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Speakers:
Melissa: Okay. Hello and welcome to the Open Education Network's Pub101. Thank you for joining us for today's session. My name is Melissa Chim, and I'm the Scholarly Communications Librarian for Excelsior University. I'll be your host and facilitator for today. As everyone trickles in and we get started, I'm starting to think about my trip to Minnesota next week for the Library Publishing Coalition Conference. I thought I would open up to everybody in the chat. Go ahead, introduce yourself, and maybe talk about any travel plans that you have coming up. Okay. Soon, I will be handing it off to Karen Bjork and Abbey Childs from the Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries to talk about call for proposals.
As always, we will leave time for your questions and conversation at the end. There may be many of you who have experience with this topic in addition to our guests, and we invite you to share your experiences and resources. Oh, Amanda is coming to LPF as well. Oh, Elizabeth is from Florida and she gets to travel to North Carolina this weekend. It's for fun, not for a conference. That's always good to hear. Oh, there's actually quite a lot of people going to the Library Publishing Forum this weekend, so that is exciting. So, I can't wait to see everybody there. As we get started here, just a few housekeeping details. We have an orientation document that includes our schedule and links to session slides and recordings.
If you can't make it to a session and want to know what you missed, please check the document and all of this will be available in the chat in the next couple minutes. Please remember there is a companion resource for these sessions, the Pub101 Canvas Curriculum, and that's where you'll find the resources and templates I just mentioned. We are recording the session and we'll add it to our YouTube Pub101 Spring 2024 playlist that will be also available on our Linktree. We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms.
Please join us in creating a safe and constructive space. Finally, all links to the resources just mentioned can be found in one place. That'll be our Linktree, which will be in the chat momentarily. Now I'll hand things over to Karen Bjork and Abbey Childs to talk about call for proposals.
Karen: Fantastic, thank you so much. Let me just go ahead and share my screen and get into presentation mode and then we will get started. Okay, everyone can see presentation? All good to go? Perfect. Thank you, Karen. So, Abbey and I are going to be talking about communicating capacity and expectations using your call for proposal. So, I'm going to start by introducing ourselves. My name is Karen Bjork. I am Head of Digital Libraries and Publishing here at VCU Libraries. So, prior to working at VCU Libraries, I oversaw the Open Textbook Publishing Program, PDXOpen at Portland State University. So, many of my experiences that I'm going to be talking about within this presentation come from my time at PSU.
Abbey: I'm Abbey Childs. I'm the Open Educational Resources Librarian at VCU. My background primarily has been in public services and I'm still pretty new to my role as the OER Librarian at VCU, as well as to OER Publishing. So, since Karen and I are both relatively new to our roles at VCU, we've been able to take advantage of the unique opportunity as we've been coming in and getting a sense of the program and starting to make tweaks here and there to review our program with fresh eyes. We'll talk more about the impact that that's had on our call for proposals this year.
Karen: So I always like to provide what we're going to cover before we dig into the presentation. So, we'll cover an overview of what to include in your call for proposals. We'll talk about services and support, look at what a final product and timeline can look at. We'll discuss author challenges and the most important lessons learned that you can take away, improve, and then continue to run call for proposals year after year. So, before we get started, so while you heard from Carla about MOUs last week, the call for proposal actually comes first and it does actually inform your author agreement or your MOUs. So, the two should really mirror each other in terms of author and program requirements.
So, the call for proposals or CFP, it really provides your program the opportunity to set priorities, expectations, and your program's capacity. So, it is your dating profile. It's typically how faculty first hear about your initiative. So, it really provides that opportunity to communicate and define the program's priorities, expectations, level of funding, and capacity. It also assists with setting author expectations. It allows the authors to have an idea of what they're getting into before they actually get into it. This is really important because many of our authors are going to be working on their OERs during the academic year.
So, they really need to know how much time and effort are they going to get funding to be able to allow them to maybe potentially not teach for the year, or are they going to have to teach at the same time while creating? So you want to be able to have these questions answered before they apply for the proposal. It's really important in order to ensure that their project is successful in the end. Abbey and I will actually be spending the majority of our presentation talking about questions that you should ask and providing examples from our own initiatives. So, there's many open textbook, OER Publishing call for proposals out there. So, I always recommend looking at what others have done.
So, this is what I did when I first got started and I continue to look at how other schools approach their call for proposals. There really is no reason to reinvent the wheel. There are so many programs out there and really it's fantastic because you can pick and choose what you think are going to best apply to your program. It's always important to revise your call for proposal each round. So, priority shift, lessons are learned, budgets are always different, and there's always something that you missed within your call from proposal for the previous year. Abbey will definitely talk about some of those examples as we get and move forward. All right. So, as I mentioned in the previous slide, before you release your call for proposal, you'll want to consider and decide the focus of your grant program.
This is really important. You'll need to ask yourself, who will you be encouraging to apply and does your program have a specific focus? For example, will you be encouraging faculty who teach first-year courses? Is your focus on high enrollment? Will your program focus on a particular discipline or area? Are you looking to work with a department or a degree program, rather than a single course? Is the focus of your OER program to support diversity, equity, and inclusion? So several years ago when I worked at Portland State University, we wanted to target high enrollment courses. So, we designed our call for proposal around that goal. So, one of the things that we needed to do was define what it meant by high enrollment.
So, this took us a bit of time to work out because PSU didn't have a definition for high enrollment courses. So, it meant we had to consult with the registrar's office and other institutional partners, and then we ended up essentially getting a consensus that high enrollment was defined as courses that had approximately 500 students annually. So, while it took us a while to land on this number, it was definitely worth it in the end because then we knew which courses to target our marketing for our call for proposals towards. When we were having conversations with faculty that were interested, one of the first questions we asked them is, "How many students on average do you have per year?"
We were able to tell them, while you're welcome to apply, if we have too many applications than what we have funding for, your proposal will not be a priority. So, our most recent call for proposal at VCU requires that each project and proposal demonstrate an intention to equity, diversity, and inclusion. We note within our call for proposal, so we note how within our call for proposal to differentiate and how the faculty should write about how they're going to incorporate DEI into it. So, for example, we asked folks to look at creating content that fills representational gaps in existing course resources, ensuring resource images, examples and case studies that represent a wide variety of identities and lived experiences, and then also having them solicit feedback from the diverse pool of reviewers.
So, within the proposals, all of the faculty needed to address or they need to address how they're going to focus their projects on DEI. We found this to be really important to have these priorities explicitly stated, because again, we ended up having more proposals than we can fund. So, we do want to say, "Here's our requirements. Here's the rubric that we used, and this is the reason why we chose these particular ones." So it's really an important exercise to really first figure out where your priorities lie. Sorry, I just lost my train of thought. Okay. So, when we talk about priorities, we're going to shift now to requirements. So, it's what are the requirements of your program?
So in my experience, your requirements tend to be more specific with each round. I can tell you our call for proposals every year are getting longer and longer. It's actually becoming somewhat of a problem, and we have to look and be like, "Okay, do we really need to include this information?" Nine times out of 10, it is, and it's just the nature of our program. So, because we want to be really specific, we end up having quite a long final call for proposal.
So, some of the questions that you're going to ask yourself is, "What CC license will you require your authors to use? Will you be asking and requiring that projects meet accessibility standards, such as making sure that audio and video materials include closed captioning? Will you require one-on-one check-ins, monthly group meetings and workshops? How will grantees share their successes or talk about their challenges?" This is also important for building community and ensuring that projects are completed on time. So, at VCU, for example, grantees must participate in a summer cohort kickoff meeting. They must also have one-on-one check-ins. They have bimonthly group meeting, cohort meetings.
So, the kickoff meeting that we have right at the beginning of the program, it actually provides grantees with the opportunity to meet each other and learn about publishing, copyright, accessibility, open pedagogy. For us, the focus really is on that building a community of practice and learning and having the cohort get together and get to know each other and become comfortable with asking each other questions. Many of the faculty members have never met each other before, and now we're asking them to participate in this large project. So, we really want them to become comfortable with each other, to get to know each other, and really be able to lean on each other because what they're partaking and participating in can feel sometimes very overwhelming.
If they know that there's a group of faculty that are along for the ride with them, it allows them to really be able to lean on not only our project manager, Abbey, but also each other and be able to ask questions of one another and feel and see how people are dealing with the requirements of teaching as well as trying to create this new content. So, we have seen that the success of our program, a lot of it lies within that community building, and it's a really important aspect. We're actually looking at ways in order to enhance that. You also want to see the peer review. Are you going to require your books to be reviewed? Is it going to be open peer review, blind peer review? What are the project deadlines? Are you going to have a set deadline or are you going to have an estimated deadline?
The reason I say that is because what we have found within project deadlines in particular is that those change. We typically are asking faculty to be able to create this material during the academic year. So, because of that, the priorities shift and change. So, we really do need to be flexible, but we also want these projects to end at some point. They just cannot continuously continue. So, it's really about really making clear deadlines, trying to find ways to hold faculty accountable, and saying to faculty, "Okay, what do you think your deadline would be and how can we get there?"
So award levels and funding, so this is one area that I think is constantly changing. In particular for each of our calls for proposals, we always look at "How much money do we actually have to offer, as well as what kind of projects do we want to support?" So the questions are, will you do mini-grants? So will you do mini-grants and only support, adopt, and adapt grants? Would you focus just on creation? Would you want to focus on early stage projects or provide funding for projects that have already been published but need additional support to be updated? So your overall budget will help determine this answer. So, when my program had limited funding, I designed a call for proposal around adapting and adopting projects only.
So, even with that limited funding, it provided the opportunity to continue to support faculty who were flipping their course. It just unfortunately meant that we didn't have the capacity to support faculty that wanted to create a whole new textbook. At VCU, we recently transitioned to having faculty tell us how much money they need to complete their project. So, instead of setting it at a certain amount, for example, 1,500 if you wanted to adapt, 2,000 if you wanted to adopt, and 5,000 if you wanted to create, we say to faculty, "Tell us how much it's going to cost." We may not be able to fund it at that full level, but we want to be able to have faculty say to us, "This is how much I believe it's going to cost me."
It also leads to some very good questions about their projects and making sure that they have a full understanding of what it means to run that full project. So, Abbey will actually be talking about the lessons learned with this various funding level as well. So, it's just an interesting way that we've decided to approach this. All right. Budget, so there's a lot to say about the budget, and I actually feel that this is one of the most complicated areas. Unfortunately, when I first started running my OER program, it totally caught me off guard. I was not expecting the amount of time that it was taking for me to be able to manage budgets. Part of that was because my university, Portland State, we in the library actually distributed the funds ourselves.
So, that is one of the big questions that you do need to figure out before you even get started with your program, is who will be taking care of the distribution of the funds? Is it going to be your library's fiscal office, or are the funds going to get directly deposited to the faculty member's department? That in itself totally changes the way in which you will handle your call for proposals and your requirements. So, as I noted at PSU Library, we distributed the funds to authors directly. So, this required regular meetings with the library's budget analyst to ensure that we were on track and we stayed on budget. We had to set up spreadsheets and documents that guided every decision that we made.
So, if your institution distributes the funds directly, here are some things that you'll need to think about. Will the funds be distributed as one lump sum? Will it be in the beginning, the mid, or the end of the project, or is it a combination of those? Will the authors need to meet certain expectations and deadlines to receive payment, or will you be offering a departmental buyout? Who will cover other payroll expenses known as OPE? So those are employer-paid taxes such as Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare.
If you're offering a stipend of $2,500, for example, will the faculty receive the gross wages of $2,500 or will they actually only receive $2,000 after taxes and OPE are taken out? How will this affect your overall budget? Will your institution hire and handle contracts? If so, who will do that work? Have you spoken to your university's HR to ensure that you are not violating any contracts or HR law? This was something that we had to work really hard on at Portland State, particularly with hiring faculty, those that we had some that were 12-month contracts, some were at 10-month contract. So, we needed to ensure that we were not violating any HR laws or regulations.
So, if you provide your budget straight to the department, it sounds like it's a lot easier, but in fact, there are still things in which you need to consider and think about and it's tricky just in its own unique way. So, at VCU, as I had noted, we give them to our department. We give it to the faculty's department at the beginning of the fiscal year. But one of the things that we are now requiring all of our faculty to figure out even before they apply is, "What will their department allow them to do with the money and how long do they have to spend the money out?" It is something in which unfortunately, we've come across issues on. So, now we're learning lessons about how to handle all of that. Again, Abbey will talk more about this during our lessons learned.
My last slide before we transition to Abbey is services and support. So, you must clearly define what services your program will offer. So, here are a few questions that I recommend answering to help you decide on what your services, your program has the capacity to support. So, will your open textbook authors just write their book or will they also be responsible for editing and designing it? Will the authors be responsible for clearing copyright or will your program provide assistance with this? So at Portland State, many of our open textbooks that we supported were language education books and they required international copyright clearance.
So, while we worked closely with the author to draft the copyright clearance permission letters, we required the authors to request the permissions themselves. A lot of that was just because many of the authors had connections based in the countries in which they were teaching the language of. So, for example, we had a Russian textbook and she was using literature from the 1920s in Russia. Her parents had lived in Russia, and so were able to actually help her navigate what the Russian copyright law was saying. So, there was no way that I could have provided that level of support or information, but I was happy to try to help in any which way possible.
So, the other thing you'll want to ask is during the author's creation process, will the library assist with pedagogical questions or does your university have instructional designers that you can refer them to? Do you have any in-house expertise? Is there staff in your library or at your university that can do copyediting or design? Does that person have the capacity to take on the work? Would you charge for these services? So if the library already offers publishing and/or hosting services, can this initiative be affiliated with those services? So at VCU's OER Initiative, it's based in digital libraries and publishing. So, our OER publishing services align with our journal, monograph, and repository publishing.
So, we offer ISBN or DOI assignment. We do author rights and write revisions, digital preservation, editorial services. We do multiple formats and dissemination, and we will, come this summer, be able to offer Pressbooks publishing platform as well. If you don't have that in-house expertise, will authors be responsible for finding editors and designers themselves, or will this be something that your program will handle? How will you handle peer review? As I said in the previous slide, will your books be double blind or open peer review? Will your program pay peer reviewers or will authors need to pay for those reviewers? If so, how many peer reviewers will be affiliated with your institution? Do you have criteria for who the peer reviewers can or cannot be?
Will the authors be required to set aside a certain amount of funding to be designated for editorial and production services? So this is something that I had done at PSU and I learned that the length of the book will impact the overall cost of editorial and production services. It sounds so straightforward, but I was very surprised at the cost differentiation between books that are 100 pages versus those that are 150. So, that was a really tricky process to figure out how much money we wanted authors to set aside. The other thing is authors don't typically think about production services right at the very beginning, and it isn't until the end of their projects that all of a sudden they are looking to find money to support.
They may have already gotten through their funding, and now they're trying to struggle with "How can I get a good copy editor when I don't have a lot of money left over?" So that was why we thought it was really important to have and to say, "Okay, you must look at setting aside X number of dollars, but we recommend a higher level." So with that, I am going to pass it on to Abbey to talk about final production and timeline.
Abbey: Thanks, Karen. So, yeah, looking into the final product as you've gotten through the creation process with your authors, important to think about licensing. Certainly, will the author retain their copyright or does the copyright go to the university? The anecdote from PSU was when they originally started the program, the author had to give their copyright over to the university, but they were able to negotiate and work with university counsel to allow the authors to keep and retain their copyright. So, it's really important to check with your legal counsel before releasing your call for proposal to make sure that you're clear with authors and you're clear yourself what the author rights are as they relate to these projects.
You'll also need to adjust what Creative Commons licenses the textbooks will be published under, which Karen mentioned a little bit earlier. So, there's some wiggle room or some choices to be made about whether you allow authors to choose a CC license from any of the options or if you're going to require them to publish under a particular license or limit. For example, a lot of CFPs will limit, you can choose your CC license, but you can't use no derivatives so that your work can be remixed and adapted. So, definitely a lot of decisions to be made there as well.
Then also, what does a completed textbook look like? Do you want to define the length of the resource or the number of chapters or sections? Do you want to assign a structure or style? Do you want to require certain elements like a table of contents or other front and back matter pieces to have a cohesive look and feel to the products that are coming out of your program? Then you'll also want to think about what constitutes a final product. So, as Karen mentioned earlier, these projects can't go on forever as much as we would love to have limitless bandwidth and capacity to support. We know of course that that OER work requires the sustainability considerations and revisions.
So, it's about priming your authors to think about that upfront, about when do we call your project closed for the purposes of this program with the understanding that this is going to be a living resource, that as it gets used, it's going to need to be updated and you should have a plan for long-term sustainability and revision. So, that's been a conversation that we're starting to navigate with some of our projects from the 2023 cohort who are getting closer to having a finished product. It's like, "Okay, what does the close up process look like? When are you ready to leave the nest? How can we free up also our internal bandwidth to turn our attention to new projects and the new cycle as well?" Next slide please. Thank you.
Yeah, and then also thinking about what are the potential challenges for the various phases. So, during the application process, we ask authors to think about what are potential barriers or roadblocks that you see looking ahead at your project plan that you might encounter as you create and develop your project. This is an important exercise, especially when looking at realistic timelines, service expectations, and also potential knowledge gaps. So, acknowledging that in your OER program or also on the faculty side, there may be areas that aren't necessarily covered by, for example, the service model. So, Karen mentioned instructional design support.
At VCU, our instructional design framework is pretty dispersed across campus, and there are some departments that don't have a designated instructional designer for their area. That's not something that we have capacity within the library to do. So, there are some places where there may be gaps in coverage of service. So, that's something to think about too is where might there be additional support needed and where might there be a need to modify the project plan to account for those limitations? So other potential challenges could include licensing questions, staffing challenges, like I mentioned, skills gaps, content availability, time concerns, et cetera. Certainly, the list goes on, and I feel like this is one of those things that Karen mentioned.
The list grows every year because we find out about new challenges and each project is different. It's helpful to think through these on a case-by-case basis. This is also another place where those one-on-one meetings with faculty are really helpful to identify those challenges as they come up throughout the course of the project, so that we can look at ways to mitigate them. Then thinking about our selection criteria for how we evaluate our applications. So, we have a couple of criteria areas based on our specific evaluation criteria, which are listed in full on the call for proposals, but those are the project objectives, impact, plan for timeline, equity and inclusion and feasibility.
So, I have an excerpt here from the rubric which shows the criteria and then this what that looks like at different scores. We solicited feedback from liaison librarians from the disciplines for which the projects had applied and got their feedback with their subject matter expertise in mind. So, thinking about again, those program priorities that Karen mentioned earlier, this was an area where we added in a section about equity and inclusion to make sure that that criteria had shown up on the rubric and that we were not only asking for faculty applicants to think about that but also weighing that as part of our evaluation process. Lessons learned, so lots to talk about here.
The first section is just about the project management perspective. Supporting projects takes a lot of time.
So, I think that probably came through in my comments about being able to free up bandwidth to support new projects. I think it never hurts to mention that bandwidth and time and staffing are all limited wherever you are. So, it's really helpful to be cognizant of the number of projects that you have, the capacity to fully support based on your role and your position and your staffing. Timelines and priorities shift. So, it's helpful to work with authors at the beginning of their project to think about competing priorities. So, not only your own priorities within the library, but also faculty members are juggling their own set of competing priorities, which are going to impact their timelines. So, it's helpful again to have those one-on-one check-ins and conversations and to be flexible if changes need to happen.
Policies and procedures for no longer supporting projects, this is a sad fact but a realistic one. We don't want to stop supporting projects, but sometimes you need to if the author is not available to keep working or not meeting program requirements or expectations. So, it's a good question to ask upfront before you have a challenging situation, "What procedures do you have in place to potentially pause their participation in the project and what steps will you need to follow? Who needs to be notified?" And then similarly, if an author leaves the institution mid-project, what happens? Do you continue to support the project?
A lot of times that's going to come down to a case-by-case basis where, for example, if they're going to an institution that doesn't have an OER publishing platform, you might consider continuing to host their project on your own Pressbooks or something like that. So, those are conversations that can happen as situations arise, but it's really helpful to think about them upfront to have a plan in place so you're not scrambling in the heat of the moment to figure out what's the best course of action. Oh, sorry. I missed a bullet point. Yeah, thank you. Then the last piece there is just to be really clear about your budget distribution.
Karen mentioned this when talking about the setup for funding, but I think one of our big lessons learned from the last cycle was to make sure, as she mentioned, that we're aware and that faculty are aware of the various policies that impact the usage of the budget. So, I think you probably can't possibly get enough clarity about the budget. Ask a lot of questions. Talk to the folks who are managing it both internally in the library and also if you're going the route where you're distributing to each individual department to make sure that you're aware of those policies and definitely bringing faculty into the process to make sure that they're also aware.
So, that for example, which we learned is a very common thing, that funding has to be spent within a single fiscal year, that faculty are aware of that and that they don't have a budget plan that has them spending their allotment into the second fiscal year, for example. So, that's a really big important piece is to make sure you've got clarity about how that all works.
Also, specificity, it's great to provide opportunities for feedback and suggestions both from your team and from applicants throughout your program's run. So, this is a really good learning opportunity. Mistakes happen. Especially when you're dealing with project management with a lot of different people with competing priorities and very busy schedules, things are going to come up. So, it's really helpful to have those avenues for feedback, so that you can learn where you might be able to better support faculty in the future and also make changes and tweaks to your program to help it fit into the flow of the academic cycle over the course of the year, for example, and also continues to support faculty innovation and save students' money ultimately.
Thinking about specificity as well with the call for proposals, it's helpful to set clear selection eligibility and rubric, which the trade-off is you've got a long call for proposal. But that specificity helps in the long run because you're giving everybody the information upfront so that they can decide whether it's the right fit for them at this time, and also, what they need to include and be prepared for throughout the project process.
Then lastly, it's okay to reject proposals. You want to make sure that you've got strong, well-thought-out proposals and that what you're publishing is a representation of your program. So you want to ensure that it meets the spirit of your project and what you're trying to do. Rejecting proposals also provides an opportunity to have a conversation with faculty who are interested in OER, even if it's not the right project or the right time, or the plan needs to be tweaked, but it provides an opportunity to work with them to move their proposal forward for the future and can be a way to expand those connections across campus.
So, it's a good way to increase awareness of OER work across campus more broadly, and to start having those conversations, like Karen mentioned, community of practice aspect. Even if you have faculty that aren't necessarily working formally in your program, you can still make those connections and have those conversations and that you can be building to those broader connections and broader community of practice over time. So, yeah, opportunity to create awareness on campus. Like Karen said, it's your dating profile. Why should faculty be interested? Why should they participate? Why should they care? What are the benefits? So asking them to think about impact including, but not limited to, cost savings.
We've had a lot of folks who participated in the program who have told us they've started to think more broadly about pedagogy, which is really exciting. I mean, that's not the only point, but a point of this work is that you've got people reevaluating and innovating with how they teach and interact with students. What expertise as a program manager do you bring to the program and how can you advocate for the library services through this program? And then also opportunities for campus partnerships, so we mentioned instructional designers and liaison librarians. Who else can you bring into the fold to help facilitate this work on your campus? I think that's it.
Yup. Okay. So, great. So, yeah, questions are more than welcome. Then we've got Karen's and my emails there. If you want to reach out, we'd be happy to chat as well.
Melissa: Thank you both so much. This has been really informative. I know with me, we're at the point where we're starting our publishing platform from scratch. So, to hear all of these things to keep in mind is actually really helpful. So, now we can transition over to Q&A. Please feel free to put your questions in the chat, or if you would like to unmute and say a question out loud, please feel free to. Also, I'm going to put another link to the Padlet. Padlet is very easy to use. Just scroll down to session five, May 8th, call for proposals, and you'll see a little plus sign. There you can add any of your thoughts into these little sticky notes. You even had the option of changing the color too, so a little extra fun. So, let me put that in the chat and I'll open it up to everybody.
Amanda put in a really good point actually in the chat. She wrote, "For example, for our syllabus review grants, which is a curation/adoption grant, we require that they agree to meet with a library liaison three times, reduce their course materials costs by 25%, and participate in a survey afterwards. So, you could set publishing requirements based on how you want to scope your program." Actually, there's a question from Karen in the chat. This one is actually for Karen from Karen. You mentioned that asking faculty authors to estimate their costs led to good conversations and questions. Can you say more about that?
Karen: Yeah, so one of the things that I think most or maybe all OER publishing programs really struggle with is the idea that the amount of labor that it takes to create the book is never going to be anywhere near the amount of funding that we can offer. So, we wanted to be able to have a very frank and open discussion with faculty about what it could potentially look like and take in order to create their OER in the end. Really a lot of it is looking at, "Who are their partners? Who are their co-authors? Could they expand out the number of co-authors in order to lessen the amount of work that they do? But then how do you essentially provide funding or incentive for those co-authors to be able to participate?"
So that's been one aspect of this conversation and having faculty estimate the cost on their own because we're trying to essentially remind authors that it's a lot of work to be able to create this level of material. In particular, a lot of the timelines are pretty short. We're looking at essentially two years or two academic cycles, which if you are teaching at the same time, that really is not a lot of time to be able to do the amount of work that is required. The other part of this as well is to have them really think about what it means... It's in align with the first part, what it means to create an OER and what kind of services do they need.
So, when we can actually see what their budget looks like, we can talk as a group and say, "Oh, it doesn't look like they've designated anything for copy editing or for designers." So it's also about having that conversation because one of the things we do is, we open it up. So, Abbey this year had an open call. So, essentially, she had a Zoom link. She talked about the program and then asked faculty to do a Q&A. Then some faculty reached out and said, "Ooh, I'd like to talk to you more." So Abbey spent the time, spoke to them, got a clear understanding of their projects, made recommendations, and then they went and they put in their proposals.
Now we're in the process of accepting the proposals and having those one-on-one conversations even further to discuss the projects and talk to them about how much we were able to fund them, what it looks like, and maybe pieces of what their budget was missing. I'm speaking for Abbey, so I'm going to be quiet here shortly, but it provides Abbey with a really good understanding of the projects. It allows the faculty to get to know Abbey, and it's creating a relationship even before the projects officially kick off. So, I'm going to pivot and ask Abbey to expand on that.
Abbey: Yeah, no, I mean I think you've covered a lot of the big points that I would've brought up. I think I'll add just two pieces. The first is that sometimes faculty don't know what they don't know. So, for example, we had somebody budget for licensing fees for streaming movies, and we're like, "Well, we have a collections budget, so that's great. So, you don't have to worry about funding that piece of it with this program."
Then I think the other piece, which Karen touched on a little bit, is this idea of differentiating that this program is not intended to be compensation for the labor because we would never have the budget to be sufficient to do that in a real way. I was really grateful actually in the Q&A session, I got some very direct questions about that of based on what you're saying, typical project of applicants, this isn't enough to compensate the labor of writing a textbook. It's nice to be able to acknowledge that explicitly and to I guess maybe helpfully, maybe not, although the faculty that I spoke with seemed receptive to reframe that as like, "You're totally right. This isn't going to be enough to compensate you for the work, but we're seeing this as what can we give you to get you started? What do you need to make this happen if it's a thing that you want to do?" I think that reframe has been helpful and it's not going to convince everyone. Everybody has their own reason for coming into this work.
I think because it's such an enormous commitment for faculty authors, I want to respect that and I don't want to pretend that a $2,000 stipend is enough to cover the creation of a textbook. It's just not. But I think being clear with what we're offering, what amount can we give you that you would need to get you over the hump to cover your travel costs or conducting video interviews, which is one of our projects in the past, or covering a copy editor or something like that. I think that it's a facilitation money, rather than a compensation money, if that helps.
Karen: We've also increased how much level of support and education we're offering throughout our cohort cycle. So, while we may not be able to financially compensate folks, we are trying to increase our level of services, so that in kind. So, faculty feel much more supported and it's not just like, "Oh, here's the money. Now, go off and we'll see you in six months." We really are trying to provide a high level of service in order to be like, "Sorry, we can only offer you $1,000." So we're trying to balance that out.
Melissa: I was just going to say, to jump off from that too, we actually have another two-part question about funding. I know it's a really big topic, especially with publishing. So, Janelle asks, "My faculty are asking for funding to revise OER projects. I'm curious if you support that specifically in your program and how much money you award for that. Also, do you fund both individual and group projects?"
Abbey: Yeah, I can jump in on this one. So, the first question, do we support revision projects? Yes. So, we had a fun one where the initial resource was created under one of our first cycles of the ACA program, and then another faculty member took the course over and then applied a couple years later to do a second edition of the course. That was one example. I think there have been other revision projects as well, but again, as Karen mentioned, our funding model has shifted over the years. I think that was maybe under a different framework that we had set up, but if we were to get other revision applications, it would be the same like, "You tell us what you need to make this happen and we'll see if hopefully we can make that happen for you."
Then the question about individual and group projects, yes. So, I think the first big departmental project that we had was in our 2023 cycle. So, that was part of the departure from that old funding framework that Karen had talked about where I think it was $1,000 dollars to adopt, $2,000 to adapt, and $5,000 to create. But for this departmental wide adoption, they were creating a resource for a foundational course in the marketing program, and it was going to be, I think, five or six faculty authors. It was just a really big project and we were like, "$5,000 is just not really going to cut it for the scale of what they're trying to do."
So there was a conversation about "Can we create a place in the program for a larger award specifically for a department-wide adoption that's going to impact a ton of students? It's going to have a ton of faculty authors included." So we had our first one this past year, which has been a really interesting thing to see how that has unfolded from a project management standpoint. They've been amazingly organized. They've really taken it and run, which has been really exciting, and I'm really looking forward to seeing where we go for the finished product. Then this current cycle where we've just had a round of applications and we're in the process of reviewing and notifying and having those conversations. We had two applications for department projects this year.
So, it's cool to see. It's definitely a different type of application and a different type of project to support on our end, but I think looking at the impact, I think that's where it becomes even more important that their project plan is really well-developed and that they have a good sense of what they're doing going into it, because there's a lot more moving pieces. But I think asking those questions that Karen walked us through at the beginning of designing your call for proposals, having that in the back of your mind with, "Does this work for individual? Does this work for projects, or do we need to have different considerations and make that explicit?" I think is something to consider.
Karen: I just want to add too, about funding revised OER projects. I think that that is a really important aspect that all programs, particularly those that have been running for a couple of years, really need to think about. OERs should not be static. Courses change. Faculty change and shift. So, we do need to think about "How do we continuously help or support faculty who want to be able to revise their books?"
One thing that we were thinking about at Portland State before I left was "Do we want to do a separate call for proposals just for those faculty that we've already worked with?" Do we want to reach out to them and say, "Hey, we have a small pot of money. We want to support you in your work to be able to revise your book. Let us know what you need and what that would look like and we can help support you"? The problem with that was that it was taking away from new projects. We had, for example, $15,000 set aside for OERs, and we were only then able to do 10 for new. So, we did less projects in order to support the revisions. But we were thinking and I still believe it's really important because it is one of the concerns you sometimes hear from faculty about open educational resources that they're old or they don't feel as though they're getting updated or revised at the same level as a publisher's textbook. So, it's a good way to be able to circumvent that conversation.
Melissa: And Karen added, "But the license means they can do that." And it's true. That's what the CC license is for. Are there any other questions? Okay. Thank you so much, Karen and Abbey. We really appreciate you coming in and sharing your experiences today with us. It's been super helpful, and thank you all for joining us as we continue to learn about open textbook publishing. We hope that as we continue to share available resources and recommendations, one of your key takeaways is the sense that you're not alone in finding out how to support open textbook authors.
That goes a long way too, feeling that you're not alone. Just one quick announcement also, Pub101 is not meeting next week. Most of us, as we saw in the chat, are going to be at Library Publishing Forum. However, we will return to the regularly scheduled programming on Wednesday, May 22nd. So, we're really looking forward to seeing you all then and have a great rest of your day.
END OF VIDEO
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This May 8, 2024, session of Pub101 is the fifth in our series this year. Host Melissa Chim of Excelsior University welcomes Virginia Commonwealth University's Karen Bjork and Abbey Childs as guest speakers in today's discussion of the Call for Proposals in open publishing.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Audio Transcript
Speakers:
- Karen Bjork (Head of Digital Libraries and Publishing, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries)
- Abbey Childs (OER Librarian, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries)
- Melissa Chim (Scholarly Communications Librarian, Excelsior University)
Melissa: Okay. Hello and welcome to the Open Education Network's Pub101. Thank you for joining us for today's session. My name is Melissa Chim, and I'm the Scholarly Communications Librarian for Excelsior University. I'll be your host and facilitator for today. As everyone trickles in and we get started, I'm starting to think about my trip to Minnesota next week for the Library Publishing Coalition Conference. I thought I would open up to everybody in the chat. Go ahead, introduce yourself, and maybe talk about any travel plans that you have coming up. Okay. Soon, I will be handing it off to Karen Bjork and Abbey Childs from the Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries to talk about call for proposals.
As always, we will leave time for your questions and conversation at the end. There may be many of you who have experience with this topic in addition to our guests, and we invite you to share your experiences and resources. Oh, Amanda is coming to LPF as well. Oh, Elizabeth is from Florida and she gets to travel to North Carolina this weekend. It's for fun, not for a conference. That's always good to hear. Oh, there's actually quite a lot of people going to the Library Publishing Forum this weekend, so that is exciting. So, I can't wait to see everybody there. As we get started here, just a few housekeeping details. We have an orientation document that includes our schedule and links to session slides and recordings.
If you can't make it to a session and want to know what you missed, please check the document and all of this will be available in the chat in the next couple minutes. Please remember there is a companion resource for these sessions, the Pub101 Canvas Curriculum, and that's where you'll find the resources and templates I just mentioned. We are recording the session and we'll add it to our YouTube Pub101 Spring 2024 playlist that will be also available on our Linktree. We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone aligned with our community norms.
Please join us in creating a safe and constructive space. Finally, all links to the resources just mentioned can be found in one place. That'll be our Linktree, which will be in the chat momentarily. Now I'll hand things over to Karen Bjork and Abbey Childs to talk about call for proposals.
Karen: Fantastic, thank you so much. Let me just go ahead and share my screen and get into presentation mode and then we will get started. Okay, everyone can see presentation? All good to go? Perfect. Thank you, Karen. So, Abbey and I are going to be talking about communicating capacity and expectations using your call for proposal. So, I'm going to start by introducing ourselves. My name is Karen Bjork. I am Head of Digital Libraries and Publishing here at VCU Libraries. So, prior to working at VCU Libraries, I oversaw the Open Textbook Publishing Program, PDXOpen at Portland State University. So, many of my experiences that I'm going to be talking about within this presentation come from my time at PSU.
Abbey: I'm Abbey Childs. I'm the Open Educational Resources Librarian at VCU. My background primarily has been in public services and I'm still pretty new to my role as the OER Librarian at VCU, as well as to OER Publishing. So, since Karen and I are both relatively new to our roles at VCU, we've been able to take advantage of the unique opportunity as we've been coming in and getting a sense of the program and starting to make tweaks here and there to review our program with fresh eyes. We'll talk more about the impact that that's had on our call for proposals this year.
Karen: So I always like to provide what we're going to cover before we dig into the presentation. So, we'll cover an overview of what to include in your call for proposals. We'll talk about services and support, look at what a final product and timeline can look at. We'll discuss author challenges and the most important lessons learned that you can take away, improve, and then continue to run call for proposals year after year. So, before we get started, so while you heard from Carla about MOUs last week, the call for proposal actually comes first and it does actually inform your author agreement or your MOUs. So, the two should really mirror each other in terms of author and program requirements.
So, the call for proposals or CFP, it really provides your program the opportunity to set priorities, expectations, and your program's capacity. So, it is your dating profile. It's typically how faculty first hear about your initiative. So, it really provides that opportunity to communicate and define the program's priorities, expectations, level of funding, and capacity. It also assists with setting author expectations. It allows the authors to have an idea of what they're getting into before they actually get into it. This is really important because many of our authors are going to be working on their OERs during the academic year.
So, they really need to know how much time and effort are they going to get funding to be able to allow them to maybe potentially not teach for the year, or are they going to have to teach at the same time while creating? So you want to be able to have these questions answered before they apply for the proposal. It's really important in order to ensure that their project is successful in the end. Abbey and I will actually be spending the majority of our presentation talking about questions that you should ask and providing examples from our own initiatives. So, there's many open textbook, OER Publishing call for proposals out there. So, I always recommend looking at what others have done.
So, this is what I did when I first got started and I continue to look at how other schools approach their call for proposals. There really is no reason to reinvent the wheel. There are so many programs out there and really it's fantastic because you can pick and choose what you think are going to best apply to your program. It's always important to revise your call for proposal each round. So, priority shift, lessons are learned, budgets are always different, and there's always something that you missed within your call from proposal for the previous year. Abbey will definitely talk about some of those examples as we get and move forward. All right. So, as I mentioned in the previous slide, before you release your call for proposal, you'll want to consider and decide the focus of your grant program.
This is really important. You'll need to ask yourself, who will you be encouraging to apply and does your program have a specific focus? For example, will you be encouraging faculty who teach first-year courses? Is your focus on high enrollment? Will your program focus on a particular discipline or area? Are you looking to work with a department or a degree program, rather than a single course? Is the focus of your OER program to support diversity, equity, and inclusion? So several years ago when I worked at Portland State University, we wanted to target high enrollment courses. So, we designed our call for proposal around that goal. So, one of the things that we needed to do was define what it meant by high enrollment.
So, this took us a bit of time to work out because PSU didn't have a definition for high enrollment courses. So, it meant we had to consult with the registrar's office and other institutional partners, and then we ended up essentially getting a consensus that high enrollment was defined as courses that had approximately 500 students annually. So, while it took us a while to land on this number, it was definitely worth it in the end because then we knew which courses to target our marketing for our call for proposals towards. When we were having conversations with faculty that were interested, one of the first questions we asked them is, "How many students on average do you have per year?"
We were able to tell them, while you're welcome to apply, if we have too many applications than what we have funding for, your proposal will not be a priority. So, our most recent call for proposal at VCU requires that each project and proposal demonstrate an intention to equity, diversity, and inclusion. We note within our call for proposal, so we note how within our call for proposal to differentiate and how the faculty should write about how they're going to incorporate DEI into it. So, for example, we asked folks to look at creating content that fills representational gaps in existing course resources, ensuring resource images, examples and case studies that represent a wide variety of identities and lived experiences, and then also having them solicit feedback from the diverse pool of reviewers.
So, within the proposals, all of the faculty needed to address or they need to address how they're going to focus their projects on DEI. We found this to be really important to have these priorities explicitly stated, because again, we ended up having more proposals than we can fund. So, we do want to say, "Here's our requirements. Here's the rubric that we used, and this is the reason why we chose these particular ones." So it's really an important exercise to really first figure out where your priorities lie. Sorry, I just lost my train of thought. Okay. So, when we talk about priorities, we're going to shift now to requirements. So, it's what are the requirements of your program?
So in my experience, your requirements tend to be more specific with each round. I can tell you our call for proposals every year are getting longer and longer. It's actually becoming somewhat of a problem, and we have to look and be like, "Okay, do we really need to include this information?" Nine times out of 10, it is, and it's just the nature of our program. So, because we want to be really specific, we end up having quite a long final call for proposal.
So, some of the questions that you're going to ask yourself is, "What CC license will you require your authors to use? Will you be asking and requiring that projects meet accessibility standards, such as making sure that audio and video materials include closed captioning? Will you require one-on-one check-ins, monthly group meetings and workshops? How will grantees share their successes or talk about their challenges?" This is also important for building community and ensuring that projects are completed on time. So, at VCU, for example, grantees must participate in a summer cohort kickoff meeting. They must also have one-on-one check-ins. They have bimonthly group meeting, cohort meetings.
So, the kickoff meeting that we have right at the beginning of the program, it actually provides grantees with the opportunity to meet each other and learn about publishing, copyright, accessibility, open pedagogy. For us, the focus really is on that building a community of practice and learning and having the cohort get together and get to know each other and become comfortable with asking each other questions. Many of the faculty members have never met each other before, and now we're asking them to participate in this large project. So, we really want them to become comfortable with each other, to get to know each other, and really be able to lean on each other because what they're partaking and participating in can feel sometimes very overwhelming.
If they know that there's a group of faculty that are along for the ride with them, it allows them to really be able to lean on not only our project manager, Abbey, but also each other and be able to ask questions of one another and feel and see how people are dealing with the requirements of teaching as well as trying to create this new content. So, we have seen that the success of our program, a lot of it lies within that community building, and it's a really important aspect. We're actually looking at ways in order to enhance that. You also want to see the peer review. Are you going to require your books to be reviewed? Is it going to be open peer review, blind peer review? What are the project deadlines? Are you going to have a set deadline or are you going to have an estimated deadline?
The reason I say that is because what we have found within project deadlines in particular is that those change. We typically are asking faculty to be able to create this material during the academic year. So, because of that, the priorities shift and change. So, we really do need to be flexible, but we also want these projects to end at some point. They just cannot continuously continue. So, it's really about really making clear deadlines, trying to find ways to hold faculty accountable, and saying to faculty, "Okay, what do you think your deadline would be and how can we get there?"
So award levels and funding, so this is one area that I think is constantly changing. In particular for each of our calls for proposals, we always look at "How much money do we actually have to offer, as well as what kind of projects do we want to support?" So the questions are, will you do mini-grants? So will you do mini-grants and only support, adopt, and adapt grants? Would you focus just on creation? Would you want to focus on early stage projects or provide funding for projects that have already been published but need additional support to be updated? So your overall budget will help determine this answer. So, when my program had limited funding, I designed a call for proposal around adapting and adopting projects only.
So, even with that limited funding, it provided the opportunity to continue to support faculty who were flipping their course. It just unfortunately meant that we didn't have the capacity to support faculty that wanted to create a whole new textbook. At VCU, we recently transitioned to having faculty tell us how much money they need to complete their project. So, instead of setting it at a certain amount, for example, 1,500 if you wanted to adapt, 2,000 if you wanted to adopt, and 5,000 if you wanted to create, we say to faculty, "Tell us how much it's going to cost." We may not be able to fund it at that full level, but we want to be able to have faculty say to us, "This is how much I believe it's going to cost me."
It also leads to some very good questions about their projects and making sure that they have a full understanding of what it means to run that full project. So, Abbey will actually be talking about the lessons learned with this various funding level as well. So, it's just an interesting way that we've decided to approach this. All right. Budget, so there's a lot to say about the budget, and I actually feel that this is one of the most complicated areas. Unfortunately, when I first started running my OER program, it totally caught me off guard. I was not expecting the amount of time that it was taking for me to be able to manage budgets. Part of that was because my university, Portland State, we in the library actually distributed the funds ourselves.
So, that is one of the big questions that you do need to figure out before you even get started with your program, is who will be taking care of the distribution of the funds? Is it going to be your library's fiscal office, or are the funds going to get directly deposited to the faculty member's department? That in itself totally changes the way in which you will handle your call for proposals and your requirements. So, as I noted at PSU Library, we distributed the funds to authors directly. So, this required regular meetings with the library's budget analyst to ensure that we were on track and we stayed on budget. We had to set up spreadsheets and documents that guided every decision that we made.
So, if your institution distributes the funds directly, here are some things that you'll need to think about. Will the funds be distributed as one lump sum? Will it be in the beginning, the mid, or the end of the project, or is it a combination of those? Will the authors need to meet certain expectations and deadlines to receive payment, or will you be offering a departmental buyout? Who will cover other payroll expenses known as OPE? So those are employer-paid taxes such as Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare.
If you're offering a stipend of $2,500, for example, will the faculty receive the gross wages of $2,500 or will they actually only receive $2,000 after taxes and OPE are taken out? How will this affect your overall budget? Will your institution hire and handle contracts? If so, who will do that work? Have you spoken to your university's HR to ensure that you are not violating any contracts or HR law? This was something that we had to work really hard on at Portland State, particularly with hiring faculty, those that we had some that were 12-month contracts, some were at 10-month contract. So, we needed to ensure that we were not violating any HR laws or regulations.
So, if you provide your budget straight to the department, it sounds like it's a lot easier, but in fact, there are still things in which you need to consider and think about and it's tricky just in its own unique way. So, at VCU, as I had noted, we give them to our department. We give it to the faculty's department at the beginning of the fiscal year. But one of the things that we are now requiring all of our faculty to figure out even before they apply is, "What will their department allow them to do with the money and how long do they have to spend the money out?" It is something in which unfortunately, we've come across issues on. So, now we're learning lessons about how to handle all of that. Again, Abbey will talk more about this during our lessons learned.
My last slide before we transition to Abbey is services and support. So, you must clearly define what services your program will offer. So, here are a few questions that I recommend answering to help you decide on what your services, your program has the capacity to support. So, will your open textbook authors just write their book or will they also be responsible for editing and designing it? Will the authors be responsible for clearing copyright or will your program provide assistance with this? So at Portland State, many of our open textbooks that we supported were language education books and they required international copyright clearance.
So, while we worked closely with the author to draft the copyright clearance permission letters, we required the authors to request the permissions themselves. A lot of that was just because many of the authors had connections based in the countries in which they were teaching the language of. So, for example, we had a Russian textbook and she was using literature from the 1920s in Russia. Her parents had lived in Russia, and so were able to actually help her navigate what the Russian copyright law was saying. So, there was no way that I could have provided that level of support or information, but I was happy to try to help in any which way possible.
So, the other thing you'll want to ask is during the author's creation process, will the library assist with pedagogical questions or does your university have instructional designers that you can refer them to? Do you have any in-house expertise? Is there staff in your library or at your university that can do copyediting or design? Does that person have the capacity to take on the work? Would you charge for these services? So if the library already offers publishing and/or hosting services, can this initiative be affiliated with those services? So at VCU's OER Initiative, it's based in digital libraries and publishing. So, our OER publishing services align with our journal, monograph, and repository publishing.
So, we offer ISBN or DOI assignment. We do author rights and write revisions, digital preservation, editorial services. We do multiple formats and dissemination, and we will, come this summer, be able to offer Pressbooks publishing platform as well. If you don't have that in-house expertise, will authors be responsible for finding editors and designers themselves, or will this be something that your program will handle? How will you handle peer review? As I said in the previous slide, will your books be double blind or open peer review? Will your program pay peer reviewers or will authors need to pay for those reviewers? If so, how many peer reviewers will be affiliated with your institution? Do you have criteria for who the peer reviewers can or cannot be?
Will the authors be required to set aside a certain amount of funding to be designated for editorial and production services? So this is something that I had done at PSU and I learned that the length of the book will impact the overall cost of editorial and production services. It sounds so straightforward, but I was very surprised at the cost differentiation between books that are 100 pages versus those that are 150. So, that was a really tricky process to figure out how much money we wanted authors to set aside. The other thing is authors don't typically think about production services right at the very beginning, and it isn't until the end of their projects that all of a sudden they are looking to find money to support.
They may have already gotten through their funding, and now they're trying to struggle with "How can I get a good copy editor when I don't have a lot of money left over?" So that was why we thought it was really important to have and to say, "Okay, you must look at setting aside X number of dollars, but we recommend a higher level." So with that, I am going to pass it on to Abbey to talk about final production and timeline.
Abbey: Thanks, Karen. So, yeah, looking into the final product as you've gotten through the creation process with your authors, important to think about licensing. Certainly, will the author retain their copyright or does the copyright go to the university? The anecdote from PSU was when they originally started the program, the author had to give their copyright over to the university, but they were able to negotiate and work with university counsel to allow the authors to keep and retain their copyright. So, it's really important to check with your legal counsel before releasing your call for proposal to make sure that you're clear with authors and you're clear yourself what the author rights are as they relate to these projects.
You'll also need to adjust what Creative Commons licenses the textbooks will be published under, which Karen mentioned a little bit earlier. So, there's some wiggle room or some choices to be made about whether you allow authors to choose a CC license from any of the options or if you're going to require them to publish under a particular license or limit. For example, a lot of CFPs will limit, you can choose your CC license, but you can't use no derivatives so that your work can be remixed and adapted. So, definitely a lot of decisions to be made there as well.
Then also, what does a completed textbook look like? Do you want to define the length of the resource or the number of chapters or sections? Do you want to assign a structure or style? Do you want to require certain elements like a table of contents or other front and back matter pieces to have a cohesive look and feel to the products that are coming out of your program? Then you'll also want to think about what constitutes a final product. So, as Karen mentioned earlier, these projects can't go on forever as much as we would love to have limitless bandwidth and capacity to support. We know of course that that OER work requires the sustainability considerations and revisions.
So, it's about priming your authors to think about that upfront, about when do we call your project closed for the purposes of this program with the understanding that this is going to be a living resource, that as it gets used, it's going to need to be updated and you should have a plan for long-term sustainability and revision. So, that's been a conversation that we're starting to navigate with some of our projects from the 2023 cohort who are getting closer to having a finished product. It's like, "Okay, what does the close up process look like? When are you ready to leave the nest? How can we free up also our internal bandwidth to turn our attention to new projects and the new cycle as well?" Next slide please. Thank you.
Yeah, and then also thinking about what are the potential challenges for the various phases. So, during the application process, we ask authors to think about what are potential barriers or roadblocks that you see looking ahead at your project plan that you might encounter as you create and develop your project. This is an important exercise, especially when looking at realistic timelines, service expectations, and also potential knowledge gaps. So, acknowledging that in your OER program or also on the faculty side, there may be areas that aren't necessarily covered by, for example, the service model. So, Karen mentioned instructional design support.
At VCU, our instructional design framework is pretty dispersed across campus, and there are some departments that don't have a designated instructional designer for their area. That's not something that we have capacity within the library to do. So, there are some places where there may be gaps in coverage of service. So, that's something to think about too is where might there be additional support needed and where might there be a need to modify the project plan to account for those limitations? So other potential challenges could include licensing questions, staffing challenges, like I mentioned, skills gaps, content availability, time concerns, et cetera. Certainly, the list goes on, and I feel like this is one of those things that Karen mentioned.
The list grows every year because we find out about new challenges and each project is different. It's helpful to think through these on a case-by-case basis. This is also another place where those one-on-one meetings with faculty are really helpful to identify those challenges as they come up throughout the course of the project, so that we can look at ways to mitigate them. Then thinking about our selection criteria for how we evaluate our applications. So, we have a couple of criteria areas based on our specific evaluation criteria, which are listed in full on the call for proposals, but those are the project objectives, impact, plan for timeline, equity and inclusion and feasibility.
So, I have an excerpt here from the rubric which shows the criteria and then this what that looks like at different scores. We solicited feedback from liaison librarians from the disciplines for which the projects had applied and got their feedback with their subject matter expertise in mind. So, thinking about again, those program priorities that Karen mentioned earlier, this was an area where we added in a section about equity and inclusion to make sure that that criteria had shown up on the rubric and that we were not only asking for faculty applicants to think about that but also weighing that as part of our evaluation process. Lessons learned, so lots to talk about here.
The first section is just about the project management perspective. Supporting projects takes a lot of time.
So, I think that probably came through in my comments about being able to free up bandwidth to support new projects. I think it never hurts to mention that bandwidth and time and staffing are all limited wherever you are. So, it's really helpful to be cognizant of the number of projects that you have, the capacity to fully support based on your role and your position and your staffing. Timelines and priorities shift. So, it's helpful to work with authors at the beginning of their project to think about competing priorities. So, not only your own priorities within the library, but also faculty members are juggling their own set of competing priorities, which are going to impact their timelines. So, it's helpful again to have those one-on-one check-ins and conversations and to be flexible if changes need to happen.
Policies and procedures for no longer supporting projects, this is a sad fact but a realistic one. We don't want to stop supporting projects, but sometimes you need to if the author is not available to keep working or not meeting program requirements or expectations. So, it's a good question to ask upfront before you have a challenging situation, "What procedures do you have in place to potentially pause their participation in the project and what steps will you need to follow? Who needs to be notified?" And then similarly, if an author leaves the institution mid-project, what happens? Do you continue to support the project?
A lot of times that's going to come down to a case-by-case basis where, for example, if they're going to an institution that doesn't have an OER publishing platform, you might consider continuing to host their project on your own Pressbooks or something like that. So, those are conversations that can happen as situations arise, but it's really helpful to think about them upfront to have a plan in place so you're not scrambling in the heat of the moment to figure out what's the best course of action. Oh, sorry. I missed a bullet point. Yeah, thank you. Then the last piece there is just to be really clear about your budget distribution.
Karen mentioned this when talking about the setup for funding, but I think one of our big lessons learned from the last cycle was to make sure, as she mentioned, that we're aware and that faculty are aware of the various policies that impact the usage of the budget. So, I think you probably can't possibly get enough clarity about the budget. Ask a lot of questions. Talk to the folks who are managing it both internally in the library and also if you're going the route where you're distributing to each individual department to make sure that you're aware of those policies and definitely bringing faculty into the process to make sure that they're also aware.
So, that for example, which we learned is a very common thing, that funding has to be spent within a single fiscal year, that faculty are aware of that and that they don't have a budget plan that has them spending their allotment into the second fiscal year, for example. So, that's a really big important piece is to make sure you've got clarity about how that all works.
Also, specificity, it's great to provide opportunities for feedback and suggestions both from your team and from applicants throughout your program's run. So, this is a really good learning opportunity. Mistakes happen. Especially when you're dealing with project management with a lot of different people with competing priorities and very busy schedules, things are going to come up. So, it's really helpful to have those avenues for feedback, so that you can learn where you might be able to better support faculty in the future and also make changes and tweaks to your program to help it fit into the flow of the academic cycle over the course of the year, for example, and also continues to support faculty innovation and save students' money ultimately.
Thinking about specificity as well with the call for proposals, it's helpful to set clear selection eligibility and rubric, which the trade-off is you've got a long call for proposal. But that specificity helps in the long run because you're giving everybody the information upfront so that they can decide whether it's the right fit for them at this time, and also, what they need to include and be prepared for throughout the project process.
Then lastly, it's okay to reject proposals. You want to make sure that you've got strong, well-thought-out proposals and that what you're publishing is a representation of your program. So you want to ensure that it meets the spirit of your project and what you're trying to do. Rejecting proposals also provides an opportunity to have a conversation with faculty who are interested in OER, even if it's not the right project or the right time, or the plan needs to be tweaked, but it provides an opportunity to work with them to move their proposal forward for the future and can be a way to expand those connections across campus.
So, it's a good way to increase awareness of OER work across campus more broadly, and to start having those conversations, like Karen mentioned, community of practice aspect. Even if you have faculty that aren't necessarily working formally in your program, you can still make those connections and have those conversations and that you can be building to those broader connections and broader community of practice over time. So, yeah, opportunity to create awareness on campus. Like Karen said, it's your dating profile. Why should faculty be interested? Why should they participate? Why should they care? What are the benefits? So asking them to think about impact including, but not limited to, cost savings.
We've had a lot of folks who participated in the program who have told us they've started to think more broadly about pedagogy, which is really exciting. I mean, that's not the only point, but a point of this work is that you've got people reevaluating and innovating with how they teach and interact with students. What expertise as a program manager do you bring to the program and how can you advocate for the library services through this program? And then also opportunities for campus partnerships, so we mentioned instructional designers and liaison librarians. Who else can you bring into the fold to help facilitate this work on your campus? I think that's it.
Yup. Okay. So, great. So, yeah, questions are more than welcome. Then we've got Karen's and my emails there. If you want to reach out, we'd be happy to chat as well.
Melissa: Thank you both so much. This has been really informative. I know with me, we're at the point where we're starting our publishing platform from scratch. So, to hear all of these things to keep in mind is actually really helpful. So, now we can transition over to Q&A. Please feel free to put your questions in the chat, or if you would like to unmute and say a question out loud, please feel free to. Also, I'm going to put another link to the Padlet. Padlet is very easy to use. Just scroll down to session five, May 8th, call for proposals, and you'll see a little plus sign. There you can add any of your thoughts into these little sticky notes. You even had the option of changing the color too, so a little extra fun. So, let me put that in the chat and I'll open it up to everybody.
Amanda put in a really good point actually in the chat. She wrote, "For example, for our syllabus review grants, which is a curation/adoption grant, we require that they agree to meet with a library liaison three times, reduce their course materials costs by 25%, and participate in a survey afterwards. So, you could set publishing requirements based on how you want to scope your program." Actually, there's a question from Karen in the chat. This one is actually for Karen from Karen. You mentioned that asking faculty authors to estimate their costs led to good conversations and questions. Can you say more about that?
Karen: Yeah, so one of the things that I think most or maybe all OER publishing programs really struggle with is the idea that the amount of labor that it takes to create the book is never going to be anywhere near the amount of funding that we can offer. So, we wanted to be able to have a very frank and open discussion with faculty about what it could potentially look like and take in order to create their OER in the end. Really a lot of it is looking at, "Who are their partners? Who are their co-authors? Could they expand out the number of co-authors in order to lessen the amount of work that they do? But then how do you essentially provide funding or incentive for those co-authors to be able to participate?"
So that's been one aspect of this conversation and having faculty estimate the cost on their own because we're trying to essentially remind authors that it's a lot of work to be able to create this level of material. In particular, a lot of the timelines are pretty short. We're looking at essentially two years or two academic cycles, which if you are teaching at the same time, that really is not a lot of time to be able to do the amount of work that is required. The other part of this as well is to have them really think about what it means... It's in align with the first part, what it means to create an OER and what kind of services do they need.
So, when we can actually see what their budget looks like, we can talk as a group and say, "Oh, it doesn't look like they've designated anything for copy editing or for designers." So it's also about having that conversation because one of the things we do is, we open it up. So, Abbey this year had an open call. So, essentially, she had a Zoom link. She talked about the program and then asked faculty to do a Q&A. Then some faculty reached out and said, "Ooh, I'd like to talk to you more." So Abbey spent the time, spoke to them, got a clear understanding of their projects, made recommendations, and then they went and they put in their proposals.
Now we're in the process of accepting the proposals and having those one-on-one conversations even further to discuss the projects and talk to them about how much we were able to fund them, what it looks like, and maybe pieces of what their budget was missing. I'm speaking for Abbey, so I'm going to be quiet here shortly, but it provides Abbey with a really good understanding of the projects. It allows the faculty to get to know Abbey, and it's creating a relationship even before the projects officially kick off. So, I'm going to pivot and ask Abbey to expand on that.
Abbey: Yeah, no, I mean I think you've covered a lot of the big points that I would've brought up. I think I'll add just two pieces. The first is that sometimes faculty don't know what they don't know. So, for example, we had somebody budget for licensing fees for streaming movies, and we're like, "Well, we have a collections budget, so that's great. So, you don't have to worry about funding that piece of it with this program."
Then I think the other piece, which Karen touched on a little bit, is this idea of differentiating that this program is not intended to be compensation for the labor because we would never have the budget to be sufficient to do that in a real way. I was really grateful actually in the Q&A session, I got some very direct questions about that of based on what you're saying, typical project of applicants, this isn't enough to compensate the labor of writing a textbook. It's nice to be able to acknowledge that explicitly and to I guess maybe helpfully, maybe not, although the faculty that I spoke with seemed receptive to reframe that as like, "You're totally right. This isn't going to be enough to compensate you for the work, but we're seeing this as what can we give you to get you started? What do you need to make this happen if it's a thing that you want to do?" I think that reframe has been helpful and it's not going to convince everyone. Everybody has their own reason for coming into this work.
I think because it's such an enormous commitment for faculty authors, I want to respect that and I don't want to pretend that a $2,000 stipend is enough to cover the creation of a textbook. It's just not. But I think being clear with what we're offering, what amount can we give you that you would need to get you over the hump to cover your travel costs or conducting video interviews, which is one of our projects in the past, or covering a copy editor or something like that. I think that it's a facilitation money, rather than a compensation money, if that helps.
Karen: We've also increased how much level of support and education we're offering throughout our cohort cycle. So, while we may not be able to financially compensate folks, we are trying to increase our level of services, so that in kind. So, faculty feel much more supported and it's not just like, "Oh, here's the money. Now, go off and we'll see you in six months." We really are trying to provide a high level of service in order to be like, "Sorry, we can only offer you $1,000." So we're trying to balance that out.
Melissa: I was just going to say, to jump off from that too, we actually have another two-part question about funding. I know it's a really big topic, especially with publishing. So, Janelle asks, "My faculty are asking for funding to revise OER projects. I'm curious if you support that specifically in your program and how much money you award for that. Also, do you fund both individual and group projects?"
Abbey: Yeah, I can jump in on this one. So, the first question, do we support revision projects? Yes. So, we had a fun one where the initial resource was created under one of our first cycles of the ACA program, and then another faculty member took the course over and then applied a couple years later to do a second edition of the course. That was one example. I think there have been other revision projects as well, but again, as Karen mentioned, our funding model has shifted over the years. I think that was maybe under a different framework that we had set up, but if we were to get other revision applications, it would be the same like, "You tell us what you need to make this happen and we'll see if hopefully we can make that happen for you."
Then the question about individual and group projects, yes. So, I think the first big departmental project that we had was in our 2023 cycle. So, that was part of the departure from that old funding framework that Karen had talked about where I think it was $1,000 dollars to adopt, $2,000 to adapt, and $5,000 to create. But for this departmental wide adoption, they were creating a resource for a foundational course in the marketing program, and it was going to be, I think, five or six faculty authors. It was just a really big project and we were like, "$5,000 is just not really going to cut it for the scale of what they're trying to do."
So there was a conversation about "Can we create a place in the program for a larger award specifically for a department-wide adoption that's going to impact a ton of students? It's going to have a ton of faculty authors included." So we had our first one this past year, which has been a really interesting thing to see how that has unfolded from a project management standpoint. They've been amazingly organized. They've really taken it and run, which has been really exciting, and I'm really looking forward to seeing where we go for the finished product. Then this current cycle where we've just had a round of applications and we're in the process of reviewing and notifying and having those conversations. We had two applications for department projects this year.
So, it's cool to see. It's definitely a different type of application and a different type of project to support on our end, but I think looking at the impact, I think that's where it becomes even more important that their project plan is really well-developed and that they have a good sense of what they're doing going into it, because there's a lot more moving pieces. But I think asking those questions that Karen walked us through at the beginning of designing your call for proposals, having that in the back of your mind with, "Does this work for individual? Does this work for projects, or do we need to have different considerations and make that explicit?" I think is something to consider.
Karen: I just want to add too, about funding revised OER projects. I think that that is a really important aspect that all programs, particularly those that have been running for a couple of years, really need to think about. OERs should not be static. Courses change. Faculty change and shift. So, we do need to think about "How do we continuously help or support faculty who want to be able to revise their books?"
One thing that we were thinking about at Portland State before I left was "Do we want to do a separate call for proposals just for those faculty that we've already worked with?" Do we want to reach out to them and say, "Hey, we have a small pot of money. We want to support you in your work to be able to revise your book. Let us know what you need and what that would look like and we can help support you"? The problem with that was that it was taking away from new projects. We had, for example, $15,000 set aside for OERs, and we were only then able to do 10 for new. So, we did less projects in order to support the revisions. But we were thinking and I still believe it's really important because it is one of the concerns you sometimes hear from faculty about open educational resources that they're old or they don't feel as though they're getting updated or revised at the same level as a publisher's textbook. So, it's a good way to be able to circumvent that conversation.
Melissa: And Karen added, "But the license means they can do that." And it's true. That's what the CC license is for. Are there any other questions? Okay. Thank you so much, Karen and Abbey. We really appreciate you coming in and sharing your experiences today with us. It's been super helpful, and thank you all for joining us as we continue to learn about open textbook publishing. We hope that as we continue to share available resources and recommendations, one of your key takeaways is the sense that you're not alone in finding out how to support open textbook authors.
That goes a long way too, feeling that you're not alone. Just one quick announcement also, Pub101 is not meeting next week. Most of us, as we saw in the chat, are going to be at Library Publishing Forum. However, we will return to the regularly scheduled programming on Wednesday, May 22nd. So, we're really looking forward to seeing you all then and have a great rest of your day.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:18:02 Amanda Larson: Hi all! I'll be traveling to Library Publishing Forum too! 🙂
00:18:08 Elisabeth Ball: Elisabeth from FLorida Virtual Campus. Traveling to NC this weekend for fun.
00:18:22 Micah Gjeltema: Hi All! I’m Micah from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. I am going to the Library Publishing Forum, but won’t have far to travel!
00:18:23 Karen Lauritsen: Hello! Same. I will be traveling to the Twin Cities next week for Library Publishing Forum, too.
00:18:34 Jeanne Pavy: Jeanne from New Orleans. Going to NC also -- in June-- for fun!
00:18:39 Karen Bjork: Traveling to Milwaukee for my nephew's college graduation this weekend and then to Minneapolis for LPF
00:18:48 Meredith Tummeti: Meredith Tummeti in Washington. I'll be going to Oregon in June to the PNW Great Teaching Seminar.
00:19:34 Barbara Anderson: Traveling to Portugal for a bike trip in a week!
00:19:35 Sara Davidson Squibb: Sara from Merced, CA. Going to San Diego in late June though not for ALA.
00:20:24 Melissa Chim: Love seeing everyone's travel plans! Here is the Linktree I mentioned: @pub101 | Linktree
00:20:43 Karen Lauritsen: And here’s the related CFP content in our Pub101 Canvas Curriculum: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173/pages/call-for-proposals-cfp
00:21:09 Melissa Chim: And here is a Padlet to share all of our ideas! Please feel free to add your thoughts: Pub101 (padlet.com)
00:29:34 Amanda Larson: For example, for our Syllabus Review Grants (which is a curation/adoption grant) we require that they agree to meet with a library liaison three times, reduce their course materials cost by 25%, and participate in survey afterwards. So you could set publishing requirements based on how you want to scope your program.
00:44:02 Karen Lauritsen: In the Open Textbook Library, we informally define a textbook as one that can support an entire course (for a semester, or quarter)
00:47:56 Karen Lauritsen: SO MUCH TIME
00:55:13 Melissa Chim: Pub101 (padlet.com)
00:55:23 Karen Lauritsen: Karen, you mentioned that asking faculty authors to estimate their costs led to good conversations and questions. Can you say more about that?
00:58:16 Ginelle Baskin: My faculty are asking for funding to revise OER projects. I'm curious if you support that specifically in your program and how much money you award for that. (Sorry if you already mentioned this and I missed it)
00:59:21 Ginelle Baskin: Also, do you fund both individual and group projects?
01:02:05 Karen Lauritsen: That’s great to have the community component emphasized. Seems like it can be an option for leaner programs that may not be able to offer funding.
01:02:11 Abbey Childs: Reacted to "That’s great to have..." with ❤️
01:07:01 Karen Lauritsen: But the license means they can do that! 😀
01:07:08 Ginelle Baskin: Thank you! That's super helpful!
01:07:08 Amanda Larson: Reacted to "Thank you! That's su..." with ❤️
01:07:11 Abbey Childs: Reacted to "Thank you! That's su..." with ❤️
01:07:14 Amanda Larson: Reacted to "But the license mean..." with ❤️
01:07:31 Yasemin Onder: thank you!
01:07:32 Karen Lauritsen: We will not meet next week since many of us will be at Library Publishing Forum. See you in two weeks!
01:07:35 Chris Chang: Thank you!
01:07:36 Alyssa Archer: Thank you!
01:07:42 Robin Miller: Thank you!!
01:07:49 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you Karen, Abbey and Melissa!
01:07:54 Micah Gjeltema: Thanks so much! This was very helpful!
00:18:08 Elisabeth Ball: Elisabeth from FLorida Virtual Campus. Traveling to NC this weekend for fun.
00:18:22 Micah Gjeltema: Hi All! I’m Micah from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. I am going to the Library Publishing Forum, but won’t have far to travel!
00:18:23 Karen Lauritsen: Hello! Same. I will be traveling to the Twin Cities next week for Library Publishing Forum, too.
00:18:34 Jeanne Pavy: Jeanne from New Orleans. Going to NC also -- in June-- for fun!
00:18:39 Karen Bjork: Traveling to Milwaukee for my nephew's college graduation this weekend and then to Minneapolis for LPF
00:18:48 Meredith Tummeti: Meredith Tummeti in Washington. I'll be going to Oregon in June to the PNW Great Teaching Seminar.
00:19:34 Barbara Anderson: Traveling to Portugal for a bike trip in a week!
00:19:35 Sara Davidson Squibb: Sara from Merced, CA. Going to San Diego in late June though not for ALA.
00:20:24 Melissa Chim: Love seeing everyone's travel plans! Here is the Linktree I mentioned: @pub101 | Linktree
00:20:43 Karen Lauritsen: And here’s the related CFP content in our Pub101 Canvas Curriculum: https://canvas.umn.edu/courses/377173/pages/call-for-proposals-cfp
00:21:09 Melissa Chim: And here is a Padlet to share all of our ideas! Please feel free to add your thoughts: Pub101 (padlet.com)
00:29:34 Amanda Larson: For example, for our Syllabus Review Grants (which is a curation/adoption grant) we require that they agree to meet with a library liaison three times, reduce their course materials cost by 25%, and participate in survey afterwards. So you could set publishing requirements based on how you want to scope your program.
00:44:02 Karen Lauritsen: In the Open Textbook Library, we informally define a textbook as one that can support an entire course (for a semester, or quarter)
00:47:56 Karen Lauritsen: SO MUCH TIME
00:55:13 Melissa Chim: Pub101 (padlet.com)
00:55:23 Karen Lauritsen: Karen, you mentioned that asking faculty authors to estimate their costs led to good conversations and questions. Can you say more about that?
00:58:16 Ginelle Baskin: My faculty are asking for funding to revise OER projects. I'm curious if you support that specifically in your program and how much money you award for that. (Sorry if you already mentioned this and I missed it)
00:59:21 Ginelle Baskin: Also, do you fund both individual and group projects?
01:02:05 Karen Lauritsen: That’s great to have the community component emphasized. Seems like it can be an option for leaner programs that may not be able to offer funding.
01:02:11 Abbey Childs: Reacted to "That’s great to have..." with ❤️
01:07:01 Karen Lauritsen: But the license means they can do that! 😀
01:07:08 Ginelle Baskin: Thank you! That's super helpful!
01:07:08 Amanda Larson: Reacted to "Thank you! That's su..." with ❤️
01:07:11 Abbey Childs: Reacted to "Thank you! That's su..." with ❤️
01:07:14 Amanda Larson: Reacted to "But the license mean..." with ❤️
01:07:31 Yasemin Onder: thank you!
01:07:32 Karen Lauritsen: We will not meet next week since many of us will be at Library Publishing Forum. See you in two weeks!
01:07:35 Chris Chang: Thank you!
01:07:36 Alyssa Archer: Thank you!
01:07:42 Robin Miller: Thank you!!
01:07:49 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you Karen, Abbey and Melissa!
01:07:54 Micah Gjeltema: Thanks so much! This was very helpful!
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