Tim (00:01.556)
Okay, I'm gonna just mute myself and hide my camera, but I'll be here.

until then.

Brittany Dudek (00:10.894)
All right, shall we go ahead and get started everyone? All right. Welcome to Open Ed Mike, a podcast where voices from across the educational landscape share insights, stories, and strategies for transforming learning through openness. Whether you're new to open education or a seasoned practitioner, Open Ed Mike invites you into the conversation. Let's hear who's joining us today. Mike.

Mike Mills (00:37.619)
Hi everyone, it's Mike Mills, an independent education consultant and part-time podcast co-host after 35 years in higher education.

Brittany Dudek (00:49.922)
Glad to have you, Kevin.

Kevin Corcoran (00:52.477)
Hi, I'm Kevin Corcoran. I'm from the University of Central Florida, currently located in Connecticut for the moment.

Brittany Dudek (00:59.169)
Zack?

Zach (01:00.804)
Hi everybody, I'm Zach Klebaugh. I am an Access and Reference Services Librarian at Dominican University right outside of Chicago, Illinois.

Brittany Dudek (01:09.818)
And I am Brittany Dudek, Director of Learning Resources at the Colorado Community College System, where we are having a freak eight inch snowstorm in May in Denver, Colorado today. So thanks for joining us today. Today's guest, it's actually really nice. We needed the water. So today's guest is Dr. Lisa Young.

Mike Mills (01:24.777)
No thank you, Brittany. No thank you.

Brittany Dudek (01:37.054)
A long time open education leader whose work has helped shape how community colleges think about access, affordability, innovation, and student success. Lisa has spent more than three decades in higher education, including leadership roles across the Maricopa Community Colleges, where she has served as the faculty administrator for open education and innovation and as a faculty member at Scottsdale Community College. Her work has supported the planning,

implementation and growth of open education efforts, academic innovation, micro credentialing, artificial intelligence, academic technology, and digital transformation. Lisa is also a founding leader in Maricopa Millions Initiative, which has evolved into OpenMaricopa and has helped save students tens of millions of dollars in course material cost.

while advancing a broader vision of open, low cost, high quality learning materials and open educational practices. But Lisa's story is not only about cost savings. It is about moving open education from a project to culture, from textbook affordability to student agency, from local innovation to global collaboration. She has served in leadership roles with CCC OER and Open Education Global.

including service on the OE Global Board of Directors and as Vice Chair. In 2024, she received the Open Education Globals President's Award, recognizing exceptional dedication, outstanding contribution, and exemplary service to open education. Lisa's work asks a powerful question to the field. What does it take to make openness sustainable? Not as an add-on, not as a heroic individual effort,

but as an institutional value embedded in teaching, technology, recognition, workforce pathways, and student success. We are thrilled to welcome someone whose career has braided together community college mission, faculty development, open pedagogy, global collaboration, and institutional change. Welcome, Lisa.

Lisa Young (03:48.541)
Thank you, Brittany. It's great to be here. I'm visiting you all from Prescott, Arizona, where we are having a lovely day of about 61 degrees.

Brittany Dudek (03:52.792)
riskier.

Brittany Dudek (03:58.318)
Okay, I'm a little jealous. So Lisa, you've spent decades in higher education, including your early work in online learning and faculty development, water resource education, and open education. Can you tell us a little bit about your origin story and how you found your way into open education?

Lisa Young (04:17.486)
Absolutely. So I'm a hydrologist and so my first role, my first career was as a hydrologist. And very early in my hydrology career, I was asked to teach a course because basically I was the only hydrologist that they knew and they had an immediate need on a Friday for a course that started on Monday. And I had never taught. I wasn't a TA or anything and I just went in and I taught my first class.

of 15 men, older than me. And it was like quite an experience. So through my journey teaching hydrology for 15 years, one of the things that happened was it was in, it was a long time ago. And I started out with transparencies, which are pieces of plastic that you write on with a dry erase marker and an overhead projector, like that you still use in bowling alleys. And so I would write my notes on

illegal pad in class, I would write them on these transparencies so the students could then write them down. That was like the process of as I did my lectures and engagement activities. And so as technology changed from the early 90s, we then were able to print transparencies. were able to then have we had like not PowerPoint, but something before PowerPoint that allowed us to project if we could get a projector put in our classroom.

And so there was this whole process of me creating and recreating my materials as the technology shifted. And I was one of two initial faculty who taught online in 1997. Through to an instructional need of my students worked as water treatment and plant operators. They had jobs where they worked four days on, three days off, three days on, four days off, and their shifts changed every month.

So they weren't able to be real successful in school because our attrition rates were terrible because their shift changed and they couldn't go to school any longer. And so I put my materials online. They weren't great as an instructional designer. They weren't fabulous, but it was what we knew at the time. And what happened in the late nineties was I was asked to step up and engage in a project on reusable learning objects. And I was really excited about not.

Lisa Young (06:40.624)
recreating the wheel. I was very excited about this idea that we could take little chunks of knowledge and share them with others, leveraging this amazing information superhighway, as we used to call it. as I was doing that work, very early in that work, I was leading this project with another colleague for the Maricopa Community College District, and I lost all of the content from my online course.

because of a server failure. And I was like, well, I'm the reusable learning object person, so I need to do this. And so while it wasn't open education and there really wasn't even the terminology for open education at the time, I scoured the internet for resources that I could reuse. And I also created reusable learning objects that I shared. And

I loved that I could take content and repurpose it and really make it work for my students. I loved that. And then those pieces that I couldn't find anything for online, I created and it was amazing to get emails from people all over the world who were leveraging the content that I created and shared. And so this whole idea of sharing, of being able to adapt,

and reuse content got me super excited. And so then when we started learning about open education in the early 2000s, I think it was as early as 2003, we had Richard Brasniak from now OpenStacks at that time Rice and Connections come and talk to us. And that's how I got into this and jazzed about this work.

Kevin Corcoran (08:34.686)
So Lisa, I gotta ask you, I met you, I think the first time, what, 2017 in Anaheim, at one of the OpenEd ones, and I was going back and I was reading through one of the comments you made about the global impact of Open and how it changed the tapestry of your soul. Can you explain a little about that? Was there a particular moment that you felt that change?

Lisa Young (08:59.632)
know, yes, and I did write, I did share that and I do believe it did change the tapestry of my soul. I was at my first Open Education Global Conference. It wasn't called OE Global at the time. was called the Open OCWC, Open Courseware Consortium. And my first attendance at the conference was in Slovenia, which was a beautiful place. And it was amazing to be there and people who I had.

I'm seeing online in webinars. I want to say this might've been 2014. I finally got to meet and they were my heroes. They were my open education heroes, but it was.

I was in a pre-conference workshop and there was a woman who represented a non-governmental organization and she was talking about where the country she came from, there was censorship and she was able to leverage open education to get unbiased knowledge or

less biased knowledge, however you want to look at it, to people in her region and area and country. And I hadn't thought of the amazing work that our faculty and our open education champions do in that context. The following time that I went to OpenEd Global was in Krakow, Poland. And

I sat in a session where we learned about the impact of open education in Afghanistan. And that this gentleman from Afghanistan was partnering with this woman from a philanthropic organization in Canada. And they were putting open educational resources on tablets and the teachers

Lisa Young (11:08.71)
that were left in Afghanistan would come to this place and be able to interact with these tablets and learn knowledge and then take it back to their villages where there was no knowledge, where there were no textbooks, where the teachers that taught in the past were no longer there. And when you learn that the work that we are doing as

as a community, the open education community and the impact that it has well beyond what we're doing here in the US. It really changed me. It changed how I looked at it, changed how I viewed the world.

Kevin Corcoran (11:50.982)
You know, you're right that the North American sort of viewpoint of this is nearly focused on cost savings. you know, Mike, I think you have a question you wanted to follow up on.

Mike Mills (12:06.587)
Yeah, thanks, Kevin. And Lisa, you talk about heroes. And first, let me say that Maricopa, I think, was a hero to so many of us in our early work in this space. And you've also mentioned the transformation that's taken place globally. so much of us, so many of us have focused on affordability, textbook affordability. But we know that open

transforms the work we do, the access issues. Maricopa certainly produced its fair share of cost savings for students, but the work also moves into open pedagogy, equity, inclusion, innovation, student-centered design. How do you get institutions to shift their thought process from textbook affordability, which

is the sexy part of a lot of this to these other areas.

Lisa Young (13:09.797)
Mike, I think that the work that you and Shinta have done has really like is such a great example of that. So the work that we partnered with you on and now I'm not going to remember the name, the UNSDG fellowship. Did I get that right? Okay, good. That work really helped us to make that shift. But also I think that

Mike Mills (13:28.861)
You did?

Lisa Young (13:40.098)
So many of our institutions are learner centered. I mean, that was the reason that I got up and did that work for 32 years. I love my students and this year not going to graduation is really hitting me hard. I'm like, maybe I should drive the two and a half hours to go to graduation because that's why I did this for our students to see, to be able to help them achieve their dreams and their goals. And so when I think about

you know, that shift it's for our students. And so we got into it initially for the cost savings for our students. A lot of our faculty, that was that motivation. But as we look at how we can contextualize existing content, how we can make it more inclusive, how we can help our students see different viewpoints through leveraging open education, open ed pedagogy.

having our students co-author and co-create content, there's so many things that make it so valuable to the student experience that it really was why we were doing it, we just didn't know it, if that makes any sense. So I think that, but it is a shift, you know, when you started out with those cost savings and that measure.

I think that the work that you all did at Montgomery really helped Maricopa make that shift in terms of the measures, in terms of really amplifying the open pedagogy work that we were able to do. And so I really do have to congratulate you and Shinta and the team on that work.

Mike Mills (15:30.985)
you

Lisa Young (15:36.505)
that in Rajiv and everybody who did that work. But I think that when you look at everything you do through the student-centered lens, it lends itself to this work.

Mike Mills (15:49.993)
Thank you, I appreciate the accolades. Did you have to do any work with faculty, having conversations with faculty as you were going through this transformation that ensured for them learning outcomes weren't gonna be negatively impacted?

Lisa Young (16:07.431)
absolutely. And I think that we had to do that from day one, whether it was cost savings or whether it was leveraging open pedagogies. I think that there's always concerns about quality and outcomes. And so we, from the very start, our very first strategic plan engaged faculty when we were Maricopa Millions and really focused on the cost savings.

we engaged faculty in so many different ways. And as we shifted focus to more of open pedagogy, social justice, we really made sure that we were engaging the faculty in those conversations. It wasn't too difficult because

They were able to see immediately with their students how learning changed and shifted. Even myself, like when I wrote my first open textbook, the reactions I got from my students in terms of their, just the learning process, not even their learning outcomes, but just in how they felt about engaging with my textbook was different than engaging with a publisher textbook because they felt

that it was so much more contextualized that they were able that they saw that their immediate feedback was going right into the back into the textbook. They were able to see that I was taking their resources that they surface through open pedagogy into the textbook and it changed. It made the outcomes richer and made the student success metrics richer. And so I think all of those things together, but a lot of them.

professional development goes into all aspects of our open education work to ensure that our faculty have the best practices and have the understanding of the potential impacts. And then of course, on the other side, collecting the evidence of that impact.

Zach (18:28.868)
Thanks so much for that, Lisa. Just jumping in real quick to the Maricopa sort of context. So when Maricopa Millions became OpenMaricopa, which it sounds like more than a name change, what changed in the vision, the strategy or the culture as the work moved from that cost savings to a broader open education ecosystem, kind of like what you and Mike have been talking about?

Lisa Young (18:59.226)
Absolutely. so a lot changed. One of the things that really shifted was institutionalizing open education across the district. so there was a shift in that leadership of this work was no longer an add-on, but we had an OER faculty coordinator who had, this was their full-time job. And so,

with that work and a lot of the work that was happening along the community. One of the great things about the open education community is that we are so tight knit. do share whether globally, nationally, regionally, there's so much sharing that goes on that open pedagogy had surfaced. Montgomery College had the UNSDG Open Pedagogy Fellowship.

There were some things happening there that we saw and we said, we need to change what we're doing. We had met our goal, our financial goal, our Maricopa Millions goal, and we realized as leadership and Matthew Bloom as the OER faculty champion and faculty coordinator, and Debbie Baker who had come on at that time, really did a lot of that leadership work to move this.

Maricopa was ready at that point. We had met our goals. had initial goals. We had a situation where pretty much everyone in the district knew what open education was, saw positive results. And so they were open to leveraging open education in different ways, leveraging the magic of the five Rs, leveraging

the ability to engage in open pedagogy so that we could better impact our students.

Kevin Corcoran (21:01.65)
Lisa, I have to make one comment. It's because of you and Matthew that the Connecticut OER initiative jump started. We had faculty that went now and visited Scottsdale and adapted one of the textbooks. We used Math AIS, My Open Math. So if it wasn't for you and your colleagues, we wouldn't have had that jumpstart in Connecticut with Achieving the Dream and Hustatonic Community College jumping on.

Once again, thank you.

Lisa Young (21:34.522)
It's like, that's the magic of it. We all help each other and we all learn from each other. We wouldn't have been able to do any of our work at Maricopa if, you know, all like David Wiley and Cable Green and, you know, all the people who helped us get started. and yeah, so that's what's so great about this community is that we are all helping each other, move each other forward.

Zach (22:01.54)
Okay, jumping to our next question. I think one of the things that I really love about the Maricopa story is that it's a story that's focused around community colleges. you know, I just looked real quick at the OpenMaricopa site and there's a graphic on there that, you know, it's focused on student savings and it looks at a total of $36,182,300 have been saved from

2013 to the fall of 2023. And it's just an enormous amount of money. And it is something that is incredibly important for individuals moving into the community college space. Having that savings is huge. So we often describe community colleges as these access institutions. So why do you think open education has been so

deeply aligned with sort of the overall ethos of the community college mission.

Lisa Young (23:08.89)
That's a great question, Zach. I think that there's a number of different things. Our dedication to our communities as community colleges, we are entrenched in that community and we serve our community. That's one piece, but I also think that a big piece of it is our faculty. We are learner-centered institutions.

universities are absolutely amazing and there are amazing faculty at universities. Please don't get me wrong because, you all of our faculty are amazing. But when we are, really, when our faculty are focused on teaching and the, and the art of teaching, they don't have research loads to worry about as well. They're, they're focused there. So I think that it was, fairly easy also with community colleges.

We have very small classes, so we get to really know our students. We know their stories. We know their hardships. We engage with them with 20 students at a time, 20 students an hour. And so we really get to know them. And so when we look at ways that we want to engage them and help them, that lends itself. The other piece is that

When we don't have the pressure at a community college to publish for 10 year purposes, we have the time and availability to develop open educational materials or spend that time in the adaptation, they're remixing and adapting materials for our students. And like that was really reflected on

Early on in the work that we did at Maricopa, we did focus groups with students from a number of different colleges within the Maricopa system. And one of the big themes that we heard from the students was, my faculty member made these materials for me.

Lisa Young (25:22.645)
And that's really like entrenched in our mission of the community colleges to, you know, we serve our students and our community. And so I think that's really part of why it's worked so well for so many of the community colleges.

Brittany Dudek (25:45.656)
As someone who also works in community colleges, that really resonates with me. The mission of community colleges is access, but it's really focused on serving our students. And a lot of the instructors and faculty who do focus on OER are not just focused on that cost savings. They really want to make sure that those materials are there to serve the students and that they make sense for the students. So that really makes sense to me.

I'm interested in some of your perspective on how your work in teaching and learning has helped grow the open education program from just scattered projects, individual instructors or faculty.

into more of a campus culture? Because that's something that can be very challenging, right? Especially, I mean, I'm certain that it happens in universities and in colleges as well, but in community colleges, oftentimes these projects are one-offs here and there. And so how do you really make that more of a cohesive culture?

Lisa Young (26:55.993)
So Maricopa, as an example for the Maricopa Community Colleges, they are a system of 10 separately accredited community colleges, but we have a district office. And so one of the things we started out with was, and Paul Golish was critical in this early work of the Maricopa Millions Project, but Paul and I, we...

wanted to ensure, and Dr. Maria Harper-Marinich, who was the provost at the time, we wanted to ensure that we had representation from all 10 colleges, that we had representation from a number of stakeholders, and we put together a steering committee. And that may sound like, well, of course you put together a committee, but we were very, very purposeful to have representation from like our IT department, from different levels of administration, from a number of different disciplines.

but not have it so big that it wasn't manageable. And so we had to make sure that we had instructional designers, our librarians, all engaged in this work. And we charged them that they were representing these stakeholder groups and they needed to play operator and get that information out to the groups that we had them representing. And that was one key piece in changing

the culture was like making sure that all of the stakeholders were aware of what was going on with open education. The other thing that we ensured was that we had skeptics on the steering committee. We wanted people who didn't necessarily believe in this work so that we could surface that and address it and really make sure that we have full representation on that steering team.

So so that's one piece of but then the way that we did work early in this was we Paul and I were making visits at all of the colleges we had a road show we had presentations to engage the faculty with but we also urged the colleges themselves to have. We are committee so that they could get the word out themselves and so and we supported that and so.

Lisa Young (29:12.685)
Those pieces were really critical. The other thing that we did was we district-wide days of learning about open education and brought faculty from all over the district, all over Maricopa County together. And we made sure that student voices were heard. And that was another really critical piece because creating that culture takes a lot of different people, pieces, a lot of different

levels of engagement, to reach as many people as possible, you have to take it from every angle and find different ways to engage different audiences. Also leveraging our faculty champions who were doing this work, we started with those pockets of innovation.

You know that of who was doing open education. were like, you are a champion. Like let's showcase you and like have you go, you're, you're doing math in beautiful ways. Will you go talk to your math faculty because you speak the same language and you can explain this. so we, so we leveraged a lot of different tactics to be able to get the word out as much as possible.

One of the things that we didn't do was we forgot initially to include our faculty senate. And so that was something that we learned that we, you know, they were missing in our steering team and we needed to bring them on board. the, also I think by doing so much public, public.

being very public about what our mission was, know, initially that goal of $5 million in five years, everybody was kind of like, how are they doing? What are they doing? And also having so many opportunities where we were able to support faculty in their open education work, as well as leveraging thank you campaigns from the students. And so this was one of the really fun things that we did was we,

Lisa Young (31:21.016)
We created, as Scottsdale Community College, their committee created a form that they sent out to all the students who were taking open education, courses with open education materials. And we said, hey, did you know that your faculty member made this choice? And this is what they did, and this is why we think they did it. What was the impact on you?

And the students filled out this form and we used this form publisher that then created a PowerPoint slide or certificate like on a PowerPoint slide that we were able to print out. And what we did was we wallpapered the doors and walls around the faculty offices with all of these thank you notes from their students. And, you know, they were able to see, I've really made an impact with my dedication to open education. And their colleagues were like,

whoa, I didn't get any thank you notes from my students. And they were like, how do I do that? And that was like a really great way for them to see that for those people who were not engaged with open education, to see the impact that open education is happening is having on our students so that they and then they were like, how do I do this?

Brittany Dudek (32:37.89)
Sometimes that peer pressure is really helpful. I have one question about kind of the way that the system or the district works a little bit. We have 13 colleges within our system and I work at our system office. so I'm curious, is the way that your district or Maricopa district is set up where the colleges have similar resources and similar staffing or is there kind of a unique structure staff

Lisa Young (32:39.755)
Exactly.

Brittany Dudek (33:08.004)
resource at every college and so therefore things need to adapt. For example, like a teaching and resource center at every college might be a little bit different and so kind of things need to adapt at each institution.

Lisa Young (33:25.292)
Yes, so centrally we have our Maricopa Center for Learning and Innovation at the district office. And so they do some professional development. They do a lot of really great things. OER now is housed in MCLI. So we're very excited about that at the district level. At the college level, nine of the 10 colleges have a center for teaching and learning. It might be called something different at each school. But nine of the 10 colleges have that.

But they're not staffed the same as some colleges that might be one person, as some colleges that might be five people. So the resources available at each college is very inconsistent. So that's why there has been this work at the district level to help support those colleges that don't have the resources. And so in some of the colleges have OER committees and some don't.

Brittany Dudek (34:21.506)
Thank you. I can relate to some of that. I just wanted to, I know sometimes when we hear about these amazing projects, we think, well, we don't have the same resources or we have more, we have less. it's always nice to hear exactly kind of what the setup looks like at every institution.

Lisa Young (34:22.392)
You're welcome. Yeah.

Mike Mills (34:37.437)
Lisa, you've articulated very well the collaboration within the Maricopa system, but you've also been involved in collaborations through OE Global, CCC, OER, and across institutions. What makes open education collaboration work well across colleges, systems, sectors, and countries?

Lisa Young (35:00.984)
So it's interesting. I wish I could like give you a definitive answer. I think first of all, it's the people and why we get into open education. I think that, you the why of each of us, you asked me like how I got into it. You know, we have our origin story, but we all have an origin story that makes this work more than a job. It's a passion. It's a journey. It's...

something that it's service. It's something that's a little different than just the regular duties of our job. I would say that's a one piece. I think that another piece that makes things work are the five Rs. You know, when David Wiley came out with the four Rs and then the five Rs, know, like really being able to

so clearly and easily see how we can work together. Those five Rs are collaboration and it lends itself there. And so it was a really beautiful gift that David was able to frame it that way. But I also think that, and the problems that we're trying to solve with open education are not the same globally. You heard my example of censorship.

or lack of access to any knowledge.

cost savings are not an issue in Europe. That's not why they get into this work. It's the quality of the resources. It's the open pedagogy. that's not necessarily, the cost savings aren't what's making all of that happen. But I think that it's that because we're not creating something that is rigid,

Lisa Young (37:03.155)
and that we're really creating something that is flexible, that can be reused. It really makes that collaboration happen. So I would say really, and I might come up with something different at 2 a.m. as I kind of think about these questions in my sleep. I would say that the people and the flexibility that the 5Rs and Creative Commons licensing or other open licensing

enables and empowers is part of what happens. I also think that the open education community has done a really beautiful job with networking. We know each other. We have so many different, we have many different networking opportunities. Some are by profession like the work that our librarians are doing.

but others are open, like community college consortium for open education resources. I've been involved in OE global. There's OEN. There's so many different, areas that, or network opportunities that we get to know each other and we learn about each other. And we have webinars to learn about the different projects that everyone's doing. And we realize we don't have to recreate the wheel because this isn't rigid. And we are so open.

to each other to say, yeah, let me share what I'm doing and here, take it, make it your own. That changes the game in terms of really allowing this collaboration to happen. And there are some like, we're gonna, I'll go ahead.

Mike Mills (38:48.295)
Well, when you come up.

No, I'd go finish, please.

Lisa Young (38:53.643)
So sorry. There's the opportunity, know, the collaboration on grants like the, the U.S., the federal government putting together the open textbook pilot grants like, and you know, collaboration on those is a huge part of it too. And so I do think that there's a number of things that have happened with open education that have really made it the perfect storm in a really great way to be able to do this work.

Mike Mills (39:16.777)
Well, was just going to say when you get that idea at 2 a.m. text Kevin because it'll be 5 a.m. his time and he'll just be getting up and he can have that conversation with you.

Lisa Young (39:26.859)
That's a great idea, Mike.

Kevin Corcoran (39:26.878)
I probably will be up too.

I think Mike just talked about we've had many different themes, reoccurring themes through the conversation and one of transformation. I know that you and I have talked about how OER can transform one more time around micro-credentials and micro-learning. Can you tell me a little bit about how you started to see the need? It almost seems like full circle where you started with learning object repositories, and now we're coming back to instead of this full textbook model to go down to

actual assets. Tell me a little bit about how you got into that and where you see Open evolving within the context of micro learning.

Lisa Young (40:09.845)
Absolutely. It was really interesting. The last three years of my career at Maricopa, I served as the faculty administrator for open education and innovation. And as Brittany mentioned, that innovation included not just open education, but AI, micro-credential work, and digital transformation. And so I was kind of thrown into the micro-credential world, and I was like treading water trying to learn all of these things.

being able to continue the work with Debbie Baker on the open education work at Maricopa. And I started to see a synergy of all of these materials that I'm engaging with, with micro-credentials are like proprietary. People aren't looking at it with an open education lens. It's either proprietary or it's like faculty are creating it, but in a more competitive.

way as opposed to an open way. And because I would say that, you know, my values are in openness, like my personal values are, I share everything because I've been doing this work for 30 some odd years now in like, well, 30, very close to 30 years with reusable learning objects and open education. And so my immediate thoughts were how can we share this? And

we had an industry partner come to us with a need and this industry partner was a national industry provider. And I thought, well, you're coming to us at Maricopa for this, but everyone else, every other community college in the nation who is offering this is going to need this as well. So why would Maricopa create it just for Maricopa?

when we can partner with other institutions and create it for the nation. And it's specifically a nation thing because it's a federal compliance alignment. And so that's why I'm saying nation, not world or region or continent or what have you. And so like I was like, this just doesn't make sense. The other challenge that I was experiencing in that role was that we had amazing resources available to us, but

Lisa Young (42:29.781)
they were copywritten and because they were copywritten, we couldn't modify them. We couldn't break them up and integrate them into existing curriculum. And we were hearing from students that, I wish that the content of this microcredential could have been integrated and woven into the entire course so that I could have repetition.

so that it wouldn't have been done in one week, but it would have been done in eight, 12, 16 weeks. And I would have had more time to really grasp that knowledge. And so I thought, whoa, well, open education is the solution to this. And so for that student centered approach, really looking at it as like, how can we best serve our students and really facilitate learning? And then looking at

Well, if we're going to try to create a microcredential for a national industry partner, why don't we create a national open microcredential? And so then I started having all these like crazy ideas about this and I, I see the values of open education as the five Rs. And I was trying to think about, well, what are the values of microcredentials? And many of those values are the same.

as open education and some of them are different and some of them conflict with open education. But I put together like a micro credential values framework that I blogged about and then I overlaid the micro credential values framework with the five Rs to develop a micro credential OER framework.

that I've blogged about and have been trying to share with everybody because I'm really excited about it. And I think that I hope someone will take it and make it even better. It's CC by so that people can do that. But I love the idea of really thinking about as we create content from micro credentials, when we think about micro credentials, there's this whole LER, learning and employment record ecosystem. And right now,

Lisa Young (44:50.098)
In that ecosystem, authoring is not called out. know, creating that content isn't called out. It starts with issuance, but there's this whole area of authoring the content. And I hope that this OER microcredential framework will help guide some of that work as we move forward.

Kevin Corcoran (45:12.178)
That's amazing. Not only did we now have industry partners seeing the value of open and how it can benefit them, but we're also looking at content, openly licensed content, and these micro elements based on competencies. I'm excited of where this conversation is going, and I'm, I guess, empowered by seeing OpenStacks and other platforms starting to look at bite-sized content.

Lisa Young (45:43.895)
It's really exciting. really is. And I think that one of the things we really need to do as the open education community is really look at how we can leverage open to on a number of the other things that we were working on. I was at a meeting once with Una Daly and James Glapagros Glag and they were like, we should be using open education as a tool to solve other problems that were and issues and challenges that we're having in higher education.

And I think that was probably the seed that was planted by Una and James for this idea.

Kevin Corcoran (46:20.925)
Love those two.

Zach (46:24.804)
So Lisa, as we transition from that near future micro credentialing explosion that I think a lot of us are expecting, how about we fast forward 10 years? So in 10 years, if open education has truly succeeded, or I'm sorry, let me go back. Go ahead and edit that out, Tim.

So as we look at that near future of microcredentialing and I think, you know, the impact that we all feel that's going to have as you look forward, or I'm sorry, I keep messing this up. I keep looking at the wrong one. Okay. So as we transition from that discussion about microcredentialing, I wonder,

In your history as an open education expert and practitioner, can you share a story from Maricopa, from CCC, OER, OE Global, or even your consulting work that gives you hope about where you see open education heading?

Lisa Young (47:39.751)
There's so many. I think it's the students, it's the student voices that give me hope. So from the open education standpoint, we had a student on a panel once that, he melted my heart with his story. And he talked about...

how he didn't know if he'd ever finished college or even a course and how a faculty member and open education, being able to have textbooks that he could use that because he wouldn't have ever been able to afford the textbooks, that he could see his future. He said it was a renaissance for him. Like to see this amazing student, this kid on this panel saying,

talking about how it was a renaissance for him and he could see that it was the pivot point in his life. To me, that just shows that by leveraging open pedagogy, by being able to provide these resources to our students who cannot afford them, to be able to make those resources inclusive.

probably changed the tapestry of that kid's soul. Just like open education has changed that for me. And it changed definitely his future. Like it just did. And we all have those moments with students and we hear about those students. I saw it happen at that table on that panel. And so that gives me hope. As I look, as I look specifically,

at the work of Open for being applied to micro-credentials and whatever comes next, I think about our ability to be able to reimagine open education from cost savings to open pedagogy, the work that we've done in making materials so much more inclusive, to be able to help our students co-create content.

Lisa Young (49:55.956)
Yeah, we have AI co-creating content too, but we can still continue to have our students co-create. Seeing a major industry provider looking at open education to solve a very clear employment need that's going to serve

30,000 students in the next six years, they need 30,000 people employed in this area. Like that's huge. So now we may have, in 10 years, I imagine seeing employers asking for open education. I see us having AI tools that help us to co-create content with our students. I see us being able to have our students

immediately be able to gain and access skills that they need because they're openly licensed. I'm going to throw an open recognition there because I'm a big, you know, when I've done the strengths quest, I'm like a big on future. so I'm open recognition. The idea that we can have students share their experiences and earn those micro credentials so they count for their education.

Having students, I could go on forever, but I'm gonna go to just another moment. Having students be able to complete their educational goals faster, more focused, because we have open educational materials that they can access and then leverage open recognition to assert that they have those skills and being able to go backwards and have the skills that they're.

co-creating in other places be able to be leveraged as well.

Mike Mills (51:57.959)
Lisa, that's a wonderful look into the future. And as we end this episode, as we do with every episode, we finish with a bad OpenEd joke. And I'm quite sure that this joke is also gonna impact your future, but not in the same way that OpenEd itself has. So here we go. Why did the OER textbook, why did the OER textbook get invited to every faculty meeting?

Lisa Young (52:18.837)
I'm ready.

Brittany Dudek (52:22.797)
you

Lisa Young (52:29.428)
Why, Mike?

Mike Mills (52:29.577)
because it was always open to feedback. That's so bad. It is so bad.

Brittany Dudek (52:30.306)
Yeah.

Kevin Corcoran (52:35.499)
Ha ha ha ha!

Brittany Dudek (52:36.334)
Awwww... That was not that bad! That was okay!

Lisa Young (52:36.851)
I love it!

Zach (52:40.096)
Yeah, that wasn't as bad as some of the other ones, but still not great.

Lisa Young (52:40.533)
Love it!

Kevin Corcoran (52:43.166)
It's because Mike read it.

Brittany Dudek (52:43.598)
Well, with that, the mic is closed.