I saw a familiar acronym on the schedule of OpenEd 2021 sessions! Tonight we watched the session “Creating a Culture of Open with Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)” with several Open Education leaders! The moderator was Una Daly, Director CCCOER from Open Education Global. Panelists included Dr. Bob Awkward, Cynthia Orozco, Judith Sebesta, Kim Ernstmeyer, and Shinita Hernandez. Daly mentioned that OEGlobal is an international member-based network with 240+ members in 44 countries and including higher education and K-12. CCCOER’s mission is to expand awareness and adoption of high-quality OER at the community college level. Daly described the CC ECHO program, RLOE, ZTC, and Open for Antiracism. I did not know about CC ECHO that promotes equity in Hispanic-serving institutions. Daly also mentioned that they had a book club and workshops on H5P and annotation. I should look into the H5P resources! Dr. Bob Awkward, Assistant Commissioner for Academic Effectiveness at the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, spoke about the OER efforts and advisory council in the state. To promote student voices in open education advocacy, they have OER student ambassador programs and student representatives on several committees. Cynthia Orozco from East Los Angeles College is a librarian that works on informed open pedagogy: “teaching students about & brings students into open education.” Orozco mentioned that “Students decide individually and negotiate as a whole their preferred individual and collective authorship and licensing” and “students can opt-out when they want to.” Orozco talked about centering students as creators and authors with authority. Orozco mentioned that they are “experts in something even though they may now know it (yet!).” They described the scholarly values, online persona, and “the politics of citation.” Orozco spoke about working “open or closed” after having conversations with students. Dr. Judith Sebesta talked about creating a culture of open across Texas with the DigiTex and other collaborations. They write case studies on open education practices and produce yearly reports. Sebesta mentioned they have recently launched a professional development funding opportunity and statewide surveys. Kim Ernstmeyer spoke about the Department of Education OpenRN program with 16 WTCS colleges and 300+ national reviewers of the resources being produced with the goal of adapting content beyond the state of Wisconsin. Student voices are included to highlight areas of improvement. Despite COVID-19, they had 60+ adoptions of OER. They have also developed an OER 101 course with half a million dollars in estimated savings. Shinita Hernandez, who I have met over email and will interact with next year, is at Montgomery College and is the Department Chair in Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice as well as a CCCOER Executive Council Leadership member. Hernandez connected the UN Sustainable Development Goals to Open Pedagogy and now the initiative has international partners (Canada). Teams work with members from different institutions and they are charged with creating renewable assignments and students become “agents of change in their communities.” They recently won an Open Education award. Hernandez also spoke about a new project for “students as social justice ambassadors in decolonizing higher education.” Through a competitive application, students will be paired with faculty and receive a stipend. I am now even more excited to speak to Hernandez and work on connecting with the SDG program and learn about the new initiative. I would like students in BIT 295 to contribute to our campus and beyond by raising awareness of electronic waste challenges and the UN Sustainable Development goals. We can learn from these panelists and their projects to improve our work and the student experience.
