The Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) National Training Expert Group is hosting a webinar series on Canadian Open Educational Resources (OERs) for research data management (RDM).
The first series was opened with a panel discussion introducing the series and the concept of OERs, highlighting four OERs that will be showcased in future sessions, and facilitating a discussion on OERs.
The panel featured:
Robyn Stobbs, Athabasca University, for the Athabasca RDM Micro course;
Eugene Barsky, University of British Columbia, for the UBC Library Research Commons Open Educational Resources (OERs); and,
Emily Carlisle-Johnson, Western University for the Research Data Management in the Canadian Context: A Guide for Practitioners and Learners.
Moderated by:
Jen Abel, University of Calgary, co-chair of the National Training Expert Group
Nick Rochlin, University of British Columbia, co-chair of the National Training Expert Group
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Le groupe d’experts national sur la formation de l’Alliance de recherche numérique du Canada (l’Alliance) organise une série de webinaires sur les ressources éducatives libres (REL) canadiennes liées à la gestion des données de recherche (GDR).
Le premier webinaire de la série était marqué par un débat d’experts présentant cette dernière, le concept des REL, et quatre REL qui feront l’objet des prochaines séances, ainsi que par une discussion sur les REL animée par le groupe d’experts.
Le groupe d’experts comprenait :
Robyn Stobbs, Université d’Athabasca : Athabasca RDM Micro course
Eugene Barsky, Université de la Colombie-Britannique : UBC Library Research Commons Open Educational Resources (OERs)
Emily Carlisle-Johnson, Université Western : La gestion des données de recherche dans le contexte canadien : un guide pour la pratique et l’apprentissage
Animatrice et animateur :
Jen Abel, Université de Calgary, coprésidente du groupe d’experts national sur la formation
Nick Rochlin, Université de la Colombie-Britannique, coprésident du groupe d’experts national sur la formation.
hi everyone welcome and uh on behalf of the digital research Alliance of Canada and the National Training expert group it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the first session in our series on open educational resources in RDM so today with the help of our panelists and moderators will be providing an introduction to the series uh and to open educational resources or oers by highlighting four resources that will be discussed in more detail in future sessions followed by a facilitated discussion around these important materials for training and learning in RDM I’ll also note that simultaneous interpretation is available and may be selected by the interpretation button on your Zoom panel uh and you can ask questions uh through the Q&A uh and we will have a Q&A a moderated discussion followed by a Q&A at the end but before we get underway today I would like to begin uh our webinar with an acknowledgement that I’m speaking to you from Halifax Nova Scotia which is situated on the ancestrial and unseated territory of the migma people uh it’s important that we continuously work hard to understand the long history of these lands and recognize what those histories mean for the Truth and Reconciliation ahead of the alliance and the drri ecosystem as a whole uh and I encourage you to take the time as well to learn about the lands that you call home uh and think about what you’re doing personally to advance reconciliation in Canada so we continue to the proceedings of our session today with the acknowledgement of the First Nations Inuit and mate Nations and communities who have been harmed by Colonial and unethical research and of the data sovereignty and research priorities of these nations and communities we commit to understanding and taking up the alliance’s role in reducing harm and advancing reconciliation and research additionally Alliance webinars and meetings are governed by our code of conduct which states that we seek to provide a welcoming engaging and safe community and that discriminatory language of any kind or harassment will not be tolerated at our meetings uh with harassment being understood as any behavior that threatens another person or group or produces an unsafe environment so with that it’s also my pleasure to introduce our moderators for today’s session uh so we have Nick rashin and Jen Abel Nick is a research data management specialist with the University of British Columbia’s Advanced research Computing team uh and Jen is a research data management librarian at the University of Calgary libraries and cultural resources collectively they co-chair the alliance’s National Training expert group for RDM and so with that Nick and Jen I’ll uh hand things over to you to get us started great thanks so much Lee I’m just noticing in the chat there are some folks saying they aren’t able to access the slides so we will get that sorted out for you uh quickly um so stay tuned that will happen very soon I will say that there isn’t going to be a lot in the slides uh other than what you have just seen um but but good to have those available anyway um yes so why are we here today well over the last couple of years uh many different institutions and groups across Canada have begun creating open educational resources or oars in the research data management space the RDM space independently of each other um and we at ente the National Training expert group have come to be aware of a lot of these and have even had the chance to help out with some of them and since the introduction of the tri agency RDM policy almost three years ago now there’s also been a growing need for training and education and awareness raising in the RDM space which not all institutions have the capacity to provide or to create materials for in house uh so having other materials that are available to them can be really helpful this today is going to be the first session in a series showcasing both the existing oers that have been made and how they can be used and reused as well as sparking conversation about potential new projects we have representatives for three of the projects here today to talk about their resources and their experiences making oers for RDM uh for more details about all of these projects as well as well as overviews of other Oar projects in both RDM and digital research infrastructure more broadly and how they’re used and how you can use them please join us for the other events in the series uh which will have more information about for you uh in the in the coming days so with that uh let’s start off by uh by hearing from our panelists about who they are and what they’re doing today um and we’ll start off I guess uh alphabetically by first name let’s go with Emily hi everyone um thank you for having me I’m pleased to be here so my name is Emily Carlile Johnston I’m a research and scholarly communication librarian at Western University where my role really centers on open publishing uh RIT large so I support authors who are navigating their publishing options to help them find uh Open Access ways of publishing I lead our open education program and grant program here at Western and I also co-manage our open Journal publishing platform and work with editors who publish their journals openly uh through our library um I here because I was a co-editor along with a number of folks on this call uh on the recently published open textbook research data management in the Canadian context and my co-editors are Liz Hill christey Thompson and then on the French side of things Danielle Denny and Emily foron um and I know I know many people on this call were involved in the project whether as a peer reviewer or one of our many many authors um but if you’re not familiar the textbook was really as it says a primer on research data management in the Canadian context it featured 18 chapters over five sections covering um the first principles in research data management the Canadian context of research data management some more practical chapters on working with data and managing various types of data and then um perspectives on research data management and I won’t say too much more except that the the textbook was really created with the goal of being used in classrooms across Canada um by instructors teaching in library schools uh but also by Librarians who might be teaching these topics or wanting to upscale in research data management and we’re pleased to see that over several months uh it has been used for those purposes so I’ll drop the link in the chat for the resource and then turn it over to another panelist and that other panelist is going to be Eugene thank Jen uh I just wanted to Jen if you can open the chat for um for posting for the panelists because I was I was about to post a link and I couldn’t I think Emily cannot to do that too but as you do that I will introduce myself um I I’m Eugene barsky I’m a research data librarian in EBC I have been in EBC for almost 20 years now various roles including Administration uh but in my current role I I I serve as a research data librarian since 2013 and they uh my work is to help EBC Community which is a very large school more than 60,000 students 10,000 faculty uh with the all needs say V research data management I’m here today uh thanks Nick for fixing it I’m here today to talk about the open education resource that I just posted that we introduced back in 2019 just before Co um it’s a it’s it’s our um open educational resource for research common workshops uh it’s raw it’s live it’s a it’s really cool we have more than 50 different workshops on research data skills data analysis data mining data visualization research data management and more um all workshops are computation producible they self-pac they step by step all over all of the workshops using the same template they use the same license we same use the same ped pedagogical approach to our materials and they um and we allow anyone who is interested in those in those workshops to mash them oruse them um contribute to them and we contribute them back to the uh to various communities including Library carpentry and I’m looking forward to discuss it more in detail in a bit after my colleague Robin introduces herself thanks Robin go nuts Thanks Jen uh so hi everyone my name is Robin STS I’m the research data management librarian at athabaska University um athabaska university is a distance education institution with a physical location in kind of north central Alberta in the town of athabaska but we have students who are from Alberta nationally and internationally uh the resource I am here to talk about today is a research data management course that we created at a team of us created at our institution I’m just going to throw the link in the chat as well as the access code and we’ll get into in some of the discussion later uh some of the limitations around the platform we have used here but uh you can access it looks like you need to pay for the course you do not just please use The Graduate free access code to get in um so the course that we created is introductory it’s a self directed micro course and it was a collaborative effort between our faculty of Graduate Studies to contribute to their growing PD offerings for our graduate students and the library and our Graduate Studies faculty is working on making those offerings available more broadly not just to our institution so the course contains five modules there’s an intro to the life cycle and principles of RDM ethics and responsibilities data documentation data storage and backups and data deposit uh they’re followed by a summon of activity but throughout there’s a learning journal and questions to help bring people towards writing a data management plan um so I’ll I’ll leave it there happy to continue the discussion right yes Jane you can absolutely share it I see in the chat please go ahead yes I think all these are for sharing which actually Loops into this next question and um you know we’re talking about oar’s open educational resources but I thought it’s so interesting that you all three have these very different resources that fall under this same label so I wanted to start out by asking what makes something an oar and why did you choose to make your your resources this way and what value do you think it’s adding to the community and to the greater ecosystem that you’re adding to so um uh maybe we’ll start with Emily on that one going a little out of order yeah no problem um so first what makes something an open educational resource the definition that I use just a practical definition is uh something that is a teaching and Learning Resource that is both free to access and also carries permissions for sharing and reuse and often that’s through a Creative Commons license or some other kind of open license um and the the other piece that I would add is especially if you are making if you are assigning a license that does allow for adaptation um then also making the resource available in a format that others can make edits to make a copy and then make edits too um so why did we choose to make our resource a an open educational resource I’ll say I can’t take credit for that um I think I came on to the project after it was already identified that uh an open textbook was going to be made and that idea I think might be credited to uh Lam McLoud at dhos University um but I think really the the idea behind that and wanting to do it was for a couple practical reasons first to make the textbook free for students so that they wouldn’t have to purchase a textbook if they’re in a class that was using it um I think another practical reason was also being able to then kind of self-publish the resource not having to go through a publisher um and then also the ability for others to use and adapt the resource as they want so to make a copy of the textbook and then delete chapters that aren’t relevant or be able to make updates because it is an ecosystem that’s constantly evolving and and changes are being made new policies are being created that we might want to reflect in the book so that ability for for people to then take it and really treat it as a living as a living resource um and customize it for their needs um and then I think something that we talked about throughout the project to was really the values um piece of it so we’re the textbook talks about open data and sharing and so we wanted the resource itself to really embody the spirit of of what the Community Values what the community believes and what’s being talked about in the textbook itself okay that’s great uh love hearing all that and totally agree um now I know that the definition might of an oar might be similar with all of you but I’m going to pass that same question to Robin to say you know what makes something an oar and why did you choose to to make your resource an oar awesome thanks Nick so gonna kind of echo Emily’s definition the the importance with the an open educational resource is that other people can take it and reuse it that that was a key aspect here um for Au we also wanted to create an online asynchronous course that was something that could be reusable because we are a distance institutions so the the format we chose also works well for our student body in that they are enrolled in asynchronous distance courses um but also a key piece for us as we are going through thinking there’s a lot of effort going into making this we’re dedicating time we got our associate by president research got our faculties to support funding for the project um we wanted to make something that would be useful for other institutions and we are a smaller institution so if we’ve put something together and put this time in we really wanted it to be something other places could could take and use as they see fit and potentially adapt to their own institutional contexts so that was a key part of our decision-making process there okay great and uh yeah lastly Eugene I don’t know if you want to repeat things that have already been said but um I know that there’s been absolutely not and so um with that said you can talk about why you made it but um maybe moving forward to that I know that you chose GitHub as the platform to to develop your o on and what went into the selection of that platform and and would you choose it again well excellent question and the uh multiple multiple angles to take it on so we had a situ we in back in 2019 we created a new unit uh in the library to to provide research supports for the for the for the campus communities and they I I was the administrator in charge of this unit and the co happened and then we had the thousands of people interested to take our workshops on research data skills um they needed the Hands-On resource uh uh step by step resource that we could use to teach our workshops things like Jupiter things like Oma things like Unix things like naming file things like multiple multiple things our newly created team uh was about to to to to show and present and we had so much interest our Zoom was not holding up we had more than 120 people on the workshop um so we looked for a tool that would be raw that will allow us to do things fast that will allow us to do things collaboratively uh usually in the libraries we tend to use the LI software as a service uh tools springshare catalogs we always try to to find the tool that is licensed than by somebody else and managed by somebody else we didn’t like that we wanted to do things on our own we wanted to do things fast and we wanted to do things kind of in a rle and and and we understood that it will never be finished it will always be work work in progress and we we want to wanted to be able to uh to uh work on it continuously with ourselves with our team and with our students we had 18 graduate students at that time uh we were really rich at that time so we had money so we wanted to to have a tool where we can all collaborate and and they uh we found this tool it’s a and we use GitHub as a as a as our as a platform it’s free it’s smashable um you can take the content as just Vanessa just Illustrated in the in in in the chat correct you can take the content do whatever you want with it we licensed it with CCP uh they the we tend to do that in the in the in the in the open software and you see we to license the content with CC bu and we tend to license the software we release and we have quite a lot of it as MIT license which is also an open license so so we just tend to do those two um and we wanted to contribute the content back to the community including the library carpentries which we have team member serving on the board of in fact my my colleague eka gich is on a board the chair for the library carpentry right now uh so we wanted a tool that is easy enough to upgrade and maintain with a new and fresh content literally today I was working on on one guide because the Prof has complained about a GEOS spatial deposit guide and they didn’t like something so it will take me 16 seconds to change it and I didn’t have to ask for permission I didn’t ask to have any ask anybody and if I want it I would assign this to to the profit itself and they will commit they will they could do it themselves El and they and they commit the changes back to the code um so it takes a team approach it’s a collaboration between Librarians and graduate students we have way less people now we have way less graduate students we have only six right now they from 18 but we still running a team we still updating the content it allows us to keep the content fresh daily it’s a big thing we we if we we see a problem we fix it right away yes it’s a commitment it’s a a and it requires people to be on top of their top of their material but it also allows people to be on top of their material which means allows them to be to be up to dat with the comp um Nick you ask if you would choose it again uh this is a this is a loaded question H so again as we are a large academic Library very conservative in fact uh like many academic libraries doesn’t seem like it just right but we are um uh so we tend to use the libraries in a library say software as a service like everybody else we have lib guides we have lib Insight we have this and that um so it usually requires a a it usually requires an executive Champion to take a tool an open tool a free tool not a library comfortable tool and to run with it so at at that time I was that administrator so it was easy enough for us to to advocate for it and make a case would we be able to do it again I don’t know I really don’t know I and we have some colleagues here and in in I can see in at in I’ll invite you to share your thoughts if it it was a wise decision or if we would be able to do it again I don’t really know um it we’ll talk about the platforms when we get there if it’s a if it’s a right platform what about the learning curve is it easy to use I will wait for that maybe question ni to to to get to the really to the guts of the of the platform choice but this is why we choose to use what we chose thanks yeah okay that’s great um Lots time pack I’m looking forward to that next question um maybe we’ll pass this next question to Emily and talk about the platform you chose why you chose it and would you choose it again yeah so we uh chose press books to create our textbook we were we knew we were creating a textbook even in the early brainstorming stages um and so pressbooks is an open monograph publishing tool so it can create a textbook in various formats Web book format also PDF format also HTML um and I think press books came up because it was one that a couple of us uh in early discussions were familiar with I’d been involved in um publishing projects using press books in the past I currently support faculty and instructors in using it in my role at Wester and it’s a tool that in Ontario um is free to every college and university through a Consortium eCampus Ontario but I think is also um free and accessible to a number of universities across Canada so we were able to collaborate with people um add different people to to our book even if they weren’t in Ontario um to build it that way I think one um so Beyond it being free and available to us a couple other draws uh in my experience it it has been um pretty low barrier to to entry like it’s people are able to pick it up pretty quickly it’s similar to WordPress if you’ve used WordPress so um a number of us co-editors some co-op students were able to to get in there and really create the content uh like add the content to it um pretty seamlessly also it it is quite easy to make edits over time I know that that’s something Eugene was mentioning so uh we were able to make edits to it over time um I think a couple other draws it it is you’re able to add some interactive content so we have a lot of Graphics that uh we were that people had create added in their chapters or created that we wanted um embedded within the book some interactive activities like I think true or false multiple choice questions are included and we were able to really create those in an interactive way with press books um um but also uh people are able to if they have access to press books um really just like clone an instance of our textbook and start making edits to it themselves which I think going back to what we talked about in the previous question about wanting people to be able to adapt the resource um pressbooks does enable that to be done quite seamlessly with access to with access to the Tool uh so that was something that Drew us to it um as well and I think think those were the main points I wanted to speak to here I think honestly the the maybe the biggest decision was that it was something that people were familiar with and uh we didn’t want to over complicate the project so we stuck with a tool that some of us knew um would I use it again I mean I would I I am uh I of I teach workshops about press books in my current role so it is something that I do support and teach people to use I think it’s all about matching the project to the tool that’s able to do what you want it to do though so of course uh if you’re looking to publish an open book or something of that sort then yeah it is something I recommend okay that’s awesome and then um over to Robin who um i’ I’ve kind of seen what it looks like with with your platform it was one that was new to me so I’m interested to hear about platform why you chose it and would you choose it again great thanks Nick yeah so there kind of two layers to our our platform here so for development and also what we’re using for delivery and there’s some challenges and opportunities with with both we used articulate rise to create the course itself which is a proprietary product and introduces a host of problems when you’re trying to openly license and remix something um but it also presented opportunities for us because we already had licensed seats in the library we were familiar with using it and it allowed us to create a a pilot project we had a miniature version of the first module of the course right that we could then present to faculty members and have them have a look at at our faculty Graduate Studies Council to get support for funding and further creation of the project itself so there um our choice of tool was also what enabled us to move at the pace that we did to get something put forward to get funding within a particular fiscal year um we also then have a product that has to it is course it needs to be hosted on a learning management system if you want people to be able to enroll and get badges or credit for doing the course so articulate you can just put it up as a as a web page and people can go through and as long as you don’t clear your cash and cookies you will maintain your progress to the course if you don’t want that caching issue you need to have it on an LMS you also can get better statistics on who’s using your course uh so we are using powered which is a separate Department at our institution that can be contracted to develop online course delivery um so that that’s our delivery platform they’re using bright space as the LMS and we have we have a course there so the link that I shared is to that course and the code you need to get in there but if you wanted to remix it you’re probably going to need access to articulate files so and that’s the part that’s missing on the site now um for how to get get access you need to contact me for that sort of part of it um so getting into would we do it again yes because we would want to collocate other graduate professional development courses together as a larger part of our institution’s program um so there there’s that tradeoff there with what provides the most open form of content and what our institution has already established and we have access to that we we’re working within um anyway I H happy to answer more more questions related to that because articulate is an interesting tool but it is proprietary and introduces its own challenges there thanks so I think that’s a a really good segue into what we were thinking of of asking you next which is um are there any challenges to making an oar or any barriers to entry um and Robin maybe we’ll start with you if you if you don’t mind sure thanks Jen um so the first one I wrote down as I made little notes for this question was capacity we are a smaller institution and um have multiple things in everyone’s plate which is the case at most institutions um so we had to ensure that both our fa my counterpart and faculty of grad studies and I had enough time set aside for our project year when we had budget to be able to put this together and we also needed a budget for design help because we knew we we could get enough time to do the content creation but not necessarily to implement it in some sort of sharable form uh so it was a team of three who did the development I did the RDM content Karin did all of the interviewing of researchers who are featured in the project and coordinated all of the the budget and work with powered and then powered also helped us hire a designer who did the actual implementation in their version of articulate uh so that we did not have to do all of that as well um so capacity can be a challenge for trying to put a project at the scale together um we also had to understand our institution’s intellectual property policy which will vary from institution to institution but um so with our policy administrative staff which would be what Karen and I are don’t own what we produce the university owns what we produce so we can’t make the decision to openly license our output the university has to make that decision so we had to work out what the process was in order to get the appropriate approval to be able to openly license the project overall which is something anyone putting together an open resource will need to consider is are you the intellectual property owner because if you’re not the owner you cannot put the license on the project going forward and we had to ensure we could get that approval before we went too far ahead because we repurposed other openly available materials in the project and wanted to be really wanted to be able to contribute back to the community and we couldn’t then openly post something if we couldn’t assign the appropriate license to it so that was a big concern for us and I just want to give a shout out to our Oar librarian Dan coft who helped review our licensing statements before we posted everything at the end that’s great thanks Robin um Emily challenges barriers I would Echo a lot of what Robin said I think based on my own experience but ALS so um I mentioned that part of my role is supporting open education and uh running the open education grant program at Western and I would say that particularly those points around capacity around funding um and around various areas of like knowledge and expertise that’s required related to for example uh licensing and copyright that that resonates with me based on my experience working on the open textbook project um that I’m talking about today but also uh really is quite familiar to feedback I’ve gotten from folks that have um applied for a grant and then executed a project or taken a year longer than they needed than they said they would to execute a project um of this scale so certainly time um which I think the only way to really mitigate that is maybe getting rid of other responsibilities or giving yourself longer than you might anticipate needing um and then yeah I think funding was something um I yes in order to free up our time and not copyedit our textbook we wanted to hire experts to do that but of course had to had to have the funds to be able to pay those experts so being able to find the funds for a project like this um and write grants because that is how we got funding was uh time consuming in of itself but certainly um worth it and um yeah that the areas of expertise um just needing various expertise which I think um bringing people with multiple perspectives to the table uh certainly helped us um really fill in all the gaps that we that we needed even though it meant coordinating a cast of thousands well and there you go thousands of librarians um Eugene challenges barriers in uh in your case as you can see we come from a different angle here uh we uh we wanted a a platform that they we work freely we wanted the information to be free we wanted the stuff to be available we didn’t want to be limited by any licenses we wanted to create the content ourselves we wanted to edit the content we wanted to give the content back H we are not limited by any monetary Frameworks at this time and it allows us to do whatever we wanted with the content that’s good that’s the good part um the more challenging part is the skills uh so of course when you work with a with with a software as a service is the LI guides you actually don’t need to know Cascadian style shets you actually don’t need to know how to to uh to um to create tables in in markdown yeah you don’t you just click the buttons and it works for you so H and it’s it’s a challenging thing it it for five years ago when we introduced our platforms to the community we had the right people at the right time in the right place uh so we had the people we had we had six Librarians who had the skills uh to to to work in the in the markdown in GitHub and they for those Librarians who were not extra super comfortable like myself we were able to bring them up up to speed with that so we we WE peer trained each other um so we once we created o and we create them on daily basis we we have we literally worked on it yesterday so we we keep working on this content um uh we have encountered a um hesitation from my from my from some of our colleagues in different units who wanted to work with us but didn’t want to learn the the the technology behind it and again it’s not extremely sophisticate markdown language is not like it’s not your it’s not python or anything um but it requires some investment of time and there’s a learning curve and they and some some of our colleages didn’t want to to to do that or were not able to and it’s it remains a challenge it it it does remain a challenge and it does remain um that the only very core team of librarians are still leading this work same Librarians as five years ago I don’t think we have grown that much but what we can what we could grow is the students so we have we we cycled through dozens and dozens of students who learned the skills were able to contribute to the content check the freshness of the content and they and they we we and went off to to some great things and we brought new students on boarded them and did it again and again and again and again so we had a lot of excellent students that we actually released to the world with the skills and I’m very proud of that because they they have the right skills to the right place at the right time um looking backwards again as administrator who introduced this approach I do regret maybe for not going is more to with a more intuitive program because I would love to have more collaboration they have 80 82 83 Librarians now in EBC and I when we introduced it I in my head I I thought oh great we will slowly unor people as a as a as a Content Library grow so we have more than 50 workshops and we keep it up to date but there not traditional Library workshops uh we don’t we actually haven’t never migrated the citation workshops if you look at the catalog I posted I have the citation workshops at the bottom ideally I thought it was migr the citations the product marops to this to this approach and we were not able to because we were NE never able to to bring those FKS up to speed so uh it’s it’s a limitation that they again that they I would consider again if we had to to go five years backwards and and make a decision but I think Nick you asked me if you would do it again I think we would still go with a is a free raw platform that allow us to do things uh live at any time not being limited by app platform or a license or a a a a payment that we have to make um so we will maybe work with a more established platform rather than GitHub there are many like that but um um it is what it is and we we keep running with it and I’m pleased I’m pleased with the Integrations we have seen of our content to the communities we have quite a few and today again on the chat I learned about another one so I’m very pleased to see how how Community adopts our content and reuses it and and sometimes contributes back we have a quite a lot of courses in thec that decided to contribute contribute back to to our catalog and we we we took those edits and introdu them into the content Thanks Jen that’s great and you I’m actually going to ask you a follow-up question because we’re doing our training on GitHub in the Okanagan 2o and that same barrier to entry with colleagues it’s it’s it is a thing right and you want it to be as open as possible we’ve used the open science framework as a tool as a bit less of a barriered entry I’m just wondering what other tool would you use if you weren’t using GitHub because you kind of hinted at potentially thinking of other tools there’s something you had in mind or is that just a more General thought there are tools say a um tools that take markdown language and they allow you to um to work like this there’s intermediary tools that they like editors into markdown that allow you allow like BRS to create content without actually touching the the complexity of creating like graphs in mark down working on tables and things again it’s not super sophisticated just different it’s just not clicking a button and say insert a link you actually have to insert the link by hand and it’s again we actually some of us who started librarianship in the in the in the in the ’90s we actually learned it we actually know how to do it uh but the uh some people don’t so um is there another specific tool would we choose the open science framework I don’t think so I don’t think open science FR framework is the tool I would choose over GitHub I actually like the mash ability of GitHub that they allow any content to be linked to any content from any place to any place it’s it’s it’s cool I don’t see we can do it with with any other tools that I know right now because I know that some courses for instance take sections from our our workshops like especially in GIS they just take pieces and integ integrate those pieces but just import them into their courses and and as we update those pieces they automatically update in in their courses too which is exactly what we intended to do with the idea of open education we wanted the stuff to be constantly updated uh live and a kind of a interacting with each other so to answer your question no I don’t have a specific tool in mind um but I would love to ease on our colleagues to make things Mak things more comfortable for them we haven’t done that I was not able to do that yeah no that makes a lot of sense and in GitHub like you said it makes beautiful web pages and the embedding and Inter linkages are fantastic um so we have our first uh audience question that I’m going to ask and I think this is specifically geared towards um Emily and Robin but I’m going to expand to Eugene maybe afterwards but spoke costs original costs ongoing costs if the license for press books aspires what happens to the book and so I might guide that to to Emily to kick us off with yeah uh I’ll be honest I can’t speak transparently to the cost um because at least in our case in Ontario uh press books is to provided to us for free through a Consortium I know some schools in Ontario do have their own instances of it and um so if there’s anyone on the call that does and you know what the cost of that is or what that looks like on your end feel free to post that in the chat but um one of the reasons we used press books was because it was available to us and to colleagues at all uh colleges and universities in Ontario for free through a Consortium and I think that there are at least in Canada other provinces that operate on that model and have access to it um uh for free through through a Consortium um if the license goes down I believe that the Press book still exists um although I think our editing uh our ability to edit it going forward um might eliminate but now now I’m like questioning that so I’m going to have to look into it uh but I guess that’s why we export it in various formats so that we always have a copy in another format uh and don’t lose everything build that RDM into it get those versions up um Robin and in terms of your model could you speak to the you know on initial costs ongoing costs sustainability so a lot of our initial costs went into being able to hire a designer and Editor to help with the like initial production of the project um and we were able to do that in case some cases for a bit of a lower cost because of our partnership with poed and our faculty Graduate Studies um Au hires editors for their online courses to begin with so we were able to use some of those same contracts um and we were able powered because powered is now hosting the course we have a schedule with them so that we can do regular updates to the course so if the library was to reduce its seats in articulate to not have a license we still have access through powered because that’s a tool they use um but that and we have an agreement with them that it will continue to be there so it’s cost effective for us because our institution has that infrastructure in place it is not potentially cost effective effective if we were to be hosting our own LMS to do so and like we we don’t do that for our library courses right now um so that would be a problem from that delivery angle um from the Persistence of content for remixing the piece that I’m working on right now is trying to get more persistent less format dependent versions into our institutional repository of just what the content is itself that people could then take and repurpose for their own um Own remix um we’re also working on remixing our own content into a new o that will sit on a press books format but that’ll be somewhere in the next year okay great and um d i I know that you used a free platform but there was obviously costs with students and time could you speak a little bit to those those initial costs I think you hinted at it before but just talk about how others might be able to copy this model or learn from it um so we had the a good times a couple of years ago we had 18 grad students uh um that’s a lot of people to to train on the platform uh once we on so uh the the way our research comments operated at the time was that each librarian is responsible for a team so we would have a digital scholarship team and my colleague eka would be responsible for that team she would go go and train those students uh of course we will pay for their training uh and those are not Library school students they are coming from everywhere from from education to economics to computer science from every everywhere we will train them on a tool and then they we will support them as they as they as they create content and and offer content and educate themselves on this on the on the on the um on the on it on the approach did it cost us a lot of money n no it’s it’s not it’s not a I would say to get a grad student up to speed to a tool like that would take less than a week uh but it’s a skill that would actually take a long in their studies and and as they they become academics it’s it’s an excellent Hands-On skill working with with tools that are relevant in today’s economy so um was it investment worthwhile absolutely like we we definitely invested on those students and we are we are happy to see them succeeding in in the in the in the in the world and you know some of many of those students actually the library school students actually working as labr some of them on this call it’s exciting to see them um but they there is investment of money not cash it’s investment of your student budgets is it significant not really um is it useful absolutely and they if you could trade more and more focus on those skills um I think it will be beneficial in the long run for everyone you know I I taught my kids how to do markdown in in the high school and now they did beautiful presentations for the capston and it’s amazing it’s really amazing you don’t like you don’t have to worry about PowerPoint you don’t have to do uh you don’t have to place this image in this left corner you just let the mark down do it for you you work on the content you process that content you passess it and the the thing is created it’s beautiful um really makes a difference and really made my my my aun a daughters being really interested in in in this field and I my oldest is studying a data science now so here we go thanks Nick the Next Generation coming up through the ranks um Robin you were talking about um the the possibilities of of remixing and that’s a really interesting fact that we’re talking about with with Oar it’s not just about making them free to anyone it’s making them remixable Mashable Etc um so our next question is do you know if if anyone uh and it sounds like some of you do um have if other folks have remixed or adapted or reused your work um and you know how they’re doing it um and maybe we’ll go back to Emily to start yeah um actually a a couple of us on the uh so Liz Hill and Christy Thompson yesterday we were trying to track down like who do we know of that has used this in the classroom um who do we know of uh that that’s been using it in general um I don’t think we have a comprehensive list by by any means but we do know some folks who have used it used the textbook in the classroom um I can’t speak exactly to how they’ve used it whether they’ve assigned every chapter whether they’ve customized it but I do know of one instance of um uh a library in the United States had reached out to us and they had actually asked like how can we go about uh customizing this for their context United States context so they’re they’re doing so using press books we gave them some instructions on how to clone the resource and um then you know begin making edits themselves and I know that they are doing that uh I think we’ve also seen the textbook at least linked to in a number of Library Li guides so shout out to many of you on the call who I’m sure are responsible for that um and as we can see in the chat we know delh Hasa used it UBC has used it so it is being used in classrooms um but beyond that one case where somebody explicitly reached out asking for instructions on how to resource or or on how to remix the textbook I I can’t say for sure um how folks are doing that thanks um Eugene you mentioned you knew a few but there were some that you didn’t know um do you know how many folks have been have been reusing your stuff or it’s just out there in the wild reproducing a lot if you yeah it’s if you look like from ubic to to DAL literally in everything in between uh because people don’t don’t they uh reuse the entire catalog obviously they take pieces and the only thing the here Jane says they’re using it in in in Carlton and I did not that so uh so yeah people people take pieces the only thing we say just mention us say CC buas that we we we create this content and and that’s again once you release this information to the world you don’t you don’t have control right you have to rely on the on the on the goodness of your colleagues to to to to site you but that’s what the idea the idea was to create content that is dynamic and what we haven’t seen much we have seen some but not much is contribution back to the content and and so we would like to see much more of that if you see and I I I’m talking to you on this call to that and this if you see things that are not not as relevant anymore if the content is old and not as fresh if it started to rot uh just tell us create a create a GitHub request and we’ll take care of it like we will we will we take care of our stuff my RDM materials are up to dat literally on monthly basis update them U my student is Billy is here used to be on this call H she introduces a lot of icons and and and smilees to this to this content so um if you don’t like them let us know we will remove them it used to be very dry um or if you like them let us know we’ll use much more of them so again this is the beauty of a free platform we can do whatever we want whenever we want and we want to give back and receive back receive back is what we haven’t seen much uh would be great to actually um keep our stuff up to speed from from your your your expertise would be great thank you great thanks Eugene and Robin so with ours there’s a bit of the I’m G to call it hiccup or piece with the fact that we’ve used articulate makes it awkward so I know uh UBC was investigating I need to follow up with with them on that because we were trying to get the articulate I know the process to get them access to articulate we just need to ensure that it’s gone through um but others have been requesting the link and can I share this and yes please absolutely share the link and The Graduate free code I need to get text up on the site telling people who to contact to get the code and that’s a li of having it posted on the LMS is you can only have so many students enrolled in one time on an LMS there’s a capacity limit um so that that’s the way of ensuring they don’t go over the limit is to have that code there but we need to ensure people can get a hold of the code for General reuse for the remixing I UBC is the only person who’s contacted me to to get copies of files so far but I’m hoping that if we can put it up on our institutional repository that’ll make it more accessible for others because if you were to just in theory you could go in and try and copy and paste out of the live platform but that’s really awkward and not as usable as just having access to a repurposable file okay that’s awesome um so I think we’re got a couple of questions coming in here I’m going to try to Loop two together because I think that they’re related um Danica had a question and maybe this this a broad question for everybody in this room to think about but looking down the road what direction would you like to see us as a national network to take to coordinate and share these resources and then Ryan had a a semi-related question about the efforts made to engage professors in schools in oers and so I’d like to ask what what you all think about that and maybe starting with Emily I think I’ll speak to the second one because um that’s something that I think about a lot just in my role as like kind of an open education librarian in general um so what effort did we take in particular uh I think a word of mouth and just like the the the through the data community and through the list serve that we set up and other list serves like Word of Mouth really I think has has been um the most effective in engaging people in using this work in the classroom um but I think thinking about that at a higher level like how do you engage people in open educational resources um in my experience the most effective thing is similar word of mouth and like colleagues who are really champions for open education so a call like today where we’re talking about you know the power of what we’ve created and and how it’s been beneficial and how we did it um but having that filter down into different Pockets throughout universities into different departments having people who who are really supportive of Oar or who’ve used it and been really excited about it and can share things with their colleagues I think that that um is is really the most effective and Powerful way of engaging people um in this space so I think in our roles we can find those Champions or we can be those Champions and share with others or enable people to share with their colleagues that’s awesome right that’s the whole value of this thing we want to get it out there um Eugene do you have anything to add about you know how we might coordinate this nationally for sharing how people might engage professors other groups well we definitely engage professors we have multiple classes in EBC actually completely adopting the GitHub approach for for the textbooks for instance instead of using press books they want it is a GitHub for for textbooks for for for forestry course for instance the some props really like that um um the uh again as I mentioned we literally hear back from from from profs on a weekly basis because they either user content I’m doing like mechanical engineering later today Vis our content and the and we are working with those props to to to make sure the the students are getting the skills that they need now um uh how do we see National approach I always wanted we have a variety of platforms right now in Canada for training RDM Compu on the using their own platform most similar to GitHub but not quite uh you see one there is a quite a few I would say maybe a handful of approaches I for years I I reached out to Le and the alliance vis a request maybe to look into some kind of harmonization of of the content we all decide on the platform but we what we could do we could offer under the alliance umbrella maybe uh some kind of harmonized content for for for for for all the all Dr skills including our DM that would be really neat and and interesting to do we I raised did multiple times with the alliance leadership to most recently in their visit to Vancouver um and I see Jeff has done the same he has a he also thought I think Jeffy represents compute Ontario and they have their own platform but it is behind um it’s behind it’s like behind the login if I’m not mistaken it’s not open to the world while ours is so we there’s quite a lot of conversations to have but we have a potential IAL uh to to harmonize this approach in content and this this this conversations that we’re having right now it’s a great step towards it thanks Nick well lots to do Jen jot these notes down we have to push and take forward um Robin what would you like to see of the national coordination or the way to engage professors other groups I’ll highlight that so for the existing resource that here to talk about uh ente actually did a peer review and we went through and updated our content based on the feedback we got I found that was very helpful especially since it was a small it was a project by a small team at my institution so it was really good to have other people review and I really appreciated all of that feedback and the time people took to review all of the modules of content um so that that I thought was great um for involving professors depends on what kind of context meaning it a local context uh we also we have an oar librarian at our institution who is awesome and running another project help profs create their own Oar I’m hoping that at a local level we can also step up some of our Communications with profs because they’re now they’re starting to hear about that program and to have them know that well we have some other resources but having been created by other units that support teaching and research how can we get those more Incorporated in courses because I know some of them who are aware of them have talked about wanting to put it incorporate into their thesis preparation courses for example but now how can we consistently build those connections knowing that every faculty has um different Communications channels and potentially different structures for who you would contact to set that up so that’s our kind of practical next steps on a local level there is to establish those connections great thanks so much Robin um recognizing that we are just about at time and people are starting to head out out um we’re going to wrap it up with one extremely quick question uh which you can all jump in on if you if you would like uh or if you’d just like to sit on what you’ve said um if you had one very quick piece of advice to give to someone who was thinking of diving into the RDM Oar world pool as it were uh what would it be whoever wants to go first or I’ll pick on someone I can jump one wanted advice you’ll be talk to to colleagues uh because somebody has done it before uh and you’re not the first one to invent the wheel I was going to say something very similar Eugene find good collaborators find people who’ve who’ve done this work uh and that you can lean on or or work with um but for some original advice I might also say like build flexibility in from the start like give yourself more more time than you think you might need um because it uh I think we end up using or needing that time yes I’d Echo that as well I had noted down triple your timeline um because things things come up and potential for update so as a quick example as we were finalizing our content to Pilot it with a smaller set of students uh the tcps was updated and we have an Ethics module uh which we then updated after we’d done the peer review process before launching it more broadly so it’s just think about your format and what type of updates you might need because it may not be a single end date you may need to have a phased kind of approach anyway an excellent way to leave things off um thank you all so much for joining us today Eugene barsky from UBC Emily carel Johnson from Western Robin stumpster babasa um this is just the beginning of this series we will be talking in more depth about all of these resources uh down the road stay tuned in your inboxes for dates uh topics times Etc uh thank you all for joining us have a great west of your Thursday and we look forward to seeing you in the future