Brent Warner 0:00
What’s OER and why is it important? Today we have an interview with our OER librarian, Rachel Fleming. This is the higher ed tech podcast season six, Episode Seven.

Tim Van Norman 0:22
You welcome to today’s higher ed tech Podcast. I’m Tim Van Norman, the Instructional Technologist at Irvine Valley College and Adjunct Professor of Business at Cypress College.

Brent Warner 0:32
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 0:40
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here with us. So this is a new one. We got a new librarian this summer. We are librarian, and so we’re, we’re going to talk to her, because, frankly, I had never heard of one before she got hired. So yeah, yeah.

Brent Warner 0:58
So we’re very happy to have Rachel Fleming joining us. Well, Rachel, we’re happy to have you on campus, of course, but we’re happy to have you on the show as well. So welcome to the show, Rachel. We’re just going to start off with the real simples, like, straight up, what is OER and what’s an OER librarian? Absolutely.

Rachel Fleming 1:16
So OER stands for Open Educational Resources. It means any instructional resource that you are using to teach in your class with, and I’ll go into detail with it. But first an OER librarian. What that means is all librarians have expertise in specific things. We all do information literacy, we all encourage academic research and student support. However, most librarians also have second expertise in something else. For instance, if you’re a law librarian, you will have an MLIS degree, which is what I have, a master’s in librarian, information science, but you will also have a second degree in law if you’re a law librarian. So I have a background in usability, Information Science, retrievability, discoverability, like digital environments and intellectual freedom, that is my background, and I am an OER librarian, which means that I mainly work with faculty. I am faculty librarian. What we found in higher education, a lot of faculty really don’t want to take orders from Admin, and they also don’t want to be talking down to someone who may not have the same level of level of education is them. So I am a full time tenure track librarian, and what that means is I get to support you peer to peer. You bring your expertise, I bring mine, and together we can build and use open educational resources. So an OER can be a textbook, it can be PowerPoints, it can be test banks, it can be a full entire canvas course. It really depends on what it is that you’re using, but it means a Creative Commons license, which is a very specific kind of copyright license, as well as it is free to use and build upon by others. So it’s a global community. It’s a global resource.

Tim Van Norman 2:55
So I’ve also heard of ZTC. How does OER and ZTC? How do they work together? Are they the same thing?

Rachel Fleming 3:06
Acronyms? Yes. And this is a confusing one, because the st Chancellor’s Office often uses ZTC, but then OER is often what the deliverable is. So ZTC stands for zero textbook costs. This is what our students are looking for when they are going to apply for a class. When they go to find classes in their course schedule, they are looking for ZTC. That means that it is no cost to students. So the umbrella term for all of this is ZTC, because it is not a cost to students. An OER is always a ZTC, or usually a ZTC is not always an OER, because the ZTC could just mean that say the library purchases an entire class set, or a department purchases an entire class set of textbooks, and we do semester long checkouts. It’s zero cost to the students, but it is actually cost the institution a great deal of money to maintain it and purchase those sets. So it is free to students, but it is not an OER because it is not a Creative Commons license, and it doesn’t allow for building and reuse the way that an OER Commons Creative Commons license is. So it’s a very confusing world that the big umbrella term is DTC, and that’s what it means for students. OER, though, is more sustainable because an OER is basically like a living document that you will be able to update and choose how you want to maintain it, and it really works well with information cycles. Whereas a ZTC is static, it is something that usually we purchase, or it could be, you know, Adobe exchange has a whole bunch of ZTC. They allow you to use their resource, but you cannot remix it. It still remains under their copyright, and I believe you have to have a login to basically access it. Anytime you have a barrier to access something, even if it’s just having to create a login that is no longer an OER. An OER means there is no barrier to access it. As long as you have access to a computer, you can click on it and it is open to use often. OERs also have the ability to print them. That means that if you want to take this resource and you want to go to Ghana. Africa with it. You want to go to Nepal. You can print this resource without having to worry about distribution laws, and you can take it with you anywhere in the world. There is no barrier to access. If you have to have a login, you have to have some sort of credential, you have to jump through any kind of hoops that is no longer an OER, it might be a ZTC. So it’s a very confusing process. Got it?

Brent Warner 5:20
Got it. Okay, so, so this is interesting, because for me, the first time I kind of dipped my toes into OER several years ago, I found it was a little overwhelming in the sense of, like, I didn’t know how to move around it or how to find the right things. And then I was also looking for ESL related stuff, and I’m like, it’s kind of limited, or it felt limited, at least in the places that I was looking. And so when someone and I’m one after having talked to you, I think things have grown, and there’s been a lot of changes over the last 678, years, right from the first times I really looked at it, but also just when people are wanting to get started. So one, if they have an OER librarian, of course, go talk to your OER librarian. But if people are wanting to get started in this world, but it feels a little bit heavy, what would be some gentle ways to get started?

Rachel Fleming 6:16
So OER, in and of its nature, it was a grassroots movement that started about 2025, years ago, and it was a global movement, and it was in response to what we call cognitive overload and user fatigue and the internet. The worldwide internet is so, so overloaded with information. Now. We have polarized politics. We have so many pulls on everyone’s actual attention that OER is a response to basically information overload in the information age. We needed curated content that we could trust. We needed curated content that was being curated by subject experts, and we needed to do so in a way that was legal, and it also meant that basically it was a fractured process. So when people go, Where can we look for this? There is no one place to look, because every single subject area created things with completely different platforms. The digital environments are limitless. The repositories are endless. So if you want a couple of what I can give you are really big publishers in the game. So Open Stacks is one of the largest, and they are peer reviewed. Now, the feedback I get from most faculty is open. Sex is fine, but it’s very generic. So it’s often pretty basic, but everything’s under Creative conference license and a platform like libretext, which has it harvested in them, in their platform, you can remix every single bit of that content and add anything you want into it. So remixing OER is where you take multiple different OERs and you put them together, and you curate them however you want. Part of this, when you mentioned that sometimes you see content, you’re like, Ah, this seems trashy, or this doesn’t seem comprehensive, there is going to be a lot of duplication and redundancy, because you’re allowed to build you’re allowed to change it up. So you’ve got to think of it like when you’re looking at OER, there’s a lot of different building blocks, and you get to choose how you put it together as the subject expert. And there is no one way. So like, open sex is a great one. If you’re looking at other big platforms, libre text is going to be a great platform for the hard sciences and a lot of the main transferable courses, but for ESL, I always say OER Commons is often a better one, because for ESL, the final product isn’t a digital interface. Often, it’s something that can be printed like a workbook. And if you need to print something like a workbook, having something probably in an OER Commons might be better, whereas libretext, their goal is extreme online accessibility. So Ada and WCAG compliance for screen readers and low mobility students, they’re going to be able to navigate it very easily. And then it has an imscc file for easy download into Canvas, and so does press books. But like OER, commons, doesn’t have that you’re often going to click on something and end up in someone’s personal Google Drive. So it’s a little bit more grassroots, but that’s kind of the way OER works. So it’s a lot of browsing. There’s actually a behavior by Bates in information science called the barrier picking behavior, and it’s where, basically we just go through it and we browse, and we pick something up and we look at it and we say yes or no. And then there’s also this element of when you’re browsing, you have to think about your age, and the fact that when we’re browsing digital content, we’re trying to compare it to physical content, and it’s not the same so I’ve had faculty telling me, oh, this, this OER, is not comprehensive at all. It’s not detailed enough. And then I will download a PDF of that book, and they go, Ah, maybe this book looks good. And I was like, it’s the same book. And then I’ll print that PDF, and I’ll give it to them, and they’ll go, oh, well, this one’s a great book. And I’m like, it’s the same book. So the reality is, when you’re evaluating information in digital environments, we have a false perception of what a comprehensive resource is. So I get this all the time from faculty. They’ll look at an OER and they’ll be like, well, that’s not a good resource. And I’m like, what criteria are you using to say it’s not a good resource? And have you downloaded it as a PDF to actually print it and look at it? Because honestly, we’re looking at things like, do we meet the CID? Are we meeting the core? Are we meeting all of our learning objectives? And also paid publishers, they overload their books intentionally in order to be able to charge you the fee that they do. So does your book need to be 500 pages for a three unit course, or is it actually more of a 250 page book that they have padded in order to charge you the fee that they’re charging you. So this is the other what is curated content actually look like in learning, especially when you have students who are going to skim it anyway. So when we’re talking about, how do you find resources and find OERs, start with things like libretex, OpenStax, OER, Commons or Merlot, if you’re looking for someone who’s done a curated list for you the as triple C, O E R i, A, S, C, C, O E R i, which stands for the academic senate for community colleges, open education resource initiative, they have a discipline specific list, and each one of those will give you a massive list. Almost all faculty experience immediate cognitive overload and shut down, but it’ll give you at least 10 to 20 resources per Cid if you have one for you that they are recommended by other subject experts across the state of California. So that’s another one you can look at. But yes, if you have someone like me, I will send you five, and if I know that you’re over the age of 45 I’m probably going to send it to you in a PDF, because you’re more likely to look at it that way, then you will if I send you a URL to something that looks like a website to you, but yes, so that is the world of OER is very fractured, and there’s going to be a lot of different content that you’re going to have to basically sift through.

Tim Van Norman 11:31
It’s like a thrift store. So you you’ve touched on a whole bunch of things with it just a short No, no. This is this is great. But I want to get back to just one question, and why is OER so important? We’re going to get into a whole lot of other things later, but I want to, okay, I want to, like, condense it, because I think we’ve talked about a bunch of parts of it. I just want to clarify

Rachel Fleming 11:58
Okay, so the four main elements of why OER is very important macro reason. It is the democratization of higher education. All right, it used to be that higher education was behind a lot of pay walls, and it was mainly a big part of white male patriarchy, right? And then we were able to at least have the printing press. We got at a little bit more widespread. We ended up with public education. Then we had information overload with the digital age. Now we have the democratization of higher education. If you want to learn something about chemistry, there are OER chemistry books. You don’t even need to go to higher education to get that content. You now have access to higher education content for free. Anybody who wants to learn can learn. Number two, it’s equity and success for students. It doesn’t cost students anything. This closes achievement gaps, leads to higher participation rates, lower dropout rates. The data and research on it is super hardcore easy to look up. Number three, faculty flexibility and autonomy as subject experts. While the initial lift can be quite heavy, the long term, maintaining the resource is much less work than having to choose new textbooks. It gives faculty full autonomy and control over their resources as the subject experts that they are, so they can identify the needs in their students, because they’re the ones in the classroom with their students identifying the need. And instead of having to wait for the next edition, you can update your resource as a living document in that moment to meet the needs of your students as the subject expert. And then lastly, predatory paid publisher content. So in the last 10 years, publishers have become extremely predatory. They stopped paying their authors. They started putting out new editions that just having to do formatting and new page numbers so you have to buy the new edition. They started doing single use access codes, so you have a $250 textbook and you have an $80 access code that you have to purchase. And the reality is that they were still remixing. So people are like, Oh, rachel, remixing just for OER. No paid publishers have been remixing for hundreds of years. They take content, they remix it, they repackage it for you. They capitalize on this very sneaky technique called the usability esthetics paradox, which means that human beings think that if something is packaged really pretty and has this is esthetically pleasing, that that means it is more credible. That That means it is more reliable. This is not true, but this is something almost all humans fall privy to. So they are great at packaging remix content, making it look really pretty, and then tying it to you guys and to this idea of like, oh well, it’s ours and it’s good information, and we don’t want to change but the reality is that they’ve been remixing this content for years. So that’s the fourth one.

Brent Warner 14:25
So, yeah, Tim, you know what this is making me think of, too, is, like, we get all these, like, ed tech tools, right? And they’re very fancy and they’re very pretty, but there’s usually some professor, some nerdy professor, who has made an open, you know, an open development, it’s on GitHub, right? There’s like, a cheaper and not fancy looking version, but it does the same job. And I’m feeling the exact parallels here, right? Like this. This really kind of makes sense to me here. And then Rachel, one of the things that you pointed out inside of this was, I mean, there’s, there’s all these points. We get into it, I think we could go into. Honestly here, but one of the things that you said was that any teacher who’s using these things can then jump into the content, remix it a moment before they’re going to start their class, right? So I want to put my students names in here instead of, you know, John and Sarah, or whatever, you know, default names they have in there. I want to mix it up, be culturally relevant to my students, etc, I can just jump in and do that immediately, and so so on the I guess this is the micro level, like I can make updates there, but also as content, larger level content develops. How do we know that these resources are being updated, or that they’re kind of relevant in 2024 2025 as compared to 2018 for example, right? How do we follow along with that make sure that we’re giving good content to our students?

Rachel Fleming 15:54
This is a great question. So one of the things that librarians have really raged against for years is that peer review processes are proprietary. So say the Oxford journal, for instance, we don’t know if they’re showing their medical journals to two doctors or 120 doctors. We don’t know because it’s considered a proprietary process. So when we say something’s been peer reviewed and it’s a quality source, how many peers have actually looked at that? We don’t know. OER is the first time where we have transparent peer review processes. So for instance, these grants that we’re going to go after for IVC, we are building into it a peer review stipend. So we’ll have a stipend specifically for the author of the work who’s actually doing the curation and the remixing. And then we will pay an additional stipend to other subject area experts in your department to go through and peer edit it and get feedback. So number one, you get edit feedback in that moment. Secondly, what we found some of the greatest feedback actually comes from your students. Because the thing is that if you think it’s awesome content, but your students aren’t relating, that’s a problem. So there’s also this element of which subject area are we talking about? Because if we’re talking about history, it’s more about adding in new voices and new content, finding those marginalized voices and bringing them to light. Whereas, if we’re talking about nursing, you need relevant information that just happened, because by the time that something’s been published and peer reviewed, it is outdated in the medical industry. So information cycles are going to play a huge role in this. OER is better at adapting to information cycles than the paid publisher content is as it is in the fact that we’re having to do it. However, this updating material, it’s going to be up to the subject faculty, how they want to do this or not. Now, we put out new things all the time. We just got a new A, S, Triple C, O, E, R, I newsletter that went out to y’all, I think, this morning, and it was literally a list of all the new resources that had just come out. So if you’re looking at that and you’re already using an Open Stacks, you might look at this new one and say, Oh, I actually like chapter five better than chapter four. So what you can do if you have access to the remix version, which you will if you’re working with us and in Libra text or press books, or one of the many modalities, you’ll be able to just click and drag pull that in and use it immediately instead. So think about if you are updating your resources every five to seven years for articulation and curriculum. How long does it take you to look through a whole bunch of new books, change up your course in your curriculum to match that? If instead, you’re just modifying things for five to 10 minutes whenever you see a need for it. Theoretically, it should be less work in the long run than it is to do a new book every five to seven years now, that initial list, though, is quite heavy, and so this is what we’re pushing for grants for, because we want to make sure that you are compensated for this curation efforts, this like we’re gonna call assembly or aggregation effort that you’re doing that requires your subject expertise. It’s outside your faculty contract, and absolutely you should be compensated for it. So that’s the kind of thing that we’re applying the grants for.

Brent Warner 18:42
Very briefly on that, Rachel, you mentioned that IVC maybe hasn’t had the best processes for paying people to develop things in the past, and it’s not necessarily like any one person is making a problem. It’s just that the systems haven’t been in place. So as other community colleges across the way are looking at doing these kinds of things, saying, Oh, I can actually build my own OER, right? There are grants out there, as you’re saying. And I know we’re kind of running up on on a lot of these right now, like there’s time limits on these. But what can people, what should people across the colleges if they’re going to build a new curriculum course, right? What? What should they get paid? I guess, I guess that’s what people want to know.

Rachel Fleming 19:26
There’s no way for us to pay you what I believe you’re actually worth. So most of the time you’re getting pennies on the dollar. So you guys were getting between 502 grand, two grand, I think, if you were offering something from scratch, and around $1,000 if you’re building an entire course. So the going rate around the state is about 10 grand for a full course. Now, 10 gram is that that includes a textbook with a URL to that remix textbook that you’re using, that you’re updating as a living document, as well as a second link to the Canvas course uploaded to the Canvas Commons, which includes textbooks, test banks, text. Book, PowerPoints, lecture notes, it’s everything. So basically the goal is you can hand that to a brand new part time instruction faculty and say, Hey, here’s basically you could be a course manager if you want to learn how we do it here at IVC. Here you go, ready to teach. Make it your own if you wanted. So 10 grand would be for the full amount everything. And to me, honestly, it’s not enough. It’s about 10 grand more than what? About nine grand more than what y’all have been getting? So that’s what I’m advocating for. And then I’m advocating for an additional 10 grand in the back end for accessibility, for someone to do road map coordinating for all of the basically admin and other elements related to this, and actually to make it accessible to students. So that is one element, that’s my opinion. There are people who have gotten paid up to $40,000 for an OER. But like, for instance, in the Central Valley where I worked last year, we had to make an HVAC OER, and they’re still working on it. There is no good HVAC OER in the nation, so they’re having to build it from scratch. The author is not an author. He’s not someone who writes books. He’s worked in the field, he worked in the oil rigs, and then he ran his own HVAC business. So they’re going to take audio, like recordings, throw it into a transcription service, hopefully, this is the goal, and then throw that into AI and have that help write the base contents. And then they have to reach out to manufacturers to actually get all of the diagrams. So when you’re talking about that level of building, of course, you’re looking at way more money. However, we have so much remix content now we’re basically just asking you to put together a different puzzle piece and get puzzle pieces into your own arrangements. To me, you’re looking at anywhere from 100 to 500 hours. Most people, I can do multiple OER in a single semester. You’re lucky if you’re going to get one OER done in a six month period, and that’s including either a Christmas or a summer break where you’re going to work on it quite heavily, honestly, if we’re doing realistic timelines for things, I’ve seen faculty take a year. I’ve also seen English faculty, because there’s so much English OER out there, just like, literally, be like, I want these two help me remix them. We remix them. We remix them in one night, publish it the next day. They use it in their class three days later. So it is possible to take content, remix it, and use it in less than a week, and it’ll be your own living document that then you can update as needed. I’ve also seen people who want to take two years to do it. So it’s again, going to vary depending on you as a subject expert.

Tim Van Norman 22:25
You mentioned that that some of these contain especially if you’re doing canvas, commons, it contains question banks, it contains quizzes, the assignments, PowerPoints, maybe Even video links to videos or something like that. That’s what I hear all the time from somebody who’s using a publisher. Hey, my Well, my publisher gives me all of these tools so they can actually look for that as they’re looking at the OER materials. That’s correct.

Rachel Fleming 22:55
So OER ancillaries are a whole thing, and they’re still considered OER. So an OER test bank, an OER assignment list, and often they’re attached, like, again, we’re going to encourage a lot of folks to use libretexts if they’re a part of, like, a lot of GE courses, and we can attach PDFs to them, or we can attach it to the back end, so only instructors have access to it, but students wouldn’t. So the whole goal is to be able to have all the ancillaries tied to it as well. Part of the reason we’re advocating for these grants is because a lot of the books might be done and be willing to be remixed from, and maybe you can remix a book in two days, but maybe the ancillaries aren’t built yet. So basically, we can use state funds to pay you to build a statewide used OER test bank. And test banks are some of the most challenging to build, because you think they’re often in three modalities. Our Spanish department is looking to build them in a scantron format, just an online Canvas format, and in just a regular in person environment. So it’s three modalities of tests that they have to build out that then if they make them free for the states, those absolutely they should be compensated for that work, because that’s not something that’s within their faculty contract. So yes, ancillaries are more difficult to find. You can’t search just for ancillaries.

Tim Van Norman 24:05
So along those lines, in this age of AI, how does AI factor into OER?

Rachel Fleming 24:12
So it’s really fun.

Tim Van Norman 24:14
I know I’m mixing my acronyms, but I love it.

Rachel Fleming 24:18
I love AI – it’s a huge chance. I’ve been using it since the moment I had access to any of it, I’ve been using all the different ones I can possibly get my hands on. I try them all. Gamma dot app is a really great one to use if you’re just looking at making fast PowerPoints. We use chat GBT to basically you can aggregate from a whole bunch of other OER content, because it’s a language model, right? So you tell it what to pull from. It’s not pulling from the World Wide Web. It’s not making stuff up. You can give it an outdated OER and say, Make this and use culturally responsive pedagogy. Use these specific names, bring in these examples, throw in, say, some lecture notes that you have. Put it in this order, and you can take AI and have it, pull from existing content, curate it in a new format for you, so it can really expedite our processes. I’ve seen people write entire books basically. Using outdated OER and AI to update it, and it’s been really beautiful. So we’ll see what happens. There is some sketchy elements related to the images. They’re starting to get better, but they’ve been pretty racist and they’ve been pretty sketchy, so we’ll see how those go. But yeah,

Brent Warner 25:16
Okay, so there’s obviously a ton for us to possibly continue to dig into. You know, clearly, you’re just getting started on these conversations, and so there’s way, way more. And I think, Rachel, we’d love to have you come back in the future to kind of get, like, do deep dives into different types of conversations. But for today, I think this is a great start for people to kind of go, Well, what can I start looking at? What can I start thinking about for my OER options, and we really appreciate you coming on to join us.

Rachel Fleming 25:44
Absolutely, I love OER. I believe in it. I have seen the power of it. I have seen children, not children, students brought to tears when they see their names and they see themselves represented in the learning materials. So I know the power of this work, but obviously I’ll just need to talk about it over and over and over again. So thanks for

Tim Van Norman 25:59
letting me chat with you thank you for listening today. For more information about the show, please visit our website at the higher ed tech podcast.com

Brent Warner 26:09
as always, we do want your feedback, so please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts for everyone

Tim Van Norman 26:16
at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with your technology questions, please contact IVC technical support. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please stop by a 322 or contact me. Tim Van Norman AT T van norman@ivc.edu

Brent Warner 26:30
and if you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on LinkedIn at Brent G Warner and Rachel. What if somebody wants to get hold of you? What should we

Rachel Fleming 26:40
do? So you can email me. At, R Fleming, R, F, L, E, M, I, N, g@ivc.edu, you can come into the library every Wednesday. I’m sitting in the Library at the Reference Desk. You can come in and chat with me, because I am for you guys, not just for students. And yeah, anytime you want to reach out, reach

Tim Van Norman 26:54
out. Excellent. So I’m Tim Van Norman

Brent Warner 26:57
and I’m Brent Warner, and we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Take care everybody you.