Richard Sebastian

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Announcing the Zx23 Project Grantees

July 1, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Congratulations to the VCCS colleges selected to participate in the Zx23 Project. Each college will receive grant funds to support faculty and staff in building a Z-Degree at their respective institutions. You can click on the college abbreviation in the first column to see additional application details.

See the Zx23 Project page for news and updates on grantees and other aspects of this groundbreaking project.

There is still a chance for a few additional colleges to participate in the Zx23 Project. Contact Richard Sebastian at rsebastian@vccs.edu for details.

College First Last Type of credential Type of program Grant
NVCC Dr. Braddlee Associate degree Liberal Arts $15000
VWCC Elizabeth Wilmer Associate degree General Studies $15000
PVCC John Donnelly Associate degree General Studies $14760
TNCC Patrick Tompkins Associate degree Social Science $15000
TCC Daniel DeMarte Associate degree Administration of Justice $15000
GCC Ann Woolford Associate degree General Studies $14855
CVCC William Sandidge Associate degree General Studies and Business Administration $15000
NRCC Pat Huber Associate degree General Studies $15000
WCC Lorri Huffard Associate degree Science, Specialization in Mathematics $15000
PDCCC Tara Atkins-Brady Credential* Certificate in General Education $14100
JTCC Leonda Keniston Associate degree General Studies $15000
JSRCC Jane Rosecrans Associate degree Social Sciences $14912
MECC Vickie Ratliff Associate degree Management $15000

We’re open on Saturday: OpenVA 2.1

April 29, 2015 / / 0 Comments

openVA_logoOpenVA has gone viral, with the first documented outbreak happening this Saturday from 10am-2pm on the William & Mary campus in Williamsburg, VA. There are still a few open spots left if you want to come. You can find the link to register and other important information on the OpenVA site,  http://openva.org.

William & Mary graduate student Jamison Miller caught the OpenVA  bug during last year’s  summit at Tidewater Community College and brought it back with him to the W&M campus, where it spread apparently.  Those infected have been manifesting symptoms like a newfound interest in openness and a disregard for weekend plans. It’s the kind of virus that I’d like to see become a pandemic. OK, OK, end of my extended metaphor(or simile?).

I am excited to be moderating the opening panel, Intro to OER, especially since I didn’t think I was going to be able to make it to OpenVA 2.1 at all. However, I think this event is a significant development in the somewhat grassroots growth of OpenVA and, as I didn’t want to miss it, made room in my schedule. Besides, it’s pretty easy to reschedule my Zhumba® workout.

Visit the OpenVA website to see the full agenda and the roster of speakers.

OpenVA 2.1: Powdered Wig Version

April 14, 2015 / / 0 Comments
Thomas Jefferson Reenactment

“P.S., citizens: ye should license openly all of mans’ intellectual endeavors to avoid some serious problems down the road.”

OpenVA is putting on its breeches and tri-cornered hat, hopping on its pony,  and heading to Williamsburg, VA. OpenVA is evolving from a centrally-organized, annual summit to more of an umbrella term for a collection of institution or group-sponsored gatherings focused on all forms of openness. This is a good thing, I think, and was the goal anyway, shared at the close of OpenVA 2.0 last October at Tidewater Community College with the idea of the college “drive-by.”

The W&M event is really an ideal format for the next iteration of OpenVA. Jamison Miller, previous OpenVA participant and graduate student in W&M’s Higher Education Program, organized OpenVA 2.1 to address particular needs at his institution, but has designed the event with input from the the broader open community in Virginia. Here is the announcement Jamison posted to the OpenVA mailing list:

We are excited to announce “OpenVA 2.1”, a 3-hour workshop on Open Educational Resources (OER) that will be hosted at the College of William and Mary on Saturday, May 2nd. Although OER are gaining exposure and adoption across the globe, awareness remains one of the chief obstacles to implementation. This event, then, is about fostering a rich and varied awareness of the many faces of OER. We are organizing two focused panels to critically discuss:

  1. the current OER landscape and what constitutes OER and,
  2. first-hand accounts of OER implementation from a variety of disciplines and contexts.

These panel sessions will be broken up by an expectedly spirited keynote address from Gardner Campbell, Vice Provost for Learning Innovation and Student Success at Virginia Commonwealth University. Space in the agenda will be reserved for audience input, as we hope to encourage an engaged dialogue relevant to attendees. And lunch is on us!

It is good to see the DIY, guerilla spirit of the first OpenVA conference continue. The first conference was created 2 1/2 years ago out of spit and polish, rolls of duct tape, Werner Herzog-recommended bolt-cutters, pure, unrefined human ingenuity, and a small roll of bills that constituted a budget. We referred to it as an “inaugural” event at the time, but that was purely aspirational. Here we are today, with another exciting event at one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious colleges. Who’d a thunk? Details below. It’s free, but you have to register.

Saturday, May 2nd, 10:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. (doors open at 10 for coffee)
Media Center, Ground floor, Swem Library
The College of William and Mary
400 Landrum Drive, Williamsburg, VA 23185

Free weekend parking available in all campus lots
Directions: https://swem.wm.edu/about/directions-parking
The event is FREE, but pre-registration is required as there is a cap of 50 attendees. Register at http://openva.org/register-2/. Please distribute immediately to interested staff and faculty. For questions, please contact Beverly Covington or Jamison Miller.

The Portable Z: We’re Doing Five Blades

April 9, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Portable ZOne of my favorite Onion articles is an expletive-laced “op-ed” by fictitious Gillette CEO and President James M. Kilts responding to his company’s lack of innovation in the “multi-blade” razor game. Softening up the language a bit so the VCCS will continue to allow me to blog, the modified headline reads: “Screw It. We’re Doing Five Blades.” I’m not going to link to it for obvious reasons, but you get the drift. Google the Onion + five blades if you want to read the whole, hilarious, testosterone-soaked article. Again: lots of cuss words.

Well, Virginia’s Community Colleges are “doing five blades,” too. Not in the multi-blade razor/moisturizing aloe strip space, of course. No, instead–building on the pioneering work of Tidewater Community College–the VCCS is taking OER to the next, audacious, metaphorical five-blade level by scaling the zero-textbook-cost degree–or Z Degree–to all 23 VCCS colleges.

The initiative, called the Z x 23 Project, is made possible by a generous grant from The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, an organization with a deep interest in understanding how to successfully scale OER. The one-year grant will allow the VCCS to kickstart the process of building out the Z Degree by providing funding, support, and training to fifteen (15) VCCS colleges to begin building pathways to their own Z Degrees. An initial cohort of 6 colleges will begin work right away and work through the summer. A second cohort of 9 colleges will get underway in early fall 2015. Each participating Z x 23 college will pilot the open courses they adopt for this project. Lumen Learning, the VCCS’s partner in this endeavor, will work closely with participating institutions to build these pathways, host the courses in Blackboard Learn, and evaluate the outcomes of the pilots. Along the way, we also want to document how OER successfully scales and becomes mainstream, and answer the question, “How do we make Z degrees portable?”

Virginia’s community colleges are known internationally for their innovative OER work and significant accomplishments in developing and using open materials. TCC’s groundbreaking Z Degree, the first all-OER degree in the world, is partially responsible for putting Virginia on the OER map. However, much of this attention also comes from Virginia’s uncommon central structure, which enables the system to translate a commitment to scale OER into action. Sixteen VCCS colleges have developed and deployed OER courses. Over 70 open courses have been developed using Chancellor’s Innovation Funds (CIF), Chancellor’s OER Adoption Grants, Professional Development Grants, or local college funds. Collectively, the efforts of Virginia’s Community Colleges have saved students millions of dollars in textbook costs. And with the addition of 2 new Z Degrees from NVCC, the VCCS now has 3 all-OER associate degrees. All of this has taken place in less than 3 years.

This is a growing, global movement, and the next three years are going to bring even more dramatic results. This grant from the Hewlett Foundation is going to allow the VCCS to continue to lead the way forward.

Details about how your college can become a Z x 23 college will be forthcoming in the next few weeks. In the meantime, feel free to post a comment on here or contact me directly to express your interest or get additional information.

The 3rd Annual Open Textbook Summit is calling

March 19, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Call_for_Proposals___Open_Textbook_SummitThe call for proposals is out for BCcampus’s 3rd Annual Open Textbook Summit. The summit will be held on May 28-29 in Vancouver, British Columbia. This is the same location as the Open Education Conference on November 18, 2015, which also has a call for proposals.

Summit topics include:

  1. Faculty experiences adopting, adapting or creating open textbooks
  2. Student advocates and students who have experienced open textbooks
  3.  Open textbook project staff interested in sharing experiences and resources
  4. Government representatives who are, or are interested in, creating policy and establishing funding programs
  5. Librarians supporting open textbooks
  6. Open textbook research initiatives
  7. Open textbook peer review
  8. Institutional support for open textbook adoptions
  9. Technology to support the development and use of open textbooks
  10. Innovative pedagogical activities involving open textbooks  and open pedagogy

Submissions  are due on March 23, 2015. Acceptance announcements go out no later than April 2, 2015. Presenters get their registration fee waived.

The Digital Revolution Will Be Livestreamed

January 26, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The Textbook Costs and Digital Learning Resources (TCDLR) Committee released this final report a few weeks ago at the last meeting of the Reengineering Task Force. I co-chaired the committee with the wonderful Dr. Mark Estepp, President of Southwest Virginia Community College. The committee was charged with the following tasks:

  1. examine VCCS administrative practices and policies that unnecessarily add to the cost of academic textbooks,
  2. explore how networked digital technology can best be leveraged to lower the overall cost of textbooks, including using open educational resources,
  3. investigate ways which currently licensed electronic resources can be used in electronic “course packs,” as a substitute for textbooks, or for the supplementary material often required for a course of study,
  4. identify opportunities for interested VCCS faculty to explore using openly licensed resources in their courses,
  5. examine the current relevance of printed textbooks in an age of interactive, web-based content, digital publishing, and
  6. recommend strategies and policies for creating an institutional culture that embraces and practices openness, transparency, collaboration, and sharing.

The report contains a number of recommendations for lowering the cost of course materials across the VCCS. I am really proud of what this group accomplished, much of it before the release of this report, including the 17 college VCCS Collaborative Bookstore contract with Follett to textbook reduction metrics in the annual evaluations of VCCS presidents. In fact, in many ways the final report is a bit anti-climactic.

Still, you should red it. You can read or download a copy of the report below:

OpenVA: Live Stream

October 18, 2014 / / 0 Comments

It is almost like you are really there!

Session 1
Open Educational Resources Panel
8:30 am to 10:00 am

Moderator: Diane Ryan (TCC)

  • Raising OER Awareness – Anita Walz, Virginia Tech T Library
  • The Z-degree – Daniel DeMarte, Tidewater Community College
  • Write Your Own Textbook / Student Generated Texts – Jennifer Kidd, Old Dominion University

Session 2
Open Infrastructure Panel
10:15 am to 11:45 am

Moderator: Jim Groom (UMW)

  • A Domain of One’s Own – Martha Burtis (University of Mary Washington)
  • UMW Blogs – Ryan Brazell (University of Mary Washington)
  • Free and Open Infrastructure Initiatives – Chad Wollenberg (Southside Community College)
  • Cloud-based Infrastructure – Rusty Waterfield (Old Dominion University)

Session 3
Open Pedagogy / Curriculum
12:30 pm to 2:00 pm —

Moderator – Mano Talaiver (Longwood University)

  • Outward-facing Teaching and Learning – Jeff McClurken (University of Mary Washington), Recipient of 2014 SCHEV Outstanding Faculty Award for Teaching with Technology
  • OER at a CC: Just Start Somewhere – Cheryl Huff (Germanna Community College)
  • MOOCS – Tom Woodward (Virginia Commonwealth University)
  • LOOCS – Art Fridrich (Virginia State University)

Get your hammers. We’re building an OpenVA

July 18, 2014 / / 0 Comments

It is encouraging that last year’s OpenVA conference wasn’t a one-off event. It easily could have been. The conference was initiated and supported by the McDonnell administration, now gone, and could easily have ended with a round of pat on the backs and atta boys after the conference’s closing session, held at the Stafford campus of the University of Mary Washington. But OpenVA has come back for a second year, kept alive by the passion and dedication of the conference organizers, an enthusiastic group of educators representing Virginia’s public post-secondary institutions.

TCC_VA_Beach

TCC’s cool-looking student center, Virginia Beach campus

The  follow-up event is scheduled for Saturday, October 18th at Tidewater Community College’s Virginia Beach campus. The event will be a little different this year, focused less on sharing best practices and more on the development of a framework of policies that support greater adoption of open resources and promote collaboration among institutions across the state. The summit, called Building OpenVA, will gather input from participants during four focused discussion sessions with the purpose of developing recommendations for a statewide open resource strategy.

The summit is for administrators, educators, legislators, librarians, and learning technologists involved with public post-secondary education in Virginia who:

  • have launched successful open initiatives that they would like to expand or scale,
  • know, or want to know, how to support an open initiative at their institution,
  • understand the importance of openness and want to better understand how ‘open’ is currently being deployed throughout Virginia,
  • believe in the promise of ‘open’ but aren’t sure how to start or sustain an open initiative,
  • want to learn how to form and write policy for open education.

You can find out more about the Building OpenVA Summit, as well as respond to an open call for submissions, at the event website: http://openva.org/. And don’t forget that the 2014 Open Ed Conference will take place a few weeks later in Washington, DC, another great opportunity for VCCS faculty and staff interested in learning more about OER and global open initiatives.

Bookstore Contracts, OER, and Textbook Affordability

June 5, 2014 / / 0 Comments

BooksBelow you will find a link to the VCCS Bookstore Operations Request for Proposals. This RFP was developed in response to the findings of the VCCS’s Textbook Costs and Digital Learning Workgroup. For the past two years, I have co-chaired, along withe Dr. Mark Estepp, President of Southwest Virginia Community College, this workgroup. While the TCDLR group’s work is still ongoing with its final report scheduled to be released this summer, one of its early findings was not only how much a college’s bookstore contract dramatically influences textbook prices–something that was well-known–but also that the terms of the contracts of various VCCS colleges were wildly disparate. We also discovered that of our 23 colleges, 9-10 had contracts expiring within the next several years.

As a result, Virginia Western Community College, the college with the bookstore contract expiring the soonest, lead the development of this RFP that is not only a systemwide agreement that all colleges can use, but include requirements for the support of OER as well as a reduction in the percentage of commission colleges receive from book sales. A total of 12-13 colleges have indicated they will sign on once their current contracts expire, making it pretty darn close to a systemwide bookstore contract.

Feel free to download and reuse the contract.

VCCS Bookstore RFP by richardsebastian

Announcement: the Chancellor’s OER Adoption Grant, Deux

April 10, 2014 / / 0 Comments

open_book_neonTonight (April 10th, 2014) during the New Horizon’s Excellence in Education Awards dinner,  Chancellor Glenn DuBois will be announcing the next round of the Chancellor’s OER Adoption Grant. Because you are reading my blog or following me on Twitter, you get an advanced peek at the grant details and online application. Don’t say I never gave you nothin’.

Building on the success and momentum of the 2013 grant, which produced twelve high-enrollment, faculty-developed courses in which all required materials are free and openly licensed, the next phase of the Chancellor’s project will focus on increasing OER adoption by incentivizing VCCS faculty content experts to build and curate a library of open educational resources . The 2014-15 grants will be awarded to individuals who will form multi-college content teams to identify and review open content for high-enrollment course sequences (BIO 101-102, CHM 111-112, etc.). Each grantee will receive $1000 to collect these materials as well as  use them  to build and pilot their own OER courses at their respective colleges. Other VCCS faculty will be able to confidently select from this curated content to incorporate into their courses however they wish.

This OER development model of content teams has been used successfully in the Kaleidoscope Project, an effort several of our colleges are participating. Grantees will be supported by Lumen Learning.

For more information about the grant, or to fill out the online application, follow this link to my Chancellor’s OER Adoption Grant page. You’ll find out more grant details and links to the RFP and online application. The turnaround time for applying is pretty short: the deadline is April 28th, 2014. Good luck!

 

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