Brent Warner 0:00
This is the HigherEdTech podcast Season Five, Episode Seven: OER in Action

Tim Van Norman 0:19
Welcome to today’s HigherEdTech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Instructional Technologist at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner 0:25
And I’m Brent Warner, Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman 0:33
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. So Brent, while you’re gone, you know, we’ve had no other discussions on campus other than AI? Well, okay, we have, but AI is all over the place, as we covered in the last two episodes. As we were talking about this one today, all of a sudden AI came up again, and it’s probably going to come up in every conversation and stuff that we have right now.

Brent Warner 1:00
Yeah, I think it’s just, I mean, at some point, it’ll become so ubiquitous, that really, it’s just ingrained in the rest of the conversation. You know, it’s, it’s like, you can’t really not talk about it, but But yeah, still kind of, still, it’s gonna be a long time, there’s gonna be people that are gonna get sick of, you know, I don’t don’t want to hear about AI anymore. But for sure, and so I hope those last couple of episodes were useful. But we also you know, there’s there are other things to talk about. And of course, we’ll be we’ll mention the AI parts inside of this conversation. I think there’ll be part of it today. But I’m interested because Tim, you said, basically, like, you’re getting people coming up and talking to you about OERs educate open educational resources. So I think we’re just going to head right into that conversation. Let’s jump over and start about what’s going on there. So let’s jump in. Okay, Tim, so you got people asking you about OER. A lot of times when people start asking you questions, it’s because money’s involved, but what’s going on on campus there.

Tim Van Norman 2:05
So first of all, OER, open educational resources. A lot of people are sick of students paying $200 a class for a book that they’re never actually going to get or see, or, and we say for a book, because the book itself is like six bucks, the if you would actually order it, but you get all of this other material. And so it’s expensive. And so the state of California has, through grants and stuff like that they’re encouraging different, encouraging community colleges, to try to lower the cost for students, what can we do to lower the costs? And at one point, we looked at, hey, if we, as a college, if we just simply went to one of the publishers and said, We want this publisher for all of our students, what would it cost? And we were talking millions of dollars. So obviously, we didn’t do that. Okay. But we’ve been trying to figure out how do we do this best for our students? How do we help the students get the materials they need in the best way? And so like I said, the state has state of California has come out. And they’re offering through different grants to colleges, all kinds of different things they’re trying to offer, hey, get in here and create this material and use it in your classes.

Brent Warner 3:29
Yeah, so this is, I actually was trying to talk to publishers for quite a long time about this, giving them kind of a warning, like, hey, you know, like, this is not really the way charging overcharging for books and for content like, especially with and this is, you know, pre AI conversations, but just saying like ubiquitous information, you can learn anything on YouTube, or you can learn anything with just the stuff that’s out there already on the internet, right. And so I was trying to warn publishers basically, stop trying to be a content publisher and create platforms that make interaction with content a lot easier, right? So you kind of have to switch to being a software developer really, in certain ways that pulls in content, or that uses content that people want to know. Some companies didn’t listen, some people some kind of are still struggling with figuring out what they’re doing. But I think we’re starting to see more of this because now we’ve got these ARS. I’ve been doing this for a couple quite a few years, I guess at this point is, you know, where it’s like I don’t want to charge my students a couple 100 bucks to buy a book that they are not going to open again after class when I can provide them with all the same information customized towards what I’m teaching for free on the internet, right and so, so at IVC we have our listings as ztc so zero textbook cost and we have LTC which is low textbook cost, which I think is I think we currently have under 4040 Right? Yeah. Okay, so under 40 Um, so my classes like my academic writing class is a an LTC because students have to buy a $12 novel to, you know, to read along with whatever. But other other everything else other than that it’s free. My other classes are ztc. So like my conversation classes or whatever else I’m doing because I create all the materials for the students. It’s work though, right? Let’s, so it kind of goes both ways. And so this is, I think, what we want to talk about with how this gets done, how are there some approaches to it? What are some of the resources people can use? Because it doesn’t all it doesn’t mean that you as a teacher, if you’re, for anyone out there listening, that you have to sit there and go, Okay, I have to develop all my own materials for every single thing. That’s not what OER is, it can be a part of it, right? But it’s not, it’s not limited to that. So there are different ways to kind of piecemeal, your work together to figure out parts of things that work that you created parts of things that other people have created. And some people just pull in entire generated courses that other people have made and say, that’s my, that’s my structure. Right. So. So today, let’s, let’s get into some of this, Tim, I know you have a lot of kind of resources, information, things that we can kind of break through on this. But I kind of wanted to set up that structure first.

Tim Van Norman 6:15
Absolutely. And so why would we on a technology show want to talk about something like this, there’s a ton of technology involved. Okay, when we talk about technology in the classroom, the more you go OER, I hate to say it, but the more you’re probably going to deal with technology, you have to give the students the information, you could do it on paper, you could hand out everything on paper. But in today’s world, that’s unlikely, you’re going to want to go to that next level. Also, sharing of materials. Right now, I heard from somebody who’s gonna go to a conference in November, and they got all kinds of materials ahead of time and create sandbox courses. And we’re gonna pull in this material, and we’re going to take a look at it. So when we go to this conference, we can now ask the people who wrote the material questions, huh? Okay. And so there’s that sharing of material that’s going on like crazy right now. And I think this is an amazing thing. But again, it’s technology. You can’t just hand out a piece of paper or, you know, a PDF, it’d be done. And like I said, California community colleges is offering some incredible grants.

Brent Warner 7:28
Yeah, there’s a lot going on. And I think that’s a big part of it, too, is like, the fact that you can share this. I mean, a couple of years ago, I went to a conference, and someone was saying, well, here’s all these oars that I built. And here’s the QR code to them. And I’m like, so now you’ve got 50 people in a room all now have access to that whole class structure, right and like, and then you can go in and adjust that pedagogy. So the ability to do that so quickly and easily because of technology and online structures. And, and in the California Community Colleges, because we’re all on Canvas to then I’m sure we’ll get into this in a minute. But you know, the Canvas has their own entire commons, the Canvas Commons that you can log into, and just pull other people’s classes and take their materials, whatever they’re willing to offer out there and use them. So there’s a lot available.

Tim Van Norman 8:20
And for those people who are no, I don’t want to do this, think about how many times you’ve looked at content that somebody else’s create created for you. And gone, you know, I do it differently if I had to do it. That’s right. Guess what? Now you’re legally able to, yeah, when you do this, in fact, you’re encouraged to. So like I said, somebody going to a conference, they’re pulling in material, well, they’re this class is taught this way, I want to teach it this other way. But I want some of that material. Fine. Take what you need, get rid of what you don’t, that type of thing. That’s what OCR is all about. It really does Let you be you and figure out how you want to teach your class.

Brent Warner 9:10
That’s right. And I think one of the other things here to Tim, is that when people are like, Well, should should I go to OER? Like, do I have to go do everything to make this work? You don’t, right? Because what I’ve seen a lot of the most successful people using OER, kind of start by keeping their text for a couple of semesters and then start replacing sections of it with OER as they’re kind of, they’re kind of folding their way into the process. And so they’re like, Okay, well, here’s our regular textbook, and we’re still using it. Oh, but this unit, I’ve got this and this and this that I’m going to provide you right and then and then they add a few more things every semester and then they and then they kind of hit this tipping point where they go, you know, it’s not really worth it for me to have my students buying this. Whatever. multicopter Yeah, after just a couple of chapters. I can now I just have to do just push past the finish line. I didn’t create my own little bit more materials. And now we’re all you know, it’s saving students money, it’s, it’s my, you know, I have much more authority over the materials that I’m working with. And, and I understand these materials better because I created them or I’ve been involved with the development of using them in class for so long. And so. So I want to encourage people who are saying maybe this is something I can do, it doesn’t mean, throw away everything you’ve known, it means dip your toe in and get started with it in bits and pieces. And then you can, you can see when it’s appropriate for you to make the change, again, keeping that student centered in mind, right? It’s like, what’s what’s going on here to help the student? What’s the best thing for them? Does saving them this money make a difference for them? Does it mean it’s funny, because I was just on the street the other day, and I was looking at these, these kids here walking down the street with these giant backpacks full of books, and they’re just like lugging them. And I’m like, thinking about my own childhood that doing that, you know, and I’m like, with these digital materials, like, go wherever you need to go, and you don’t need to worry about like, oh, I left it here, I left it there, you know, like, all these things are a great aspect to it, as well. So something to keep in mind.

Tim Van Norman 11:11
Absolutely, absolutely. So, before we really get into some of this, let’s ask the question, Should everything go OER? And I and you know, you know me well enough to know, I’m going to probably have both sides to that answer. So first of all, let’s start with a negative No, I think there are still some things that publishers can do. As you mentioned before, a lot of publishers are really getting into interactive assignments, and interactivity that is really hard for you to program and develop, especially if you’re not a programmer. Big time, big time. So don’t just assume that OER is the way to go, I’m gonna go no matter what it is. That said, also, maybe work with your colleagues, that can make a big difference, talk to them, maybe there is something a middle ground or something like that. But interactive assignments is definitely something that publishers have spent a lot of time developing. And there’s a reason why they charge what they do. Also think about, so one of the ones that we’d have a lot of is spreadsheet classes, if we’ve got a spreadsheet class, you don’t want every student to come up with the same calculation, because you know, there’s probably one original and the rest of all, many of the rest are copies. So one of the cool things that some of the publishers do is they provide different values in every single spreadsheet, different calculations and stuff like that, you or or maybe at least the values that come out. So you and then they’ll correct it. No, make sure that it was right. Doing that as a, as a faculty member would take a ton of time. Right, right. And so think about that, as as part of this to, can you accomplish what you’re really wanting to accomplish? If you do go OER,

Brent Warner 13:08
right. So I can see here where you say like, so hey, you have to log into the spreadsheet. And I don’t know if these companies do this, but it’s just an example of like, some of the things that get built into these are now like, kind of fail safes or guarantees against plagiarism in different ways, right. And since that’s always such a concern for so many teachers, you can kind of say, well, hey, hold on a second, if they’re using XYZ company’s system, then they know that when a student logs into it, they’re gonna get fresh content, but it’s also maybe going to be tracking them through there to make sure that they’re not just pasting something in or, you know, whatever else that is, and that’s a ton of work that, you know, a teacher can’t just follow up and do with every single student every time, right. And so, when it’s built into a system like that, from a publisher, it makes total sense that, you know, hey, that’s a, that’s a value add. That kind of helps the students be able to work through their processes helps us to teachers make sure that they understand that it’s, you know, the academic integrity is in place. And so you can see where there are places where you can’t just replace that with a PDF, or, you know, I mean, not to say that OERs are PDFs, but you know, you can’t just replace it quickly with one simple thing because OERs by their nature are a collection of different resources and materials that are not as unified as something that a publisher, especially with these digital access publishers will give to you.

Tim Van Norman 14:34
Right. So on the flip side, yes, everything should go. Oh, yeah. All right. So I said it. Right. No, no, I understand. I understand there is there maybe there’s a line between the two and I don’t know where that line falls for each person. Right? Right. Okay. So this is not a case of black and white. This is a case of you We have to make the determination for you. So if you’re willing to put the time and effort in, there are new tools being developed all the time, that can give can do all kinds of interactivity. Canvas, new quizzes, have spot quizzes, where you can literally touch a spot to say what something is. There’s audio, there’s all kinds of things. h five p is a, an organization that has developed all kinds of quizzing type, assignments.

Brent Warner 15:31
h5, p has a lot of cool stuff in there, lots of really cool interactive activities. And I’ve enjoyed playing with those quite a lot. So for sure, we’re looking into

Tim Van Norman 15:41
Absolutely. Adapt learning has a lot of that type of thing. And in fact, a lot of these will work together, too. So my open mat, my open math, right, right, yes. Okay. It felt like I was missing a word there. I opened math is a math tool. We’re going to talk about it again a little bit later. But it’s a math tool that’s got all kinds of stuff built into it. That is interactive. But it was it’s a specialty. So there are tools that are out there. And by the way, that’s three of hundreds. So there are tools that can do a lot of the stuff, you just might have to find it. Yeah, yeah, a little searching

Brent Warner 16:24
a little effort. I mean, and that’s part of the initially, why OERs had a little hard time getting off the ground, because it’s like, oh, well, I have to go do work, just to figure out where I’m gonna get started with things. And I get that for sure. You know, a lot of teachers are very busy and everything, but I think also maybe with this money coming in, people are gonna be more motivated, say, Oh, well hold on a second, I can, I can take off this time to be able to work on this, or I can, you know, I can get some funding to be able to figure some of these details out. So So yeah, there’s a lot, a lot of cool stuff going on here. But there’s also materials available right to him. I mean, just stuff that’s just like, hey, here’s content, right. And so let’s take a look through some of those.

Tim Van Norman 17:03
So one of the most famous ones OpenStax, Rice University hosts said, some of the big sponsors are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, there’s a whole bunch of really big sponsors, my understanding is that at least for some of the initial textbooks that were created, they actually paid people to create the textbook. It wasn’t just, you know, volunteering your time. And so these are high quality, higher education textbooks. Some of them are also great schools and stuff like that. But a lot of the ones at least that we’re going to talk about, they have a lot of high quality, higher education textbooks.

Brent Warner 17:44
Well, I’m also going to point out to him, this is one thing that I always warn, you know, us in higher ed, go check out those k 12. Because if you’re looking at like a senior year’s book, or even, you know, junior or sophomore, right, like in your community college courses, you might have to be reviewing information. And you might be pulling in some of those resources to remind students or some students skipped, you know, maybe they dropped out of high school, and they’re, they’re back into community college trying trying to get at it again. Right. And so even though, we have this kind of false delineation that higher ed and you know, high school, for example, are separate, but, but like, somehow, I always make this this comment, which is like, somehow a 12th grader, you know, a senior in high school is more connected to a first grader than they are to a freshman in college. Right? And it’s like, well, it’s a false, it’s a false distinction, right? And so make sure that you do go back and look at those ones that are for K 12, because there’s going to be resources that you can absolutely use.

Tim Van Norman 18:46
Absolutely, absolutely. Another one OER Commons. So that one, one of their big sponsors is one of the Hewlett Foundation’s. So I’m bringing up some of these sponsors, because there’s also a lot of OER material that is hosted and stuff on somebody’s website from 10 years ago, and who knows if it’s updated, and stuff like that. So just we’re trying to pick some that are pretty recent, and actually have some money and, and materials behind them as we look at it. So OER Commons is another good one to take a look at. And both of those have a ton of variety in what they’ve got. So it’s not just a couple of little classes.

Brent Warner 19:37
I also all say about OER Commons, I was pretty happy because one of the fields that has been underrepresented in OER is my field is ESL, and it’s taken a while for some of these databases to get updated or whatever, but I hadn’t checked it for a while. But before the show, I went and checked it OER Commons and I just typed in ESL, and there were like over 200 resources inside of there too. Around 200 resources, something so. So you know, it’s like you can you can really begin and see, hey, maybe not every single one of these is going to be good for me. But you know, it’s the same thing as when we’ve looked at textbooks in the past, right? Like it when we would go to these conferences, we’d flip through the textbooks and go, this one’s not for me, this one might be good, right? And so spending that time and having more and more resources that keep coming into them, too, is a great part.

Tim Van Norman 20:25
Absolutely. And remember, you can always contribute to them, too. That’s right, yeah, if you write something, you’ve got material to do it, too. So another one that is coming up a little bit more recently for me is llibre, text li ve r ETXC. S. So that’s UC Davis, National Science Foundation, stuff like that. So in their Libery, catalog commons, if you click on one of their classes, they actually have a common course cartridge of their course. So literally, you can download that and upload it into come into Canvas, into Blackboard into most learning management systems, and it will fill out and maybe it doesn’t look exactly right. But you know what you got to start?

Brent Warner 21:15
Yeah, having that structure really helps. So that’s a really nice feature. I haven’t looked at that one for a little while, either. So. So libertex, definitely worth checking out. And then Tim, I know that there are also some of these ones that are like, getting into some specialty areas. So what are some of these ones that you pulled out?

Tim Van Norman 21:34
So Android development, if you go to developer.android.com/teach, they actually give you the lessons, the slides for the lessons, the applications, the everything that you need to teach your class on how to do Android development. Nice, nice, okay, that you can pop into any learning management system, you could do it in Google Classroom, you could whatever. So there’s a lot of that type of thing that’s going on with those developers who want, especially in we talked about how Oh, well, programming, it’s really hard to do. Or this, it’s really hard to do. Well, guess what, a lot of these places have developed their own training material because they want students learning. And what better way to control that and then write it yourself. So Android is a great example of that Google has really been behind that. We’ve got like Coursera, and stuff like that, that we often will pick classes from those aren’t necessarily OER. But so you’ve got all of this other material. So think about that. If you really wanting to work on something specific, they might have already developed it. Well, I mentioned earlier, my open math. Oh, yeah. So that actually has interactive math homework, it will draw the charts for them. No, no, it will do all kinds of things. Plus, they have a page that says, Oh, by the way, here’s an A class and go to Open Stacks. And you can pull this class in to your class, the classroom material, go to this source and just pull in the whole course that uses my open math. So

Brent Warner 23:22
and what are the responses to that, that I know that sometimes they kind of go up up and down with these, you know, these OER sometimes it’s like quality is not as good, the quality, whatever, right? So how are people responding to these. So the

Tim Van Norman 23:33
quality of my open math is getting better. But there are still a bunch of faculty who love it, and some who absolutely hate it, especially for those who are teaching students who are going to go on to a four year institution, especially grad school, a lot of those they want the students using MATLAB, a very specific application, learning how to use that application. And so that application is required. And this would be basically it’s a competitor. Okay, so rather than the students learning two languages, you know, you teach them on the one, but those are the types of things where you got to figure out what is really important to the student. So the student who’s not going to go on to graduate school in math, maybe my open math is a perfect opportunity for them. Hmm, yeah. So as you said, if you have classes that are that are, oh, these, this is math majors, right? Maybe you want to have them go a different direction.

Brent Warner 24:35
Yeah. So like, if you’re teaching a gen ed class, you might want to think about it in one way where as you’re kind of, hey, we’re leading towards this right? Yeah, for sure. That makes sense. And again, it’s gonna be it’s not perfect, right? It’s not it’s not going to be put into anyone’s lap exactly as the way that you want it. But you can say hey, this is kind of what I’m thinking about for my students. This is what I where I’m seeing their their going. This is what helps them sometimes you know, it’s It can’t be the thing where you say, hey, you know, paying for this service is actually going to be worth it and pay off in the long run. So let’s do it versus? Well, in your case, you know, you don’t really need all these things for the long term. So let’s just go for the free version. And you can, you know, you can work your way through it and see if you want to, you know, start moving into a major that does require these higher level things, for example, in the future. So that makes a lot of sense.

Tim Van Norman 25:27
Cool. And remember, as you look at all of these things, when do you have questions? Google and especially YouTube or your friends? Oh, yeah. Both for class content? And wait, how do I use this tool? What what is going on? It’s amazing how much stuff how many 1000s and I’m, I’m underselling, 1000s of videos are in our in here in there. So. So look, all over. There’s a lot available. So where else could you look? Canvas Commons? You mentioned that earlier, Brent? My suggestion on Canvas Commons? Personally, I hate it, I find it the wild wild west. And the reason is because almost every time somebody has pulled something in from Commons that looked good to them. Not that somebody told them to find, okay, if somebody told you to find a course, it’s usually pretty good. But when you’re just doing your own research, and you’re looking around, and Oh, this looks good. I find that you really want to put it in a place. That’s a temporary, because about half the time you get one module. Oh, yeah. Or you know, you get you get less than you expect, or they did a great job of selling you on nothing.

Brent Warner 26:47
Okay, so oil and of Canvas Commons, right? That’s free. But it but it’s a waste of your time, right? So yeah, I can sometimes you get what you pay for, that’s kind of the that is part of the problem with Canvas Commons is that they kind of opened the gate, and they’re like, here’s this great thing, or it can be this, like, this social experiment of all the stuff and it’s like, and then they didn’t really they just kind of left it there. You know, cannabis has been guilty of this, you know, across several different things. It’s just like, here’s a cool thing. And now we’re taking our team away from it. And it’s just going to kind of blow away in the dust at some point. So and not to say, you know, those who are using it, there’s great stuff inside of there, of course, right? And those who are trying to share and do those things. When it works. That’s great. But you do have to kind of do some some looking for the needle in the haystack sometimes.

Tim Van Norman 27:37
Absolutely. So where else conferences? I hear about, oh, hey, I was at a conference. And they told me about this. And it’s a great place. I mean, that’s why you go to conferences, right, is to get those resources and find those resources. So other faculty, where you are, but also conferences? Look for sure around because you are not the only person in your discipline in the world. Who is trying to do this? Yeah, absolutely. I guarantee.

Brent Warner 28:12
Yeah. And I think we can kind of, you know, say like, Hey, with that in mind, hit those conferences, talk to your faculty members, probably your campus has an OER team. I know ours does. And we’ll probably try and talk to some of them a little bit later in the season. And then libraries and librarians, right, like hit up your resources, right, you’ve got these resources, take advantage of them just go and ask because I think a lot of us kind of tend to kind of forget that like, hey, you know, we ended up in our little bubbles. And we’re saying, Hey, I’m doing this and this and trying to figure it all out. But there’s a lot of great people out there, who are who have really led the way on these conversations and can help you get through them.

Tim Van Norman 28:53
Absolutely. And it really does help when you realize you’re not alone,

Brent Warner 28:57
for sure, for sure. Well, Tim, I do want to wrap up with this with with the big question is like, what if I want to start building my own OER courses, right? What do I need to know? What do I need to have? We’ll spend, you know, a little want to talk a little bit about this. So,

Tim Van Norman 29:15
so often, it’s good to start with a textbook of some kind, whether you’ve written it, whether you got it from somebody something, PDF, a Word document, something to start with, because if you if you just start with a blank page, it’s going to take you forever. You need to get that organization in what comes first. And you know, the thought of how you’re going to teach your class and why I bring that up is you don’t teach pivoting tables in Excel before you teach addition and subtraction. You know, that might be the thing that oh, I want to get to pivot table so I’m gonna put that first, well, if they don’t know how to do simple addition, subtraction, they don’t know how to copy and paste formulas, they don’t know anything else. Pivot Tables are useless. And that’s the same thing in every environment, there’s always something you need to learn before you learn the next thing before you learn the next thing before you get to the end goal.

Brent Warner 30:18
Yeah, so in pedagogy, we call this backward design, right? And so you would, you would start with the end goal in mind, and then you start working your way backwards. And I’m going to throw out a little pro tip here for someone who does want to do this, go in and look at the structure of your class, because that can also be a guide for it, right? Like you’ve already built out your class in Canvas, or wherever you’ve got your class going. And you’ve probably already got it in things like units, and you know, and then chapters and days and you know, activities. And so it’s all there might already be a structure that probably you’ve built. If you’re if you’ve been running on traditional textbooks, right, you’ve probably built the units of your class, based on some of those structural elements that are already in place. And so then you can also build your own design out of the structure that you’ve already made. But it’s a lot easier than going and looking at a blank document, you’re going oh, wait a second, I already have this idea already. I already have this idea to and so. So if even if you’re not pulling from a specific textbook, you can kind of say, Hey, I have a structure in place, because I’ve used it before in my own classes.

Tim Van Norman 31:21
Absolutely. And that goes back to what you had suggested before. If you don’t just try to rewrite your class, if you take it step by step, you’ll naturally have that. Steel keep a lot of those things. But I don’t know how many people I’ve heard go, Oh, yes, it’s chapter 1235746. You know, that’s how I teach my class, well, you’re already doing this. Yeah, then you’re already thinking about reordering it, because you feel it, it works better. That’s what you want to do. Keep get an order that makes sense to you, and tweak it up, keep on going, because you’re gonna find, oh, I was wrong here. Great time to adjust that. So get a textbook of some kind, something. And it doesn’t have to be a book doesn’t have to be text. But just something to keep Your Order something to build a guide. Yeah, to build a guide. Exactly. Then create content. So in your current class, create, put images in, put content around what you’re already providing video, audio, anything that adds to that content of the class will help you start getting rid of the need for a publisher.

Brent Warner 32:38
Yeah, yeah. And you can do two couple things here to Tim is one. If you’ve already been making your own videos for your classes, go back and review them, right, see what’s going on. Because I’ve made videos, I made videos a couple of years ago, and I just, you know, I went back and I saw a lot of them in three C media. So. So I went in, I’m like, Oh, I totally forgot that I made this. And I was about to build a whole new lesson. Like, boom, save myself a bunch of time. And it’s relevant. And it works. So So one, if keep a repository of your videos, or keep some sort of track of a way to kind of see what you’ve already done, because it can be super useful. And then text and images to anything that you’ve saved that you’ve used that you built before in the past. And we’ll get into that. Well, we’ll see. But I’m gonna start, I’m going to start it right now, Tim, all these text image generators on AI, right, like, so powerful, right? Like you can build so much visual content now. And especially these new ones. We haven’t even talked about it yet. But the new Dali three that’s tied in with Chad GPT, I was able to do it with with words on the images, you know, the words that I asked for to be put out because they were having problems with that before. So I’m imagining it’s not too far, where we can say like, Hey, here’s the infographic that I want it to build, right? So there’s all sorts of possibilities here with custom images that you can now bring into your classes to help clarify ideas.

Tim Van Norman 34:02
Well, and that’s exactly what we want to talk about what tools could use, AI is a great opportunity. Go find that you could even use AI to generate a video if you want, you can put your face in and have your words, and you’ve typed them if that’s what you would rather do. And you know, there’s a lot of different ways of of using AI to do this. And it doesn’t have to take you nearly as long as creating the content from scratch.

Brent Warner 34:32
And this is one of the big points that I bring out in a lot of the presentations that I’m asked to do around AI is the ability to customize the content to your students needs is so powerful and so you wouldn’t just say, hey, let’s, you know, let’s write a, you know, just write the history of World War Two, right? You would, you would say well, hey, since we live in this particular community, maybe we would talk about How World War Two affected people in our town back in this day, right or, you know, whatever it was what was going on. And so you can actually customize it into that. Or you can say, Hey, I know that right now, there’s a trend, my students are really into, you know, I don’t know, Beyonce. And so let’s talk about let’s bring Beyonce conversations into this content, right. And so the ability to super customize is a huge part of AI. And so when you’re doing this OER stuff, you can make the content that’s really, really relevant to your students and things that they care about. And so it’s, it’s going to be a huge part of the whole overall conversation is something that you should consider if you’re looking at doing these soon,

Tim Van Norman 35:41
well, and use AI to generate quizzes, and assignments and discussions and stuff like that. So basically, if you don’t have to write every single sentence, is gonna make the development go a lot faster. It’s always good to, as we talked about before, good to verify

Brent Warner 35:59
the accuracy. Yes, but I’m saying that part. Yeah, we absolutely.

Tim Van Norman 36:05
But if it’s accurate, maybe you’re tweaking it to up at a level. You know, I don’t want to phrase it quite, so easy. You know, I want to make it a little more difficult. But if you could have your all of your quizzes written by AI, in a matter of an hour, and you got 10, quizzes knocked out, copy and paste, and you’re done, man, that’s a whole lot easier than sitting there manually typing in 10, multiple choice questions for every, you know, whatever, you get the point, use AI use these tools. And that will help generate a lot of these things. And by the way, AI, there’s AI that will help make your slides for you. Out of the content you provide. There’s AI that will do a lot of these different things. Look at using these tools. It’s a tool. Use it as a tool.

Brent Warner 36:59
Yep. Yeah. Jump into it. Again, we’ve last two episodes, we talked about a bunch of those things. So take a look. But But Tim, is there anything else to say of people wanting to make their own OERs or get started on him anything else they should do before we wrap up?

Tim Van Norman 37:15
The last thing I want to really point out is you mentioned it before librarians check about validating your copyright information. It’s an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure all of those things. But it’s amazing how much librarians are in heaven when you start talking about this stuff. They want to be involved. They want to help, at least the ones that I’ve dealt with, absolutely. are very interested in helping in this. And you don’t want to get into a situation where you’ve spent a whole lot of time and energy and find out that you’ve broken copyright laws. And you need to redo it.

Brent Warner 37:58
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So talk to him, talk to him. They’re, they’re awesome. So lots of cool things. We’ll put links to as many of these resources as we can in the show notes. But I think this is also something we’re going to have to come back and revisit in the future because there’s a lot of interest. And you know, and I think really, at the end of the day, we really are talking about the best thing is to help our students. I love the idea of one saving the money. I love the idea of having content that is built by their own professors and by their teachers. And I love the idea of having custom customized work that appeals to them directly. So, so much cool stuff to do inside to hear.

Tim Van Norman 38:36
Absolutely. Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we took a look at OER in action. For more information about this show, please visit our website at thehigheredtechpodcast.com. There you’ll find our podcasts and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner 38:53
As always, we want your feedback. So please go to thehigheredtechpodcast.com. And let us know your thoughts. And if you have ideas for future shows, there’s a link over there where you can give us your topic ideas.

Tim Van Norman 39:03
For everyone at IVC that’s listening. You need help with technology questions, please contact IVC tech support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, including OER please stop by the IVC Training Center. Or contact me Tim via Norman tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner 39:21
And if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman 39:27
I’m Tim VanNorman,

Brent Warner 39:28
and I’m Brent Warner and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody