Remixing information and adapting it
and adding new information.
Back in the early 2010s, the student PIRGs
released a toolkit for student activists
that are interested in open.
And it's just been so
exciting to watch students
take the toolkit that we made,
add new information, add new chapters,
localize it, and just really
live up to the potential
of these open resources that we created
and share with the
community and watching the
community continue to
add resources back in.
That's the whole idea.
So what I want to talk
about is bringing these
concepts to your campus.
And I've broken this into
three different steps.
So the first is you gotta
figure out what it is
that you want to change
or add to the conversation
or the policies where you are.
The second is figuring
out who has the power
to make the decision here.
And then the last thing
that you should spend time
thinking about is what does that person
or sometimes a group of people need to see
in order to make that change.
So the first step is
really deciding what it is
you'll want to advocate for.
Now, whether this is
the creation of an open
textbook grant system or
making sure that textbook
costs are included on the
registration page of your school.
You should check to see
what already exists.
And a great way to do that
is to set up a meeting
with your campus's library
or their OER working group
to kind of see what the lay of the land is
before you jump in.
So let's talk about deciding
what it is you want to change.
So this is goal setting.
You should set a goal.
And then this is a really helpful acronym
to see if your goal really measures up
and is going to be helpful and useful.
So what this means is you should
choose something tangible.
You want it to be something specific.
So the next thing is you
want it to be measurable,
achievable, realistic, and timely.
So for example, I would
say that raising awareness
is usually not a strong
goal to work towards.
Because when do you know when
the awareness has been raised?
When do you know when you've met your goal
and can move on to the next step?
You can't, because there's not a timeline,
there's no measurable amounts,
and it's not really specific.
Now, the reverse of that
would be we want to get
the STEM department's introductory classes
to be using open at a 30%
rate by the year 2024.
So you know exactly who you're targeting,
the STEM department,
introductory level classes.
You want 30% of those introductory classes
to be using an open textbook,
which is pretty realistic.
And then also you have
a timeline, by 2024,
which allows you to make a plan.
But you can't do this on your own.
You're gonna have to find the people
who can make this decision
and then you're also going to need
people to help you make your case.
So the first is you have to figure out
who it is that can decide that goal
that you're working towards.
Now, for some goals, it's
going to be a department chair
or a departmental working group.
So for that STEM example,
you might be working with
the department chair for the chemistry,
biology, computer science department
in order to hit your goal.
For some other goals, it
will be something higher.
So let's say you want to create
an open textbook grant
program at your university.
You might be working
with the vice chancellor
or even the chancellor or
president of your school.
And then some of the
goals that people have
around these issues tend
to be more technical.
So think creatively about who ultimately
makes the decision.
So if you're trying to get textbook prices
included on the registration page,
students can make informed
financial decisions,
that might actually be the
technology officer or dean
or it might go through the registrar.
And that's going to depend on the school.
And then let's say you're trying to make
some really big system wide changes,
something like the Rutgers
open textbook great system.
Then you might have to go
to the board of trustees
or the regents.
So you have to decide
who it is that's going to
give you that final yes or check off
for the goal that you've set.
But also you can't do this alone.
So you're going to have
to find some friends
along the way to help you.
I would suggest reaching
out to the library.
They tend to be one of the best groups
when it comes to working on open
and advocating on open.
They're experts on information.
Student governments are
often very impacted by this,
but think outside the box when it comes to
student governments.
Don't just go to the president of the SGA.
They're often very busy
and they might have
different goals than you do.
So they might be focused on campus safety
or food insecurity.
You might be wanting to work instead with
the vice president of internal affairs.
And then also reach out to
students who are most impacted,
whether that's through
your own social network
or through student groups on campus.
And then faculty and administrators,
we gotta work with them too.
Faculty are the ones using open.
So I would suggest looking
for faculty that are
currently already working
to use an open textbook,
have written one, or
care about affordability
issues in general.
For example, some faculty
don't use an open textbook,
but they make all of their
readings available online
rather than making students buy the book.
And those faculty are going to be
a great ally as well.
So once you've found your people,
once you know who it is
you're going to have to ask,
you're going to need to take some actions
to make the case.
So the first step is you
should meet with that
decision maker, ask them,
because there's a possibility
they just might say yes.
But there's a good chance
they're going to have
some concerns and not say yes right away.
So you should set up activities, actions,
and events that answer the concerns
that your decision maker has raised.
So I've given some really common concerns
that we've run into with decision makers.
The chief among them being,
are faculty going to be okay with this?
Are faculty going to be upset when we
try to advocate for these issues?
I would suggest the
best way to answer that
is to build faculty support
and be able to show it.
You can do this as
simply as getting faculty
to sign on to a letter of support
or passing a senate resolution
through the faculty senate.
That tends to be kind of
intensive and takes some time.
So plan out what you think is going to
answer that concern.
In some cases, all they need
is a faculty letter of support.
In some cases, they're
going to need to see
the whole senate voting on this.
And then if they're
really close and you think
they need to see the visibility,
you can reach out to one
of those faculty allies
already using open who already
cares about affordability
issues and ask them to
write an opinion editorial
for the campus paper.
We've had faculty do
this across the country.
We think it's so helpful,
not only to show the
decision maker that this
is something faculty value,
but we know that faculty
listen to other faculty
when making decisions about their courses.
Sometimes decision makers are worried that
do students even care about this.
And this one I think
is a little bit easier
to put aside because
passing a student government
resolution often takes a lot less time
than a faculty senate resolution.
But also you can hold
a textbook broke table.
And if you just put into Twitter or Google
#Textbookbroke, you can
see some excellent examples
of schools and students around the country
holding these tables and
putting out their effort
into the public.
Sometimes the faculty or administrators
or the decision maker may not even realize
that this is a big problem.
Textbook prices have gone
down in price a little bit
over the past couple of years.
And they're way more expensive than they
would have been 20, 30,
maybe even more years ago
when that decision maker was in college.
So for these you can
just show student data.
You can hold a student survey on campus
to show how much they're buying,
what it's holding them back from.
You can host student panels and invite the
decision maker, faculty,
administrators to come
where students can share
their personalized stories
or more directly have
students submit letters
to the editor to the campus paper
talking about the struggles
they've had buying textbooks.
And that really illustrates
the student need.
One of the most common ones
though, above all else,
is there are competing priorities
in running a university or college.
And making sure that faculty
or that the decision maker
are prioritizing this
over the many other things
they have to prioritize
can be a challenge.
And you can do this and you can kind of
answer that concern by showing media
covering student savings.
Investing in open
textbooks gets a really big
bang for your buck when it
comes to student savings.
And if you can show that,
it really lifts this up
when it comes to priorities.
You can also show that faculty want this
by holding faculty panels.
And then this one I think is really fun.
Will this program be used?
And students are really
excellent at marketing.
They can get the message
out to the faculty,
whether it is through
direct conversations,
creating posters, hosting events,
sending emails that are
campus wide to faculty.
There are all sorts of
opportunities to make sure
that this program will
be used and well used.
So that way not only do you
get that initial support,
whether it is to create a grant program
or to create a working
group or any of the other
things that you could be working towards.
You can make sure that once you have them,
people are actually using them.
So once again, figure out what it is
you want to do and change,
figure out who it is that
can give you that yes or no,
and then figure out what it is
that can convince that
person to say yes to you
and create the program and
change that you want to see.
So something I run into
a lot is when I'm talking
with students, student
governments, faculty,
administrators, librarians
is there's a desire
to want to wait until
you have all your ducks
in a row to start doing things.
I always like to close things with a
Fred Ross Sr. quote.
He was a community organizer
in California in the 1950s.
But if you wait until
you have all the time,
people, and resources to go ahead,
you may never still,
you may still never get
there because you didn't
fill the interval with action
needed to get you there.
So don't wait until you
have every single thing
that you need to create
something that's perfect.
Start taking action as soon as possible
to get you even closer
so that way when you have
the things that you need,
you're just ready to launch.
So don't let perfect be
the enemy of the good.
So I want to open it up to
questions from the audience.
And I put my contact
information up there as well.
One of the things that I
do is I do consulting calls
with student groups, student governments,
faculty, librarians, even administrators
to help them come up with
a plan to build support
for open textbook and campus
textbook affordability
initiatives on their campus.
But I want to open it up to the audience
to ask questions that they may have.
Does Jenifer or Natalie have anything
they want to add just to wrap up?
- [Natalie] No, I think everything
that we said was awesome.
I really appreciate everybody
who tuned into the call.
Seeing that there was
25 people on the call
at one point was awesome.
I really appreciate all
your guys' time as a student
and even though I just graduated,
I still have the mentality of a student.
As a student, I really
can't thank the community
enough for everybody's time.
- [Jenifer] I don't have much
to add on my part either.
Again, I'm just gonna
shadow Natalie there.
Thank you for those who attend.
If you have any questions,
please let us know.
Contact Cailyn, me, or Natalie or even Una
and they will get to us.
They will get your questions to us.
- [Una] All right, big
thank you to Jenifer,
Natalie, and Cailyn for their work today
and in the future.
- [Cailyn] Thank you
so much for having us.
