Various Voices:
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OEG Voices.
OEG Voices.
OE Global Voices.
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Alan Levine:
Welcome to another OEG Voices podcast, and I'm your host today, Alan Levine. I'm really happy that I'm here with my colleague Una Daly. Say hello Una--  how are you doing today?

Una Daly:
Hey Alan, I'm thrilled to be here with these amazing OER folks from Arizona.

Alan Levine:
Yeah, this is really exciting because I mean, one thing we want to do is definitely feature more of the work going on at community colleges, but also the idea about bringing in this regional perspective. This is kind of a new format that we're going to be doing and it's really special to me because we're visiting Arizona down there in the corner of Southwest US. I lived there a long time. I started my career there. That's where Lisa and I first met. I'm really excited that we're going to be welcoming colleagues from Maricopa, Pima Community College and Yavapai College.

We really want to hear about the work that they're doing and some of the things that are going on across the state. This is looking at the landscape of open education at Arizona community colleges. I'm going to ask everyone just to say hello, where you are, what you do, and if you feel like it say something really unique about this part of Arizona that you live in that maybe the tourists don't know about. I'm going to pick on my friend, Lisa Young, because it's so wonderful to see you again here and to be able to work with you as an OE Global Board member. Tell us about yourself and what you're doing right now, Lisa.

Lisa Young:
Hey, Alan, it's great to see you. Alan and I have known each other for decades and he is responsible for getting me into open educational resources back in the early turn of the century when we were involved with reusable learning objects and had a blast with that. My role is I am the faculty administrator for open education and innovation at the Maricopa Community Colleges. I have been involved in OER formally for the Maricopa Community Colleges for almost 10 years. It's going to be 10 years very soon next year. Originally, from Rhode Island. Something that is very interesting about Arizona since I'm a hydrologist is that the water rights of the Phoenix area were written into the constitution of the state of Arizona.

Alan Levine:
See, I didn't even know that, Lisa. So thank you. Our next turn because we're at Maricopa to Lisa's colleague, Matthew Bloom. Welcome to the show, Matthew.

Matthew Bloom:
Hi. Yeah, I'm Matthew Bloom. I'm English faculty at Scottsdale Community College. I was formally the OER coordinator for Open Maricopa for three years and I have been on the Open Maricopa steering team since about 2014. I'm not sure, I think the thing that comes to mind, if you have ever visited Arizona, then you may know this. Usually, we're just known for a giant hole in the ground called the Grand Canyon and saguaro cactus. But there's actually a really diverse landscape across the state. It's not just the Sonoran Desert, but you have really, really beautiful high country, lots of mountains, and so it's actually one of the most beautiful, some of the most beautiful places I've ever visited in this state.

Alan Levine:
That's very true, Matthew. Because I used to live up on the rim in Strawberry and it would blow people's mind when I tell them that we had snow. With that, we will continue on Northern Arizona. We'll go over to Megan Crossfield, who is at Yavapai College. Welcome Megan.

Megan Crossfield:
Hello. Thank you so much for having me here. Very excited to be here and represent not only Yavapai College but also our Open Textbooks for Rural Arizona Consortium. I am the manager of academic initiatives and special projects at Yavapai College and one of the projects I'm working on is leading our Open Textbooks for Rural Arizona Initiative, which is a open textbook pilot grant funded through the Department of Education. It consists of all eight rural Arizona colleges. We really wanted to focus on rural Arizona because it is a different population that we serve. They're smaller colleges, so smaller amount of resources and so being able to collaborate together and really focusing on the different student populations that focus on within those institutions. To go off of what Matthew was saying, we're located up in more northern Arizona. I'm fairly new to the area. I previously came from the Bay Area in California and so I was not expecting it to be cold during the winter. That's something that many people think Arizona hot, which it is, but there are parts of Arizona that do get cold, especially during the wintertime.

Alan Levine:
Right, and there's also the proper way to say Prescott, right?

Megan Crossfield:
Yes. My husband grew up in Prescott and he always says it's Prescott like biscuit not Pres-cott.

Alan Levine:
Yeah, that's right. We're going to go from Prescott down south to Tucson and there's a little bit of irony. If I remember when Arizona was settled, Prescott was like the territory capital and obviously Tucson had been settled long ago. When they had to pick a state capital instead of fighting over, they picked something in the middle where nothing was and that's how Phoenix got to be the capital. At least that's what I think I remember. But enough of my trivia, welcome Josie Milliken from Pima Community College. Let us know a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Josie Milliken:
Thank you. Great to be here. Josie Milliken, Dean of Distance Education at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona. To Matthew's point about the landscape and diverse climate, the first and only times I've been skiing is at Mount Lemmon here in Tucson, Arizona and a beautiful little ski area up there that may not get snow too often, but when it does, it's absolutely beautiful. I've lived in Washington state, Utah, so yes, but didn't start skiing until Tucson. Then I would also, however, want to share our monsoon, which is a lot of people think of Tucson and they think basically sand and saguaro cacti.

However, from June 15th through September 30th of every year, we have our annual monsoon where we get these absolutely beautiful storms and rain and sunsets and it's very dramatic and our temperatures drop several degrees, which in a very short period of time. In fact this last monsoon, we gained about 4.94 inches of rain when the average rainfall in Tucson for a year is approximately 11.92. That gives you a sense of how much rain we get within our summers. That's one thing a lot of people may not realize about Tucson, Arizona and also other parts of Arizona including up north in Phoenix.

Alan Levine:
That's very true. When you don't like the weather, you just drive somewhere else for a couple hours then, that's how it goes. But yeah, the diversity is really beautiful there. Moving on, let's maybe get a sense about what's going on in terms of projects interest in open education at your individual institutions and maybe since we just went... We'll reverse order and start in Tucson and Pima Community College. Josie, what are things that are sitting on your plate right now in terms of open education at Pima?

Josie Milliken:
We have made substantial progress in the last year particularly. We started off of course with our Achieving the Dream initiative, which we can speak more about later. Then we've always pursued it and the majority of the cost savings and the work has happened on our distance education side with the Achieving the Dream, the development of these courses. Then last year OER, expanding OER was part of our college's strategic goals and so I had the honor and the pleasure of being an owner of that goal or a sub owner. We participated in the 2021, 2022 AAC&U OER institute with a real diverse selection of members from our institution with helped us get the year off to a great start in terms of our planning for the year that followed. Then from that work in the fall of last year, we developed an OER task force because we wanted to expand this initiative college-wide, rather it being consolidated amongst a team of approximately five to six people.

This task force was our way of doing so and achieving all of these goals, which related to the registrar, course markers, data aggregation and all of that. We also, in that work, what happened to coincide and came about, and I'm sure this group is very aware of this, in February, the Department of Education released some modified language related to what could be used for HEERF funding for OER. Knowing that the year, the end of this, the year was coming up in May, the co-chair of the task force and I worked together to put in place a HEERF funded OER fellowship awards offer. What that did was that it gave about 45 faculty the opportunity for a certain stipend to research OER materials for their courses, to replace other materials.

We scheduled in two workshops for faculty to attend as part of this initiative, we had a guest speaker who was our mentor for the AAC&U OER Institute, who' is Dr. Barbara Illowsky out of California, very well known. That all of those pieces came together to create this whirlwind of awareness and education all throughout Pima Community College and also clear up a lot of misinformation about OER. And that has put us in a place, we developed a provost report related to our taskforce recommendations and the taskforce actual name was Open Education at Pima because we didn't want to restrict it simply to OER because there's such a lot, OER encompasses so many different things and a lot of people simply think of OER and they think, oh no cost and that's it.

And so clearing up some of those misconceptions was part of our work this last year. Moving forward, we, at this point, do not have one designated OER coordinator. We recognize that this work, in order for it to continue the momentum of the last year, it would be very beneficial to have someone in that position to both coordinate OER, low cost, no cost efforts, and also negotiate with the bookstore, be a point person with the bookstore to see what can be done to lower costs for some of those courses that can't find a way around offering, requiring cost materials for their courses. Those are just a few of things that we've accomplished over the last year and a little bit previous to last year.

Alan Levine:
That's quite fantastic and we'd love to hear more about everything. Let's go north again to Yavapai and hear from Megan about the open education scene at Yavapai College.

Megan Crossfield:
At Yavapai College, we've been doing OER for over three years, but really formalized the initiative in fall 2020, which correlated with our Higher Learning Commission quality initiative report. We put together a whole quality initiative research study, and it was a two year study that concluded in spring of 2022. We submitted the report and have some great findings and research that we got from it. But through that work, we were able to apply for an open textbook pilot grant, which I mentioned earlier, focusing on OER through the rural community colleges because a lot of people don't, or looking at the state of Arizona realized that 83% of Arizona geographically is classified as rural. Within those counties, 12 counties, there's a discrepancy between people living in poverty, and so 15% of people living in poverty in rural Arizona compared to 12% in the urban areas.

Then also there is a discrepancy between higher education. 21% of persons over the age of 25 in rural Arizona have a bachelor's degree compared to 33%. The cost of textbooks and the cost of higher learning for the population in rural Arizona is really causing them to not be able to earn maybe a degree or certificate to move along. Then also being able to get jobs to have a standard of living. That's why the grant was really written to focus on colleges within rural Arizona. We were so excited to be funded and we recently received additional funding. Now, our grant is a total of $2 million. With that, we were able to add Cochise College, so we were able to really become a consortium of rural Arizona Community Colleges, which we're very excited about.

The grant started in fall of 2021. We just concluded our first year of the project and we have done amazing work. I am amazed at how much has happened in one year. It was a lot of foundational work. We have a variety of colleges, we have colleges that have been doing some OER for a while. We have Yavapai College who's been doing it for a few years now and then we have colleges that are just starting out. We created consortium wide standards. We created procedures that other institutions can adopt and adapt so they're not having to start from square one essentially, and being able to utilize that foundation. Then what we're also trying to work on is really looking at cross-institutional collaboration because one of the reasons we strategically wrote the grant for rural colleges is because they're smaller. Some of our institutions have one faculty member in a discipline.

And so to say, oh, we need you to work on OER is a lot of work. Being able to collaborate with faculty from other institutions will really help to expedite those courses and those materials to be available. Then part of the grant is also having a shared repository. And so we are using OER Commons for our shared repository, we have a hub, and on that hub is where all of the material is going to be located. That way, anyone in the state, but anyone in the general public, I think we've had people from multiple states accessing our hub, even from out of the country accessing our hub so far just in one year, which is exciting so that people can access the materials, they can adopt them and use them within their own classes. Really trying to increase access to OER, not only increasing the development of OER. That's some of the work that's happening on the consortium level and we're just starting out, but I see some big moves happening.

Alan Levine:
That is so impressive. We want to hear about all of this. As we're talking, if folks think of it, if you can drop web links into the chat, I will include them in the article, but now, how do we describe Maricopa and everything going on there in a short time, but I definitely want to hear from both Lisa and Matthew to give a sense about what's going on in the system around Phoenix.

Lisa Young:
Absolutely. We started almost 10 years ago. It'll be 10 years in 2023, which we were very excited to celebrate. When we started, we were really looking at increasing access and cost savings with our Maricopa Millions project. A few years ago, Matthew was able to rebrand us to Open Maricopa, which lended itself to a lot of really good work in regard to open education practices, taking it beyond cost savings and access to equity to inclusiveness. Matthew, can you talk a little bit about the competencies that you developed, the open ed competencies that you led that work? Because that's really, I think, really impactful.

Matthew Bloom:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so as Lisa was saying, the idea of transitioning the brand from Maricopa Millions, which was primarily, I mean, just right in the name, was the implication that it was about saving students' money, which was great because Lisa and the team that founded Maricopa Millions set out to save students $5 million over the course of the first five years. It ended up being almost like $13 million that we estimate students save because of faculty decisions to use OER or low cost, no cost materials. But yeah, the idea was that it was time to evolve the project. The initiative, it was deeply institutionalized. I was in the role of the first person to be chosen in the role of the OER coordinator for the district. I was fully reassigned to that work. One of the things that I really wanted to try to do was focus on pedagogy and equity and all of these other things that we can use open education to try to address basically, beyond the cost savings.

One of the things we did, and I know you wanted me to talk about the competencies, but I'll say real quick. Initially, we had a lot of grants that were focused on building entire courses, and a lot of that material was also focused on trying to bring cost down for students. There could be a lot of low cost, no cost kind of product there. One of the things that we did was we tried to reimagine our grants for a period of time so that we were giving faculty the opportunity to identify gaps in the curriculum so that it wasn't necessarily about building a textbook up from the ground, it was more about like, okay, well, this needs to be made more accessible, or this could be made more diverse, or this could be something where we could apply renewable assignments, something along those lines.

It was like we were thinking about it as trying to contribute to the buffet of materials that we are offering our faculty and the world access to. But then beyond that, we also saw value and potentially a lot of value in trying to build up our capacity to provide professional development opportunities and to not just those in Maricopa, but those potentially across the region or across the world. We came across a set of professional development competencies that had been developed at an old open education consortium summit. I don't remember where it was, but it was like French language, but they had created this draft of open education competencies and we used that and it was a creative commons license. We used that as a basis. We spent a couple years, actually, the Open Maricopa team was providing feedback on what kind of adaptations we would like to make, and then we took that to our Arizona regional OER conference and invited the public also to provide feedback on different, what's missing, what other kinds of things do we want here?

The product of all those iterations, its was this a pretty, it's a pretty detailed set of competencies. I don't remember how many there are exactly in the end, how many specific learning objectives ended up in that list. But what it does is it provides anyone who is wanting to adopt it. We like to think of it as something we're going to use as the basis or are using as the basis of our professional development opportunities in Maricopa, but we also saw it as an opportunity to try to provide a baseline framework that if we were going to continue collaborating with or pursue collaboration with institutions across the state and beyond, then maybe this is a common shared language that we can use to really focus some of those efforts. Does that kind of answer what you were getting at, Lisa?

Lisa Young:
Absolutely, Matthew. That was some of the really good work that led us to where we are now. Where we are now is that we're doing strategic planning to figure out where we go next. We've been doing this, it'll be 10 years. We've had a lot of lessons learned. Our district-wide team has been working on creating a new mission, vision, values. Our strategic planning goals are around faculty engagement, the infrastructure needed, and looking at zero textbook costs and affordable degree costs. We're continuing that work and we're really excited about some of this, things like establishing our platforms. We use MyOpenMath and we use Pressbooks. We've branded those MOER Maricopa OER for Math, and then our MOD Press Maricopa on-demand press. But we're really looking at getting these solidified and leveling them up a bit. One of the big projects that we're working on is that we were the first college to tag in our student information system, which we were really proud of, but we tagged low cost, no cost, and we polled our students for that low cost value, but it's not giving us the data that we need.

We're looking at what do we need to adjust to make sure that we get the data that we need. We don't know what materials are low cost, we don't know what materials are no cost, and we don't know what materials are OER. We're really looking at diving into what definitions do we need, who needs to be communicated those definitions, and how can we collect the data that we need from our student information system? That's a little bit about what we're doing at Maricopa.

Una Daly:
That's exciting, Lisa. It sounded like you had one more thing you needed to say.

Lisa Young:
Yeah, one other thing that we're doing with Pima that's really exciting is the UNSDG fellowship. Maybe I can throw it over to Josie and she can talk a little bit about the fellowship. She and Matthew have been very involved in that.

Josie Milliken:
I'd love to speak more if this is a good time to go there.

Alan Levine:
Absolutely.

Josie Milliken:
Maybe Lisa, before we begin, because Pima's involvement started with OER Arizona back in 2021, February of 2021. Perhaps if you or Matthew could provide, probably Matthew would be as a coordinator, if you could provide just a brief update because of Maricopa's coordination and initiation of all of those efforts, and then I can jump in.

Matthew Bloom:
Well, sure, I mean, I'd be happy to talk about that, but I have to say that it really so when you reference OER Arizona, I think specifically you're talking about the Arizona Regional OER conference and the work that we've done through that conference to try to connect people across the state. We invite, actually every year since the first year, we've had it, we've had people, we've had at least one person from outside of Arizona on the planning committee as well. It is definitely regional, not just Arizona. But I have to say that actually grew out of something that Lisa and the people who were in leadership at Maricopa Millions before I took over for that period, they had these annual OER dialogue days where they would invite someone to come and they were Maricopa focused. I mean, it was basically for Maricopa faculty.

But one year, we had Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani as our keynote, and we invited people from Arizona State University, University of Arizona. I think we may have had some people from some of the other community colleges. I think we had some folks from the Yavapai there that day. It was pretty clear at the end of that event that there was a lot of excitement across the state and that this kind of thing needed to be more generally promoted, publicly promoted, so that it wasn't just like, hey, this is for Maricopa folks, right? We started the Arizona Regional OER conference and we are now in our fifth year. That's really super exciting. We have a pretty diverse set of folks involved in the planning committee, as I already mentioned. We typically have somewhere between two, 300 people register for the conference and maybe about one or 200 who actually participate.

But we're pretty happy with that as it is and that was a way for us to try to start making these connections because we saw so much potential in obviously just connecting with the open education community in general is super important as we all know. I mean, the open education, the central value of collaboration and transparency, that kind of openness that we bring lends itself really well to this kinds of public sharing. When we have similar, we're all in the same state. We are all dealing with the same kind of lack of funding for community colleges from the state government, for example, that kind of thing. Now, there are certain things that we share here, and the student populations may differ from rural colleges to the urban colleges, but at the same time, we do have a lot of shared goals. This was something that we thought would be very helpful for that.
Then I think as a result of the connection that we made with Pima through the conference, Maricopa had already become involved in the United Nations Sustainable Development goals and pedagogy fellowship, which started at Montgomery College in Maryland and involved Kwantlen Polytechnic University up in Vancouver or in the Vancouver area. Then we were invited to join that. The year after that, Pima joined through learning about it from our experience. It's just part of that same message. Now, I don't even know, I'm not on the leadership team for that anymore. So maybe Lisa knows, but I don't want to put her on the spot.

But I think that there's at least six or seven different institutions now in North America that are involved in that fellowship. It's just this really cool thing, not just that we are sharing it with our colleagues down at Tucson, but it's also that we're part of this kind of North American dialogue about open pedagogy and how those kinds of meaningful learning experiences can really get students engaged in what's going on in the world and how we can try to improve everyone's lives or provide some opportunities to know more about those, that potential.

Josie Milliken:
What happened is, so I attended at, in 2021, the Arizona OER Regional Conference, and I attended a showcase in which I saw several of the artifacts, the renewable assignments that were produced through the UNSDG Open Pedagogy Faculty Fellowship. I was fully just enamored and I immediately thought Pima needs to be part of this fellowship. I started doing searches, sending emails, and one of the emails ended up getting routed, fortunately to Debbie Baker at Maricopa, who's an instructional designer. We spoke, and then Debbie Baker then connected me with the fellowship opportunity, and Pima was able to participate with 12 fellows in that 2021 cohort. Because of that conference, we're now involved in promoting and providing, facilitating that work, being part of the leadership team for this wonderful opportunity. Now, we'll begin recruiting for our third year, this upcoming winter.

It's been just a beautiful experience and it brings together so many different things in Arizona because of some general education changes that were agreed upon by the tri-state, the NAU, ASU and University of Arizona down in Tucson. General education is shifting. Along with that, there is an emphasis, a greater emphasis on interdisciplinary curriculum. There is a greater emphasis on high impact practices, collaboration, project based learning, all of those different things, critical thinking and all of those skills are part, embedded into this fellowship as what it consists of is it's this partnership between these institutions and then faculty from those institutions.

The fellows are partnered up with each other based on UNSDGs that they highlighted is particularly significant and of interest. They'll be partnered up with someone from a different discipline. You might get someone from social sciences matched with someone from astronomy and so their challenge is to create three renewable assignments that they will then administer in their courses the next fall. Out of that has come this just tremendous collaborative work between students and faculty and faculty and faculty at other institutions and it just embodies so much of where education is shifting more and more.

Alan Levine:
I know from the conversations we had with Shinta Hernandez and Michael Mills, I mean, one of the great things about the fellowship is how the participants work across not only disciplines but between these different locations. It's just amazing how that is still pulled off as it has grown. It's such a wonderful model.

Una Daly:
Between countries, in fact, because I know Matthew was working with a faculty member up in Canada, and when we did our Open Pedagogy Adventure last summer, a summer of 2021, we had that faculty member come in and it was amazing. Yeah, really something.

Josie Milliken:
I can say too, with this theme of collaboration, because of that, becoming familiar with people at Maricopa, it's been a point of contact a little, it's established this little community. Throughout last year doing this goal time, I reached out to Debbie Baker and said, "Hey, what is Maricopa Millions? Tell me more. What can we do?" Then Debbie described some of the work and the OER coordinator position that Maricopa provided for, I believe Matthew, you were the first in that role. Anyway, it's like a kind of conduit or a central connection point that conference between all of these different OER voices, both within the state and then outside of the state, to continue this collaborative work and while embodying open pedagogy at it's core, open sharing, open information, open connections, and sort of a deep centralization of any authoritative voice.

Matthew Bloom:
Josie, I could just jump in and say that, that's the reason why we at Open Maricopa have decided that it's time to really try to formalize this as a statewide, or maybe even regional, but primarily a statewide network. Because what we've had so far over the last five years of this conference is that's kind of the only formal event that we have where we come together and we share, but then there's connections, there's like you make that connection and now you're part of the UNSDG fellowship or we send an email to this person and get a little bit of information there on the side and here and there. It seems like the Arizona Regional OER Conference, and I actually said this, when I welcomed everybody to the conference back in 2019, I believe it was, or maybe it was 2020, I think it was 2020, it was right before the lockdown. It was literally a week before everything was shutdown.

Una Daly:
I was there.

Matthew Bloom:
Yeah, right. I think it was at that conference that when I welcomed everyone, I wanted to clarify that OER Arizona is not the conference. The conference, it's an event where we get together and we share things and it's a great opportunity for networking. But OER Arizona, it's not like me or us either. It's not even just the people in that room at the time. It really is all of these practitioners, all of these advocates for open education across the state who are just on their own for the most part, collaborating and communicating across institutions. And so what we're trying to do right now, and I shouldn't just say trying, the work that we're doing right now, is to really try to formalize that and create a way for us to formalize not just the conference and try to keep that going so that it's more sustainable and maybe also could be hosted by other institutions who might be part of the network and things like that.

But also try to provide some sort of more formalized way for us all to communicate throughout the year and collaborate on projects and collaborate on offering professional development. There's a variety of kind of goals that the OER is on the network is going to have, but it really is about trying to support the communication and collaboration that we are already kind of doing, but just as individuals and it's going to be nice if there's a little bit more formality to that so that it's almost institutionalized in a sense. Just for the general public, just FYI to everyone, there are a lot of states in the United States who have from the... Even just the State Department of Education has an OER task force or an OER initiative. There are some states that have that, we don't have that. Without that, we felt at Maricopa, we have already been lending whatever, if you want to call it wisdom or experience, whatever it is.

We've been sharing that to the extent that we feel like we can, and in the process, learning a lot from all of the other people at these other colleges yourself, Megan and Josie included obviously. It's like a perfect opportunity for us because we have to admit that we're a massive community college district and we have some resources that a lot of the other colleges don't. We can start some of that work and try to create something that will roll into the future. Maybe I'm the one that's spearheading the starting of it, but I envision it very quickly being led by somebody else, maybe even somebody not even at Maricopa, because I want to see this as something that's owned by open education practitioners across the state, not by Maricopa or myself.

Una Daly:
Yeah, I really appreciate the leadership of Maricopa. Obviously, having started so long ago and bringing forth this, and of course through Lisa's leadership, you're now a consortium member of CCCOER, and as part of that, some of the rural colleges have come in as members and we've been thrilled to welcome Central Arizona and Mojave. So wonderful collaborations and I can see this ball being tossed or the baton perhaps is a better expression. But what I wanted to ask Megan about how do you see the collaboration working between your rural colleges that you're working with, of course, Yavapai specifically, and these more, I hesitate to call senior, I'm the one with the white hair up here. But tell us a little bit more about how that collaboration is working.

Megan Crossfield:
It's a great question, and I think long term, it's a great opportunity for sustainability. That's the way I'm looking at it is the Open Textbooks for Rural Arizona. It was a grant. It was written the way it was written because there is a clear need in, whenever you're writing a grant, you want to write a grant so that you're showing a clear need and there is a clear need in comparison between rural Arizona and the urban areas. It wasn't meant to disclude anyone, it was just a strategy for getting the funding. But it is a great opportunity for the rural colleges to really formalize and build upon what has already been done at the state. But I see a statewide initiative or a statewide collaborative being a sustainable option because that's really the goal of any grant is to make it sustainable.

Being able to collaborate, bringing Pima, Maricopa and become a statewide collaborative is really the long term option, I think, or possibility. It's great to see the work happening now. I'm excited to continue collaborating. I know I've seen emails from Matthew, and so I'm excited to see where that's going to go and how we can leverage what has already been built at Maricopa and Pima and what is currently being built through the Open Textbooks for Rural Arizona because there's no reason to duplicate efforts, but to constantly build upon what we're all doing. I think moving in that direction is going to be very smart and strategic and sustainable for long-term efforts.

Una Daly:
Do you see any immediate next steps for collaboration?

Megan Crossfield:
I mean, I'm hoping, I know that we've seen some emails come through, so getting some meetings scheduled, where can we go moving forward? Definitely, I think we should hopefully get that moving forward as quickly as possible. Our grant is a total of three years and we're currently in year two, so it'd be great to see where we can start leveraging, start transitioning if needed and see where we can go from there. I'm hoping that Matthew and I will be able to further connect on that moving forward because I know that there's been emails going out and everything.

Alan Levine:
That's great. I wonder, we talked earlier and maybe Lisa can talk about this new relationship with the DOERS organization group that you were telling us about earlier.

Lisa Young:
Absolutely. DOERS3 is Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success. Their purpose is really about having member organizations, their goal and their purpose. I'm reading, the promise of high quality, accessible and sustainable OER implementations to achieve equity and student success at scale. Their work has been around, they created an equity blueprint, they've been looking at tenure and promotion, they're looking at data and how we can look at that from regional areas. This work of the DOERS network has been limited to... They're working with regional organizations. Those of us in Arizona, because we didn't have a regional organization, we could benefit from the work they were doing, but we couldn't contribute to their work. Now, Maricopa on behalf of our OER network that we are developing for Arizona, that Matthew is leading has become a member.

Arizona has become a member of DOERS, and so we have a lot of opportunity as we put this new collaborative or network together to have different organizations or institutions within Arizona participate in these really critically important projects. I mean when we think about the tenure process, when we think about this equity rubric, there's so much work that we can do and the next steps that come out of DOERS in terms of looking at what's the next big challenge in OER that we need to face? Now, those of us in Arizona can have a voice towards that and help, which is really exciting and fun. It's something that as we have this organization or networking established, we can plug people into these different roles. I know we're running out of time, so that's a brief answer for you.

Alan Levine:
That's really good. Obviously, if you have, I'm willing to sit here for a couple hours because I'm just having a great time understanding what's going on and it's fascinating and it's like there's so many things going on. I wonder if possible if you can give a barometer reading among the faculty across your institutions and for students too, what do you see in terms of the increasing awareness and understanding of open pedagogy as a practice? Because we can make and understand the needs for the OER material in terms of the benefits. But what about getting across the acceptance and appreciation and willingness to try open pedagogy approaches?

Lisa Young:
I've been giving this some thought and I can't wait until the day we have a filter in our SIS, our student information system, based on open pedagogy practices being used in the course. I can't wait until we get to that point. I don't think we're there yet. I think that from a student perspective, they're really interested in access and the lower cost. They would love to see more inclusiveness, but they're not shopping for their classes based on that yet. But that's what I can't wait for, I know I have my little crystal ball. I know it's in our future and I can't wait for that. I recently was doing a focus group with some students and when they found out about open pedagogy, their response was, I could leave a legacy for future students, and to me, that was super exciting.

Josie Milliken:
I'll follow. It's a tough question to answer, partly because open pedagogy encompasses other terms we're already using like high impact practices, like active learning, so many of these different things. I think that I can say that one of the things I've appreciated about this conversation we've had is that it has modeled or reflected a very open pedagogical approach. A very kind of, we've chimed in, we've learned from each other. I know that I've certainly learned a lot and would love to learn more. I think that the more that we model these kind of practices, the more that we demonstrate them institutionally and it just becomes a part of a way of being and doing and creating this openness, promoting this openness, facilitating this openness. We'll see greater opportunities for that expansion and while working, not to become too embedded in that term of open pedagogy, but recognizing the open pedagogy encompasses so many these different terms

Megan Crossfield:
Yeah. At Yavapai College where it's still such a new concept. I mean, not new but new for practitioners I think. We're definitely starting to see more faculty inquire about it and starting to explore the ideas and how it can be implemented in their classroom. I do, like Lisa said, see it coming up and excited and for when that will happen because more faculty are getting intrigued about it and so we'll see. It should be hopefully in the future.

Una Daly:
Yeah, Megan, I hope that you get a chance to share some of the online webinars that we have at CCCOER with your faculty at Yavapai and throughout your network because open pedagogy is something that comes up over and over again through our member surveys, and we just had one last month, which was amazing. I can send you the link, but they're more fun to attend live, but we do record all of them. They had some great examples. I know sometimes when it's the right discipline, it's a great time to invite somebody from nursing because we have somebody from nursing presenting and people can really relate. I hope since we can't be in person, that's our next best.

Megan Crossfield:
Yeah. Thank you.

Alan Levine:
We're doing pretty well.

Megan Crossfield:
I was going to say thank you, Una. I was definitely actually on that one and I did share it with some colleagues as well. It was a very good webinar.

Una Daly:
That was good. Yeah. Well, thanks to a wonderful professional development team that we have.

Alan Levine:
All right. We really want to thank Megan and Josie and Lisa and Matthew for giving us this never enough time to do a tour of Arizona. I think we got a sense from our intros about understanding, appreciating the diversity of landscapes of Arizona. You've all done this fantastic job of showing that same diversity and dynamic emphasis in the efforts in open education. Thank you very much for being here, and thank you for those listening to this episode of OEG Voices. It's a podcast that we do at Open Education Global and I like to throw in a different open licensed music track appropriate to an episode.

I dug around the free music archive and I found this beautiful track called Cadillac Desert, not to be confused with the book about water rights that was formative to me when I lived in Arizona, but it's by an artist named William Tyler licensed under attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license. You'll find this episode at our site voices.oeglobal.org, and we hope you engage in some follow up conversation with our Arizona colleagues in our OEG Connect community. Anybody out there, let us know of someone that you think we should bring onto the show or our topic, et cetera. We just want to bring to you more voices like these Arizona voices we had the pleasure of hearing today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Una. This has been fantastic. Let's do more community colleges here. Okay?

Una Daly:
Absolutely. Yeah.