OEG Voices 053: People and OER Projects from CC ECHO
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Alan Levine: We are live here in the OEG Voices Studio, we're here for another episode of this podcast that we produce here at Open Education Global. And we just aim to bring you in each episode different people, personalities, and their ideas and projects they're working on, from open educators around the world.

And today we're making another trip to California, which we always like visiting. And I'm your host and podcast recorder Alan Levine. Today we're gonna hear a lot about some great projects behind CC ECHO . So the acronym being the California Consortium for Equitable Change in Hispanic-serving institutions Open educational resources.

I love a good acronym. We heard a couple months ago from one of the early projects when we had Vera Kennedy and Rowena Bermio sharing about the Ethnic Studies Primer. And today we're just gonna hear about some more efforts going on and we're really glad to have several people from the CC ECHO project.

I want to thank my colleague, Una Daly, who organized today's conversation. I might just hand the mic over to you Una to set up the episode and then maybe introduce our guests.

Una Daly: Okay, Wonderful. Thanks Alan. Yes, I think I organized this along with Kelsey, Kelsey Smith, who is the program director for CC ECHO. Yeah, I'm very proud of you, Alan, for memorizing what that acronym means. I think it took a lot of us the first year of the program to get it right.

It's a really exciting program. Not only the California one, which all of us here are working on. But just a slight little background before I introduce everybody. What is the Open Textbook pilot program? So it is a program run out of the US Department of Education since 2018.

And we're very lucky that the US Congress has provided funding for the last five years, and we just heard that there's more funding for 2023. We think there's a number of senators who have led this effort. Dick Durbin is the leading one out of Illinois, but there's several others. And in all 47 million dollars has been provided for funding for institutions, higher education institutions that want to create open educational resources in order to remove barriers for students.

I wanna introduce Kelsey, who, as I mentioned is the director and she runs this program and I think she'll tell us about CC ECHO.

Kelsey Smith: My name is Kelsey Smith. I am the project director for CC ECHO, but I am also an OER librarian at West Hills College Lemoore, which is a very rural, small town in central California. Would you like me to go into the project right now? Intro to the project?

Una Daly: Sure that'd be great.

Kelsey Smith: Okay. So, like Una said, we are one of the Open Textbook Pilot program grant awardees in 2020.

So it started with West Hills and College of the Canyons, just talking and thinking about applying. And then college of Marin and Allan Hancock College kind of chimed in and we got some ideas going and then applied around November, 2020, which honestly sounds like it, it feels like ages ago the world was much different.

We were still newly into this pandemic and I think our motivations stemmed from, of course, the barriers for our students. There were still significant gaps in a lot of high enrollment courses and we wanted to put our energy there, but then also with, the events of Summer 2020 with racial reckoning and January, 2021, it just really enforced what we were thinking of with diversity, equity, and inclusions accessibility and anti-racism.

Our goals of the CC ECHO project is really to create 20 OERs for high enrolled courses where there is very little OER out there, or no OER at all. And we would like all of our authors to include DEIA [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility].. That acronym is different all over the place. A framework. So all of that is integrated into their projects.

All of the projects are peer reviewed, were appropriate and so that's really our goal. And of course we will share everything, all our training materials, all of our projects out with everyone. So that's really our goal for CC ECHO how we got started. Also, this is a three year grant, so we got our funding at the beginning of 2021, and it'll be 20 OER projects in three years.

Una Daly: Pretty exciting.

And Kelsey, do you want me to introduce Brian or Susan, or would you like to do that?

Kelsey Smith: Oh, I could do that. Both Brian and Susan are faculty authors or creators of OER for the CC ECHO grant. And we can start with Susan, I think your project was done first, so let's go with you. Maybe introduce yourself and then talk a little bit about kind of your motivations for joining the project and your specific project that you worked on.

Susan Rahman: Thanks Kelsey. Hi everyone. Yeah, so my name is Dr. Susan Rahman and I'm a Sociology and Behavioral sciences professor at the College of Marin in Northern California and adjunct at Sonoma State, but my primary work is at College of Marin. And I came to this grant knowing that I was one of the people that worked on the grant originally with Kelsey.

When I saw the grant, I was like, oh, West Hills and College of the Canyons are the schools that have done so much in this field that I was thinking could we all work together? And so it was just such a really nice process to create this massive grant and then get it. It was really nice. 

And for me as a faculty member, I got the grant and then my goal at College of Marin was to get somebody in place who could be the OER person, because depending on what college you work at often library is where it's housed. The librarians are usually socially just minded when it comes to OER work. 

And at my school, it was a small school. It is a small school, and I was the lead on it. But I'm faculty and so my position is not as well suited. And so luckily we were able to hire an OER person to take the lead on the grant. And so I got to fall back into just being someone who writes the books for the grant. 

And that was really just really enriching and challenging and exciting. 

My first project is called a People's History of Structural Racism in Academia from A to Z. And that's a nod to Howard Zinn if anybody is in that kind of realm. It was taking place prior to Summer 2020 when all the kind of, poop hit the fan with racial injustices and everything.

But students and I were coming together on, on ideas about the ways in which structural racism is embedded in Higher Ed. Informally and really before this grant actually got funded, we were in the planning stages and starting to gather information. But once we got the grant, it was really empowering because I could hire students to write with on the grant. 

And that to me, made everything better. Their voices, their perspectives, the teamwork. It was just super fruitful. So that was the first project I did, and it does feel like a long time ago. Kelsey, when you think about it, that was a long time ago. 

And then my second project was what was originally pitched in the first place, which was a human sexuality textbook because as Kelsey said, gaps in OERs were definitely, there was a gap in human sexuality. There wasn't an open source textbook per se. And so that became something that I felt like I could contribute to this grant project that would be really meaningful. And that was also a collaboration with students and a sex educator and then some experts that sort of participated in contributing different pieces.

That one wrapped, I guess before summer. I think I finished it before summer and so I'm on my second semester of using both of those open source books in my classes. And I gotta say, it's really fun, it's really fun to use your own work because because you of know it and so it makes prep in everything that much more exciting and the fact that it's open source. 

Una Daly: I wanted to ask a quick question, before Brian jumps in. So I know you're using them. You started using them in the Fall . Susan have other folks at your college [been] using them as well? Cause I know you had some faculty who were peer reviewers of the materials as they were being developed.

Susan Rahman: Yeah, thanks for that question. So the human sexuality class at College of Marin, there's only two sections and I teach both of them. So nobody else is adopting them at my school yet. But as you all know they've made it onto LibreTexts and they've become in the common world. So hopefully people are adopting it.

I honestly don't know where we are with it yet. The other book, the Structural Racism Reader, that book looks at approximately 30 disciplines and has maybe a, a brief kind of discussion of how structural racism is embedded into each field. And so ideally, any faculty at my school are taking their section and using that as a lead off point.

That was the goal of this . For me, as a sociologist and a behavioral scientist, it's really easy to use an anti-racist lens in my teaching because it lends itself to that. Whereas, anyone ought to be, could be, should be (I don't need to, should people) , it's a more of a easier fit in my field, whereas like a chemist might be like, how do I build that in? What kinds of things? How do I do that? 

And it's called a primer. We're just sending it out to, any faculty in any field. And that's just their jumping off point, you can look at just that tiny little bit of , how chemistry was touched by structural racism and then you can take it as far as you want, but please at least start with it. 

That's my pitch to people because the other pitch in the book that I said is, academia is only as good as how relevant it is. The more we shift and morph as a culture, the less some of the things need to be reevaluated and rechecked if we're gonna thrive.

Adding this piece into curriculum is a way to protect academia and a way to grow it and change it to, to meet all the needs of all the people that perhaps could come to college.

Kelsey Smith: And as a librarian, I really appreciate that Susan included Library Science as one of the disciplines in her primer. That was definitely something missing in my Library Science education during grad school. Okay. So Brian, you we, Una and I met you in an interesting way and you got involved in an interesting way.

So can you introduce yourself, where you work, and then a little bit about your project

Brian Barrick: My name is Brian Barrick. I teach at Los Angeles Harbor College and I teach political science L A H C. We are a small public community college in the South Bay region of Los Angeles. So we're just next to the port of LA just across the water from Long Beach. I teach Political Science, so one of the most popular OER texts for PolySci is definitely the OpenStax American Government text.

I've been using it for several years. We're on the third edition now and I started using it back on the second edition. And I really like it because I always know that my students have access to the text. Before that, I was assigning a book that was about a hundred dollars and oftentimes students wouldn't get their financial aid on time.

And so I really like this text. The project that I did was essentially to take that text and to adapt it as an audiobook. We've released that on a number of different platforms. As of today, there are 17 chapters that have been recorded totaling about 30 hours of free audio that students can use.

It's available on YouTube, which seems to be where we get the most traffic. But it's also available anywhere you listen to podcasts. So if you have Apple Podcasts, Spotify is a big one for us. It's also on some of the smaller podcasting sites as well. And the way that I was able to connect with CC ECHO was years ago when I was working at East LA College, another college here in our district, Una and Kelsey came to my campus and did what is to this day, the best training I've ever been to.

It was a two day OER bootcamp and we sat in the library there for two days all day. And what I really liked about the training was when I walked away from that, I had a full game plan to go into the next semester and use OER so it was like intro to OER but also here are all of the resources, practical tips that you can use.

OER was like on my radar since then cuz I've been using it. But I'm also somebody who's definitely an auditory learner. . I listen to podcasts constantly. I'm listening to audio books all the time. And back around, 2020, 2021 I started listening to this podcast on Bitcoin.

I was really interested to learn about it cuz it was, starting to get some hype. And I'd heard about it a few times and I was like, what is this all about? So the podcast that I found was called Bitcoin Audible, and it's basically this guy named Guy Swann who takes all of the best articles about Bitcoin and he just reads them out loud.

I've learned so much from that. He touches on things like economics and political theory and computer science. I learned a tremendous amount just by listening to it. And so it gave me the idea of maybe there's something to being able to listen and learn. So that's why I really wanted to adapt this text.

So I just started with a microphone that I bought for, teaching online. And started doing some proof of concept stuff and was telling people on my campus and somebody said, you should really ask about funding. So I started reaching out to everybody I knew in my district and barking up all the trees, but not getting any answers.

One day I was sitting here thinking, I actually, I went to that training a couple years ago. Maybe I should reach out to Kelsey and Una. And long story short, we were able to reconnect. I was able to get funding for the project, which was incredible cuz I could buy some equipment to record.

I worked with a student on my campus to help narrate and now it's available. 

As of today the stats for the podcast we've got over 12,000 views on YouTube which accounts for over 4,300 hours of listening time, which I'm really excited about. And in terms of our podcasts and the, the downloads of streams over 6,500 at this point and still growing CC ECHO also funded me to do a Canvas shell for instructors as a way of making it easier for these materials to be utilized by other instructors as well.

So we have a whole canvas shell with embedded audio players and syllabus, language and all the rest, and that's available in the Canvas Commons. So that's a little bit about my project and happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Una Daly: Those are really impressive download statistics. Brian, thanks for sharing that.

Alan Levine: Way ahead of us, Brian. , I just wanna say do you have any Bitcoin on you, Brian?

Brian Barrick: I think it's worth knowing about it. I don't think it's going away. It's good to be, and I know you have a computer science background. I listened to some of the podcast episodes, yeah, maybe we could chat offline sometime.

Alan Levine: Yeah we'll do that. I wanted to ask Kelsey, cuz looking at the list of subjects and you mentioned what you went through to find ones that needed treatment. How was it to develop this, everything, we've heard a couple, but, from Sexuality to Microbiology to my field, Geology.

Was it difficult to come up with this subject area list?

Kelsey Smith: Definitely I think it was more difficult than we thought it was going to be. When we originally put in the proposal for the grant, the gaps were totally different or the gaps in OER were totally different than they are now. As there's lots of OER initiatives and grants out there producing work, and things were ever evolving.

The best way we could think to do that was a gap analysis between the four colleges in CC ECHO. At the beginning of every year, we would ask the leads at each college, which courses are your high enrolled and which ones are still aren't using OER and then we would go from there, see if we can find interested faculty on our campuses.

If not, reach out to other campuses. That's what we did. There has been some overlap. Like we would start a project and then we'd find out another initiative has a OER textbook that just started as well. But I think the more the merrier, we just don't wanna duplicate effort if we can avoid it. 

Una Daly: I think one thing that was really unique about Susan and Brian's projects is that you both use students , which isn't true of all of them. And I think you had different approaches and used different numbers of students. I wonder if you'd like to share a little bit about that. 

Susan Rahman: . I think the idea behind using students was something that I always felt like important, in terms of the ways in which OER is, by the people, for the people in some ways. It makes it more relevant for students to be involved.

There's so many learning outcomes that come of them actually being contributors to the work rather than just passive, takers, of the knowledge. For me it was really part of my teaching, but it also became a way in which students could branch out, get some really valuable experience in terms of being published authors at the community college level. 

It's not very typical that they get that access at such a, at a early point in their career. So community college, obviously for those of you that are in the community college world, students are coming and going at a pretty, quick pace.

I would start with a group and then they would leave and so sometimes I would have things partially done and then have to train someone else taking it on. So that became, a little bit juggly but it was okay in the sense , that made it even more diverse in voice.

I had students who had graduated, transferred, moved on and come back and said, I still wanna help. And it was a pot of different kind of people at different stages in their academic careers. But yeah, working with students I think is the way to go cuz they know things I don't know. 

I'm thinking about Brian and all of his tech there and I'm thinking like, if I didn't have a student helping me with my tech, I don't know what I would've done. So their knowledge was absolutely crucial in terms of making these things become current and, relevant.

Una Daly: Wonderful.

Brian Barrick: I also worked with a student but I only worked with one student on the project a really great political science student named Sarah Aria, who's now studying over at Cal State Long Beach. She transferred from our school and initially I was not thinking about working with a student at all.

I think that was actually Una and Kelsey had made that recommendation as part of the project. When I was starting, I really was new back to this campus. I'd worked here before, but had been gone for a few years. In terms of finding a student, I asked counselors because oftentimes counselors are meeting with students for longer than just one semester and able to build that relationship over time. 

Somebody recommended the student and yeah, we started working together and I think it really brought a lot to the project. One of the reasons for that is because our voices sound so different. If you're reading a textbook, especially a college text there are different parts. You have all of these visual cues as you're reading, right? 

So you have the main text, but you also have student learning outcomes. You have call out boxes you have key terms. There's all of this other stuff that goes in there. And the way that we split it up was I read the main text and then Sarah would read all of the student learning outcomes.

She'd read the call out boxes and we tried to make sure that students, because they couldn't have those visual cues, we're actually getting the auditory cues as well to just signal that, hey, this is a different part of the text. And I really, was connecting with what Susan was saying a moment ago in terms of that being part of the teaching.

I think that all of us who teach in higher ed, we see ourselves as hopefully if we're doing our job well, to be mentors to students who are coming up too, right? This can be one of those opportunities to help somebody build skills and have something that they can put on their resume and have just professional development.

I think that was important to me. I'm really glad that this recommendation was made and really enjoyed working with Sarah. I will say that if you are going to be, like creating OER and you're working with students, do budget in additional time. Because it really did take more time to sit together and to record together.

It took longer to edit. And I'm sure that there are probably a lot of similarities when you're writing a text together as well. You're probably spending more time when you're working with students than not, but all together it brought a lot to the project. I'm really glad that we were able to collaborate in that way.

Alan Levine: I'll ask Susan but Brian too. I hear writing an open textbook and so what does it look like? What's, how does one go about if it's the first time or, , I'm looking at, your A to Z, Structural Racism, that's a lot to cover. That's a little bit different from taking your expertise in one area and fleshing it out. What goes into making an open textbook as an author outside of the technical stuff 

Susan Rahman: Gosh, so much. Yeah. That one came from complete scratch. In the OER world, there's a lot of already existing OER content that you can use and credit and edit to your liking. That one, I didn't use anything. It was just, we just birthed it. It took a lot, it took a lot of planning. I don't think we started and went from beginning to end necessarily.

For some reason thought I was like writing a paper, beginning to end but that wasn't how it worked at all. We came up with a list of disciplines based on what community colleges usually offer. We made a list and then our list changed, and then I wanted Z because I wanted it to be from A to Z, and so I had to add Zoology, which was like just -- I had to have a Z So that was why. 

So we started putting together all the the sections and they would change and they would morph and they would get added to, I would have students being responsible for certain sections and there was some oversight on my part in the sense that once they would write something, I would make sure that like they didn't miss a really important piece.

I consulted with a lot of faculty on my college and I just said, send me anything you think is important regarding your discipline and structural racism. When that happened, I definitely took their lead because I never imagined that I would know how structural racism say, has affected Geology.

I do now, but so I think we did, we did that, but then I also wanted the students to have they're kind of why that journey was important to them? So the two main authors that spent the most time with me on the book got to discuss themselves in context and why the reader was important to them, and talk a little bit about their backgrounds.

We had just like a rough outline and then we just started to fill it in. The introduction and the and the conclusion came after. Once I saw the middle, I read the middle a thousand times, probably, maybe not a thousand, but a lot. And then I was like, okay, so how do I, how do introduce it. How do I finish it? It was a lot. It was, it took a lot and yeah, it's a lot , but it was good. I'm glad, so glad we did it. I'm so glad we did it. But but writing a book is like writing a book. , it's hard.

Alan Levine: We hear your excitement. Maybe for Brian, like I, I think to talk about the average person might think, oh, audiobook, you just open the book and start reading. And I doubt that is what makes a good audiobook. So can you talk about from your experience, what it takes to make a good audiobook?

Brian Barrick: You could certainly do it that way, but that does not really capture what I was doing. . I did connect with a lot of what Susan was saying in terms of time management and just like how she was managing the project. For me, one thing that I found was really helpful was just starting. One of my favorite quotes is Mark Twain says the secret of getting ahead is getting started, right?

Just actually going out and trying to do it was helpful because I would learn stuff as I went along. Again, I did those first three chapters as a proof of concept and shared them with CC ECHO. I later would go and redo all of those. As you're going along, you're learning things.

I will say in terms of process and in terms of time management and structure and, how do you get started? I. Really wanna encourage, if anybody's listening to this and they're thinking about like creating a project of their own, really do try to find funding for the project.

For me that was so important, not just because it's nice to get funded, which it is, and I was able to get nicer equipment and all that, but it was a fantastic commitment device. If it was just me sitting here. I have stacks of papers to grade. I got kids, I got all kinds of stuff I gotta do, right? Very unlikely for me to be recording at 11 o'clock at night in my closet as Una had mentioned, or editing on Saturday morning and so forth.

But knowing that, somebody was relying on me to get this project finished was super helpful. So be sure to look out for that. Okay. A little bit about the process itself. I had mentioned I did do one chapter in a recording studio on campus. I thought that was gonna sound really good, and I think it did.

But I also have a good friend who I guess he started his own podcasting company, lives up in the Bay area, one of my college roommates. And so I was just chatting with him and he said, yeah, find a small space maybe go into your closet, make sure there's lots of angles and clothes hanging.

I set up a little makeshift recording studio, small space, not a lot of echoes in there. I would record and sometimes I was recording in like 100 plus degree heat, you can't have the air conditioner on because that will pick up on the microphone. There's little tips and tricks you learn along the way.

So you remove background noise. There's software that you can edit. If anybody is curious about the process, I have about a, like a 30 minute video on my YouTube channel that I could share that kind of goes into detail on all of the equipment and the editing software, and just an open book on the approach.

But it starts from selecting your equipment, selecting your host. In my case I selected Anchor as a podcast host because it automatically links to Spotify. Editing videos to post up on YouTube. I figure that from the time you hit record all the way until the chapter is over, you should budget probably about four times the length of whatever you're publishing.

Most of my chapters are like maybe two, two and a half hours. It would easily be four times that amount. Just in terms of the editing process, in terms of publishing, in terms of sharing it. Hopefully I hit on some of the key concepts there. But yeah, there's quite a lot that goes into it aside from just hitting record.

But I will say, okay, there probably is actually value of just like picking up your phone and hitting the record button and recording into it and publishing it. That's really neat too, that we have the ability to do that. And I would imagine that could be useful as well. So you know, there's different strategies I suppose. 

Una Daly: . I was going to ask Brian about his students and what their reception was to get, cuz I assume that you were also using the written open textbook, the digital one. But then having this extra resource, what was the reception from students?

Brian Barrick: It's been good so far. I get the sense that a lot of my students are utilizing it. I had one student in particular last semester who was, I would guess was probably mid thirties, and she's returning to school. She's a parent. She works full-time for the county. And she told me that she figuratively, she lives in her car, she's commuting so much for work, and she found that it was really helpful.

So that's been really nice. I do like little feedback cards every week so my students can of check in with me and a lot of the comments have been very positive about being able to access and use the audiobook. One of the best things too is that I'm getting feedback from people I don't know who aren't my students who don't live in LA..

I had a student from I think Ohio, who says, "I work 12 hour shifts and, I'll listen on the job and then I'll go home and read the chapter". I had another student who said that they have a learning disability and that they hate using the text to speech software that they have to use for most of their texts because it sounds very robotic and just doesn't sound natural.

So they reached out and said thank you. I'm noticing just from the downloads and the streams obviously it's a book about American government, so 99% of the people who are listening are here in the States. But there have been some streams internationally as well. And I apparently a lot of listeners in Texas as well, cuz it seems like there's a lot of traffic from all over the country which is really neat.

So I love getting that feedback. One of the best things too, if you do end up doing an audio project like this, or a video project, definitely post on YouTube. It just seems like there's a lot more engagement in terms of comments and feedback. So getting good feedback from the students and getting good feedback just from listeners who are finding it organically.

Kelsey Smith: And I shared Brian's audiobook with one of our Political Science adjuncts right after you finished. She was so excited because she has a blind student this semester. I haven't checked in to see how that student is doing with the resource, but I'm sure they're very appreciative that they don't have to use speech to text

Brian Barrick: That's great. I love to heat that.

Alan Levine: I I was Kelsey, like hearing about some of the different projects and the other ones I, I've come across. It's interesting because sometimes these projects, they say we're going at the platform, like everything is in Pressbooks or whatever. So it seems like this project has allowed the flexibility -- the platform doesn't matter.

Was that a deliberate decision and does that have any impact on the potential reach for these OERs?

Kelsey Smith: Yeah, it was deliberate. We wanted to put as little stress on OER authors as possible. There's a lot going on and it just seemed appropriate to let them use whatever they were already comfortable with when they are complete with their project, whether it's in, a Word document or online somewhere or pdf we will try to convert that into as many files as possible. And we're also working with LibreTexts and their staff to get it they call it harvested into their system. Because a lot of people find OER through LibreTexts. Yeah, so it, we try to get everything in as many file formats as possible.

But as far as what the authors want to do it's whatever they are used to and comfortable with. And then we can help them afterwards with files.

Alan Levine: Susan and Brian what's next for you? What's on your next horizon?

Susan Rahman: You go first, Brian. 

Brian Barrick: I was hoping you'd go first. I'd have some time to think about it. . I don't know, to be honest it felt really good to finish the project because I was putting in a lot of hours on it. And it did feel nice after it was finished to just have a little bit of space away. I'm in my first, I just finished my first year full-time of teaching.

I, I had been an adjunct and I've worked in the district as a staff member for a long time. But I'm teaching a lot of classes that I'm teaching for the first time. So as it as all of that takes a lot of prep and just, figuring everything out. So I'm in the midst of all of that process right now.

So that's big on my agenda. 

I have thought again, since I've learned these techniques and strategies for publishing and recording, the idea of doing some sort of a podcast sounds really fun. So I was actually really excited when I got the invite to do this just to see what that's like. But it's just, I haven't found a topic that I'm really ready to go, full board with.

The one thing that I thought about was as I was recording the big Dobbs versus Jackson Women's Health Alliance ruling came down from the Supreme Court and of course that's really interesting to me cuz I teach political science and I often teach about these landmark cases that the Supreme Court does and was thinking about potentially just reading the majority opinions and, like narrating them. I think there might be somebody out there who's already doing that as I was looking onto some of these podcasting streams. But that would be helpful for me, just to better learn the information. And if anybody else is like into the weeds on politics like I am, then maybe they'd find that helpful too.

So that's just some stuff that I'm kicking around in terms of ideas. But nothing really set in stone in terms of OER. 

Susan Rahman: I completely agree with the once it was done, it was like a great weight lifted off your back, I was doing it on sabbatical and since then I've gone back to full-time teaching and I teach six classes, and so I'm really busy with that. But , one of the things we're gonna do is we are gonna make an audiobook out of both books.

And so hopefully my tech person can talk to you and maybe get you guys connected there. And I think for me, taking a break from this was a good idea, but I'm always on the lookout for more grant funding and I think I'm gonna do a gender book. I think that's the next one.

Una Daly: That sounds great, and I know you touched a little bit on that in the structural racism book too, think that would be very exciting.

Alan Levine: Kelsey, out of the other projects going on, trying to imagine all you have to juggle with these projects. Is there anything now that you're saying wow or that you're really excited to to see how it plays out? Or maybe it's all of them, but are there any projects that leap to your mind that, that are really like, exciting right now?

Kelsey Smith: Yeah, it is really all of them. But we have several projects that are in the Geosciences right now, which is a gap. It was there was a lot of OER out there for the three main Geography courses and a couple Geology ones, but they're getting a little old. And I know a lot of colleges, at least California community colleges want your textbook to, within five years. So fairly new. One of them that we've been missing and it's exciting for California people is California Geology, I believe it is not Geography. We have an instructor working on that one. It'll be all interactive with like virtual field trips and all of this stuff.

So we're very excited about that. And all of the other Geoscience projects we have going on. Since we saved some money on some travel because COVID was still going on and we weren't able to travel as much as we thought we were going to, we dedicated that money to more projects. Our goal was 20 OER and I think we're going to be closer to 26 by the time the grant is over.

So we're very excited. There's a whole lot of projects happening right now. But it's just really exciting. 

Una Daly: Kelsey you have someone working on a Critical Thinking English textbook from a Latinx perspective, which seems very well aligned with CC ECHO. Do you wanna share a little bit about that one?

Kelsey Smith: We had a faculty member from Allan Hancock College complete that last year. It was a full ZTC, so zero textbook cost course in Canvas. And so we are doing some accessibility edits on that before we get it published. Just some little fixes here and there, but her students, from what I heard, really love that course.

It's the English course in the California system, there is one that's more of a critical thinking logic, intro to argument type thing. And she did a Latinx twist on it. So a lot of her readings had to do with the Latinx and their culture and what was going on in the news at the time. And so yeah, we'll be excited to share that one as soon as we make sure it's accessible to everybody.

Una Daly: Wonderful. I think that has a lot of potential for California where I don't know what if is 95% of our community colleges are Hispanic serving institutions. 

Alan Levine: I wanna commend you because we have Northern California in Marin and Central California and Lemoore and we have LA . Outside world people might hear California and they have a monolithic decision. And so there, there's a lot of variety and diversity just within geography and population.

So thank you for being well represented.

Kelsey Smith: That was strategic. So we try to get some, like College of the Canyons. It's more of an urban school and Lemoore is very rural, so we try to get represented group with this grant. 

Una Daly: One thing, Susan, I know that with your human sexuality textbook, that it's been through a couple of revisions, and that's true of all textbooks. But OER in particular, I think goes through different processes and I wondered if you just wanted to share a little bit about that the process from an author point of view.

We talk about how much work it is to produce that first version, but that's the beginning. , right? , and then there's, as you improve upon it over time and and it's your baby and it's that feeling of really being attached to that.

And, the feedback you get from your students and and from other faculty potentially who are also using it.

Susan Rahman: There's definitely been a lot of editing and changing and kind of morphing. I think the thing about a Human sexuality textbook in particular, any textbook really, but time and place is central to it. 

And gosh, if you wanna talk about landmark court decisions, Brian, Roe v. Wade got overturned mid while I'm writing this chapter and I was like, oh geez, okay, here we go. 

It was just like shocking and a gut punch during that whole process. The lived experience during the writing process, is something to definitely consider as you take on a project like this because, just when you think something is, okay, we've got this.

Oh no, everything's changed. So now we have to modify and rewrite. And and that was funny because that chapter was like one of the first ones we finished and so at, I had to circle back to it at the end. So yeah, a lot of revision, a lot of, those sorts of things definitely take place in the writing process.

Una Daly: Thank you for sharing that. I hadn't even thought about how that might affect a human sexuality text, but makes sense. Perfect sense.

Alan Levine: So I think the answer is you're probably never completely done and especially when you teach with it. I like the way Susan, you described that the the A to Z Structural racism book is really a great resource for jumping off for all the other disciplines and I think that's a very valuable approach for others to think about 

I I really appreciate Kelsey and Brian and Susan coming in here to talk about their CC ECHO projects and Una for arranging this. 

And I'll just let you know for those out there listening. This is another episode of OEG Voices.

This is podcast produced by Open Education Global. For each episode I pick a different musical track from the Free Music Archive cuz it's all CC licensed. I found a track in there called New World Echo (I had to find a song with Echo in it) by artist named Lobo Loco.

It's license d Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share -Alike and so you'll find this episode at our site voices dot oeglobal dot org. And maybe you'll follow in some conversation and ask some questions of our guests in our OEG Connect community. 

I just wanna thank you so much again, everybody for sharing your time.