“Yes You Can: Providing Institutional Planned and Just-in-Time Support to Faculty” is the title of the session of Open Ed 2021 that I watched. Lisa Young from Scottsdale Community College and Mathew Bloom and Debbie Baker from Maricopa Community Colleges were the speakers. They are part of Open Maricopa initiative. This project includes professional development, collaborative creator fests (how cool!), open courseware… and more! They also have mini-grants that Bloom described. Bloom mentioned they use Pressbooks and branded it Maricopa Open Digital. Faculty apply for mini-grants, and there are two submission opportunities in November and January. What I thought was really useful is that they have a tiered structure for individual projects that may be simpler and team-based OER/book initiatives up to $3,000! They also have World of Open hands-on virtual workshops. They have Open Passports and faculty own stamps by attending the workshops. Now, they are taking clips from the recorded webinars and creating a Pressbooks resource. They are also aligning with a set of OER competencies. The webinars support Arizona OER and lead up to the AZ Regional OER Conference & Leadership Summit. Bloom mentioned they have a diverse leadership committee. Baker spoke about the UN SDG Open Pedagogy Faculty Fellowship which is focused on creating renewable assignments across several institutions. They have also done COllaborative Creator Sessions that are “data-informed” and “faculty requested.” Young talked about Open Courseware: Maricopa OER (MOER) with 315+ faculty and ten colleges! The Maricopa Open Digital (MOD) Pressbooks instance is integrated with the LMS, has H5P interactive elements for engagement and assessment, and student-developed content. That is awesome! I would love to have a PRessbooks instance like that! We already have the open pedagogy and OER initiatives that could be leveraged and expanded with a system like Pressbooks, for example.
