Tim (00:00.955)
Okay, we're recording. I will hide myself and mute myself, but I will be here.

Zach (00:11.505)
Welcome to Open Ed Mike, where educators share stories, insights, and strategies for transforming learning through openness. Wherever you are in your open education journey, we invite you into the conversation. So let's hear who's joining us today.

Kevin Corcoran (00:30.722)
Hi, this is oops this is Kevin Corkin from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida.

Brittany (00:30.964)
Hey.

Zach (00:36.871)
You are very echoey, Kevin.

Zach (00:43.986)
Alright.

So I'm just gonna start again here. So welcome to Open Ed Mike, where educators share stories, insights and strategies for transforming learning through openness. Wherever you are in your open education journey, we invite you into the conversation. So let's hear who is joining us today. Brittany.

Brittany (01:08.969)
Hey everyone, this is Brittany Dudek from the Colorado Community College System coming from Denver, Colorado.

Zach (01:15.571)
Kevin?

Kevin Corcoran (01:17.334)
This is Kevin Gorkern from the University of Central Florida, currently located in Connecticut.

Zach (01:28.455)
Mike, you are not coming through.

Mike (01:31.089)
Hi, it's Mike Mills, retired after 35 years in higher education from faculty to senior administration.

Zach (01:40.177)
And I'm Zach Kleba. I'm the Access and Reference Services Librarian at Dominican University, right outside of lovely Chicago, Illinois. And today we are celebrating our one year anniversary. So we would like to take a moment to recognize the folks behind the mic. So a huge thank you to Beth Nettles, our show runner, Tim Reed, our audio engineer, John Pizzo, our web designer.

and Aileen Lebello, our social media guru.

Zach (02:17.778)
So today's guest is Abby Elder, a leading voice in open education, open access, and scholarly communication. Abby is the open education services librarian at Iowa State University and serves as the statewide open education coordinator for the Iowa Open Education Action Team.

In these roles, she supports faculty, librarians, instructional staff, and institutions as they advance more affordable, accessible, and sustainable approaches to course materials. Many in the open education community know AVI through the OAR Starter Kit, a widely used resource that helps educators understand open educational resources, open licensing, accessibility, adaptation, creation, and implementation.

Her work has helped make open education more approachable and actionable for faculty and program leaders. Abby's scholarship and practice span OER program management, open and affordable course marking, faculty perceptions of OER, promotion and tenure, disciplinary differences in OER adoption, and the relationship between open access and open education. She's also a SPARC Open Education Leadership Fellow.

And her work at Iowa State and across Iowa reflects a thoughtful model for moving open education from individual interests to coordinated institutional and statewide practice. What stands out about Abby's work is generosity, clarity, and usefulness. She helps translate open education from a big idea into practical tools, supports, conversations that people can actually use. We are thrilled to welcome someone whose work has helped so many people enter the open education movement.

with confidence and purpose. Welcome, Abby.

Abbey Elder (04:08.742)
I was not expecting such a long and very kind introduction, so thank you.

Zach (04:14.855)
Well, we are very happy to have you here today. So with most of our podcasts, we start with a question about your origin. So you've worked across open access, scholarly communication, libraries, copyright, faculty support and open education. What's your origin story? So how did you first find your way into open education and what made it feel like meaningful work?

Abbey Elder (04:41.288)
Yeah. Honestly, I sort of started in open education through open access. When I was in grad school, I did the very smart thing of taking the optional choice to do a thesis rather than take a test to graduate and just write a thesis about how people in scholarly communication support authors in the humanities.

Because that was my interest area. How do we support people in different disciplines who might not be connected to these topics, who don't see the relevance of it like other people might? And so open access was really my focus for a long time, thinking about how do we support this, how do we make sure people can find ways to share research openly, connect with their communities. And then sort of accidentally I fell into an open access and scholarly communication position here at Iowa State.

Where they wanted to transition it to more of an open education space. So when I started here, they were just starting up an OER committee on campus and they wanted to get some more traction moving for OER. So they said, while you're here, just check this out, see how it works. and I'd recently done a OER lib guide at during my practicum for graduate school. So I said, I have some experience, I understand this. And so it was really kind of just

an accidental thing where it wasn't my main focus area, but it became it as I was getting into and learning about my career.

Brittany (06:14.78)
So speaking about beginning and learning careers, I am really interested in how you came up with the OER Starter Kit. That is something that I have used so much in my work. first of all, thank you for creating it. I think that's how a lot of people have come to find you is your work with the OER Starter Kit.

know it's really kind of a go-to resource, but I work with 13 different colleges and the instructors and adjuncts and faculty and librarians across those, but also with my work across the state of Colorado, you know, there's people who are very new to open education and so that's really the best tool to introduce people to open education. So thank you again. What was your motivation for creating the OVR Starter Kit and why do you think it's resonated with so many people?

Abbey Elder (07:06.044)
Yeah. that's so kind. Okay. I think one of the big things that came out of the OER Starter Kit where it came from was again this sort of accidental need to fill this gap we had. So a soon after I started here, I pitched an OER grant program and I thought, okay, it would be nice to get this off the ground. One thing that people want to do is create new OERs, so I should also see if we can get access to a publishing platform like Pressbooks.

But in order to show people what Pressbooks can look like, how it can work, I wanted to have an example resource that I could point them to. And so the OER starter kit was me saying, this is what you can do with this tool. So I was giving people at my school thinking about what do faculty need to know about OER to get started? What do they need to know in order to recognize the tools they have available? How can I

use all of the different things that are available in press books, like the ability to embed videos, to have hypothesis enabled on one chapter, to have an H5P exercise. I wanted to make sure everything was used in one way or another. And so the starter kit sort of came out of that interest in let's make something that shows what this can do and also serve a purpose where it's educating people at the same time. It also sort of spun up because I had been in the Spark Open Education Leadership Program.

Over the previous year. And as part of that program, I developed these little overview videos of what are open educational resources? What are Creative Commons licenses? And I wanted something I could do with those videos, so embedding them at certain chapters in the book was a way that I could leverage what I had already created while developing a little bit more to flesh that out for people. And I'm excited that it's sort of connected with people so much. I love seeing all the different adaptations people have made.

I especially want to shout out Carrie Gitz and the cool stuff for the Texas Learn OER modules, as well as some of the people that have really expanded on it over the last few years. I'm actually in the middle of doing a second edition right now that should be out this fall, but I keep finding more things I want to do. I'm working on index, which is harder than you would think it would be.

Brittany (09:11.954)
Ooh. That's really exciting. Congratulations on a second edition. It's also just a great example of OER in general and how things can be remixed, right? Like there's this great first edition, but all of these remixes. So I'm really excited to see the second edition and congratulations again.

Abbey Elder (09:35.732)
Thank you.

Mike (09:37.565)
Well, Abby, can't tell you how useful the starter kit was to me and my team when we were starting into OER at Montgomery College. So congratulations on that great work. You've also helped develop resources for OER program managers. What are the key ingredients of a healthy OER program? And especially once an institution moves beyond that early adopter phase.

Abbey Elder (10:06.236)
Yeah, I think one of the most important things any sort of program or initiative for OER can have is first visibility. So people need to know that you exist and that you're there to help them. And second, it has to have some sort of approachability. So if a faculty member is thinking, this is easy for me, this is something I can just connect with someone and get something done, they're much more likely to actually

go for that support to ask for it than if they see it as a chore or something that is a lot of work to jump hoops through. So in some ways I think the most important thing is making documentation as easy as possible and making it clear what it is that you offer. Even if it's as simple as saying, hey, here's a consultation form, here's all the information that you need to provide, and then we'll do the legwork for you to find some resources that might be of interest.

Or, here's the general breakdown of how you apply for a grant and what that takes. I think really that process of making things as easy as possible is what I find useful. but again, doing that is a lot easier said than done.

Mike (11:13.532)
I think a lot of times we do make things more complicated than they need to be.

Abbey Elder (11:20.666)
absolutely. I've had a few times in the past where you think, this is gonna be great. I'll provide a lot of extra context for people and I'll provide all of these extra little things that people need to know about when they're doing something. But sometimes when you give more context, it just makes something seem much more complicated and scary rather than if you hold back and you're like, what do you have questions about?

Let let's start from where you're starting from before I give you all of these other things that you're gonna have build on top of that and make it seem like a bigger project than it needs to be.

Kevin Corcoran (12:00.143)
Well, Abby, we're we're starting to see this emerging trend. Actually, I think we've seen it, is that you have the starter kit, you're helping out folks that are new to the field, you're helping out yeah, managers and and developing, you've been part of the statewide action piece. But I I'd love to maybe talk a little bit about some of the work that you did around supporting faculty, faculty recognition. We were lucky enough to have Andy McKinney on earlier in the year and talk a little bit about the initial work that the Doers Collaborative.

had done around tenure and promotion and we know that you've taken the baton and moved that ball much further down the field. I'd love to know, you know, what you saw in that original doers work, what have you built onto it, and how is that going within your your your home state?

Abbey Elder (12:47.74)
Yeah. So I think the doers matrix is one of the most useful starting points for people if they're thinking, how do we talk about this? How do we go into discussions about promotion and tenure when it comes to open education and at broad? but one thing that we did a few years ago is our starter our action team, the Iowa Open Education Action Team. We just call ourselves Iowa OER. It's much easier. we came together and we said, what's a project that would be of useful to people across the state?

And we thought it might be useful to have some more resources like what Doers has put together that sort of build on practical steps for if you wanted to put forward ways to talk about OER and promotion and tenure. And we made this PubPub website on open education, open education, promotion and tenure that is both a remix of the matrix from Doers. So it's

The same sort of thing, but we break down all the different categories of when they're talking about something, does it relate to the research side, does it relate to the teaching side, does it relate to scholarship when it comes to open education work? And then we also pulled out a list of at the time known promotion and tenure guidelines at other schools. So we could show examples of what does this language look like, how is it done?

Including not just open education work, but also things that mention open scholarship, things that mention open access. So we could say, hey, if your school has language like this, you might be able to talk about open education through that framing. So use the language that's already in place at your school, think about the ways that the things that really matter to your administration and work it into that rather than trying to make them understand OER.

Kevin Corcoran (14:33.441)
Where would you say that the conversations still need to happen? Is it within faculty senate? Is it department chairs? W where would you encourage the faculty that may be listening to to go back to their campuses and have this further conversation?

Abbey Elder (14:48.094)
Yeah. I think Faculty Senate is a great place to start that discussion. So here at ISU actually, we just passed updates to our faculty handbook this spring to our tenure and promotion guidelines. So we now say explicitly, if you have a peer reviewed open textbook that that counts as scholarship. And it took some back and forth to say, okay, where where are the guidelines? What do we say? Because we don't want to say all OER, that wouldn't necessarily meet the same expectations that other piece of pieces of research might.

But if we can say if you're publishing a peer-reviewed open textbook that's gone through these specific checks and balances, then it should be considered as part of your scholarship packet. And I think those sorts of discussions are things that should be happening in wherever you already talk about changes to your handbook and your guidelines. And faculty said that's a great place to start that.

Kevin Corcoran (15:38.027)
That's fantastic. Congrats on that.

Brittany (15:43.487)
So I really like the way that you talk about open education.

open educational resources and open access. think that sometimes there's a focus on just one or maybe open education and open educational resources, but open access is often left out. And I think that as librarians, that's an area that we focus on a lot. And so I'm really glad to hear you talk about it. And given all of your work in the open access realm, I'm interested in kind of your perspective on how they overlap and then kind of how they diverge.

And what can the movements learn from each other and how we can move both of them forward.

Abbey Elder (16:23.412)
Absolutely. This is I'm gonna hold myself back a little bit because this is a pet project of mine that I love talking about. But I think it's really interesting how a lot of these open movements from open science and scholarship to open access and open education have so much in common, but we also have done so much in these little silos that we tend to forget that we ha can actually learn from what other people have already done before us. So one of the big examples I like to pull from is the

Open access in the current concerns around APCs and read and publish agreements and getting into these sort of structured processes where we're buying into things that could be unsustainable over time. So over the last few years, obviously people who know about open access will get this, but I'll give a little bit of context. Open access publishing specifically, we've seen the growth of article processing charges or APCs.

That require authors or institutions to pay a thousand to ten thousand dollars of your nature to cover the cost of publishing open access and make up for the fact that you're not charging subscription fees to access materials. This is something that's become a norm because it's a way of recouping costs that would otherwise be charged for other things. And in the 2018-2019 area, we started to see similar processes coming up where there were

Quote unquote OER providers that were charging fees for students to access materials. And I really saw this as a point where we could learn from what was happening in open access and say we don't want to encourage there to be fee models for people to try to get access to things that are open, but you have to go through these different hoops. And I see the things like subscriptions to

Homework platforms and other tools being a slippery slope for open education in the same way that APCs were for open access. So thinking about different things that we can move around in that way and how we can learn from what happened before is really useful. But there's also a lot of weird different things that happen in education that you don't think about in the general research space as well. So platformization, falling into things like learning management systems like Canvas have complicated.

Brittany (18:22.43)
about different things that we can move around in that way and how we can.

Abbey Elder (18:42.846)
how we talk about all educational materials in open ed. I could go on, but I won't. I do have a book coming out later this year on open movements, so you can read up more about it there.

Brittany (18:54.59)
Ooh, would love a plug for that. We can, would love that actually. We're having similar conversations about some of those homework platforms that are open or have a charge with them, but those, you know, quote, quote platforms that are tied to some of our OER classes and

what that means for the designations and how we use a lot of grant money to develop our classes that are what we are. And then you can't just insert a homework platform. so likening that to the APC charges, or yeah, you can't, that's really the same. I think that's a really great way to make it make sense for instructors and faculty.

Is your statewide group, Iowa OER, thank you, I knew you had a short name for it. Are you finding any traction with making any correlations like that or with the APC or anything like that?

Abbey Elder (19:52.99)
I what we are. Yep.

Abbey Elder (20:05.092)
Mostly what we're talking about right now is how to help people be sustainable. So I think the bigger thing in Iowa right now is we've got so many schools with one librarian who does everything, or there's four librarians for the whole school and the director is the one who's also doing OER. And so a lot of the things we talk about is how do you do this on limited time? How do you build interest across different groups? And we've actually have a lot of people on our team who are instructional designers or

Brittany (20:18.024)
Mm-hmm.

Brittany (20:28.894)
you

Abbey Elder (20:33.095)
staff in online and distance learning offices who are leading the OER efforts because they have more time to dedicate to that work.

Brittany (20:40.944)
Sustainability is an ongoing question.

Abbey Elder (20:44.903)
Absolutely.

Zach (20:48.478)
So you mentioned libraries and libraries have played this really significant role in advancing OER and open access on campuses all across the country. So from your perspective, why do you think librarians make up such a large portion of the open education community and what unique qualities does sort of the library ethos bring to open education work?

Abbey Elder (21:16.156)
I think it's interesting that librarians were not the main people people in the open education movement to begin with. It was a lot more people from the open source, the tech community, than we had instructional designers who are really leading the way. And it's only in the last 10-15 years that we've really seen librarians become the main force. And that's partially because of the groups that are helping push it forward. I think Spark makes a big difference in this space because they are a big library-related group.

There's also been a lot of professional development around the topic, and shout out to Amanda Larson for tracking job descriptions for librarians related to OER and OERjobs.u.org, is that what it is? someone tracking other OER-related jobs in general, a lot of them are in libraries. So I think it's sort of just happened that way. But in terms of your other half of your question, which is

why are librarians sort of drawn to this work. I think a lot of it is to do with the fact that libraries are about making things accessible to people. It's about helping people get access to the information they need, getting them what they w are trying to find specifically. And especially this year, being thrifty as a librarian is really necessary because we can't purchase all the ebooks we need. We can't get things in print anymore. And if you work at an academic library like us,

A lot of the time you're dealing with course reserves requests that you can't fulfill because people won't even sell you textbooks, the ebooks crisis, everything else we're dealing with. So looking into OER just makes sense as some way that we can provide value to our communities while also finding something that is sustainable and available and free for us to provide access to and educate around.

Brittany (23:07.922)
So I'm going to switch gears here just a little bit because we, you and I have kind of a similar statewide perspective on our work in that, you know, you are the statewide open education coordinator for Iowa OER and

While I no longer work with our Colorado State OER Council, I do serve at the Colorado Community College system. So I have 13 colleges in which I help with the OER efforts, which probably pretty similar. And there's not a lot of people who work with OER at such a scale. And I think the coordination there is

Abbey Elder (23:49.492)
Yes.

Brittany (23:51.217)
is challenging to serve different institutions of different sizes with different resources and different needs is a challenge that I find fascinating and provides me with great joy. And I hope that it does for you as well. But what I'm particularly interested in is your perspective on how different your work is, your statewide work versus your institutional work.

and if they're how different your statewide work is from your institutional work if you find any unique challenges or if there is anything in particular that you would want people to know about that work.

Abbey Elder (24:29.98)
Yeah.

Abbey Elder (24:35.132)
Absolutely. I think one of the big things is institutionally I'm much more of an individual support staff person. So when people look at me, they think, that's the librarian that helps with OER things. I can ask her questions. I can get some help with a specific project. Whereas when I'm talking to people at the state level, it's usually other coordinators, it's other librarians, it's administrators or people at a higher level. So I'm talking to them about their institutional strategies. I'm talking to them about

planning and sustainability and funding for open education. So it's sort of ironic that although I'm much more of my work is at the institutional level, I feel more important at the state level, I suppose, because I'm talking about bigger, more important things. not to say that helping someone with an individual project isn't important, because I absolutely love doing that. I've been working with one author for the last five years on a book that will be done this fall.

And I'm looking forward to it greatly. But there is something nice that comes when you can speak to someone at a big transfer and articulation conference. And after you talk to them and explain, here's how this OER stuff works, they say, we're gonna set this up for this three-core sequence, and it's gonna affect five colleges. And it's one conversation, but sometimes just getting in those rooms can make so much of a difference and understanding the potential power of that.

Brittany (25:56.063)
And it's one conversation, but sometimes just getting in those rooms can make so much of a difference and understanding the potential power of that is incredibly rewarding, but also really scary because it means you have to get that message right. Yeah, absolutely. The breadth and scale of the work can be exactly a little scary. But when it hits, the impact is incredible.

Abbey Elder (26:03.472)
is incredibly rewarding, but also really scary because it means you have to get that message right.

Brittany (26:23.006)
But yeah, I think it's something that's just so rewarding. So I'm glad you are experiencing that same feeling of reward as well.

Abbey Elder (26:31.656)
Yeah, I do wanna shout out one thing that some of the other people obviously Iowa OER is not me. It is a group we have a lot of volunteers who have are just doing a lot of great work through it. so I wanna say on our website we have some great projects that they've led, including we have a set of adaptable marketing materials, a promotional toolkit. So

Anyone who wants to support OER on the campus, but they don't have a communications team, they don't have a social media person, they don't have a graphic design person, can just download our Canva templates and make a version of a handout or a slide set or a workshop and get to work with that on their own campus using their own colors and their own logos. And I think having a place where we can share things like that is one of the greatest parts about having the statewide team because I wouldn't necessarily think to do that.

Brittany (27:20.03)
Because I wouldn't necessarily think to do that being at a big state university, but we've got community college members on our team who can say, it would be cool if we had this so could share it with other people. Yeah. That's a lot of our work at our system offices is similar, where we kind of act as the resource for our colleges that

Abbey Elder (27:22.248)
Being at a big state university, but we've got community college members on our team who can say, it would be cool if we had this so I could share it with other people.

Brittany (27:40.531)
you know they really want to get that work but they they just don't have the time resource and maybe the personal resource to do so and said to be able to provide that starter is just so helpful so that they can then spend the time doing the work that is you know matters at their institutions and so it's great and i can't wait to share this toolkit that you have again your your team your partners really provide some amazing things so thanks for sharing

Abbey Elder (28:05.385)
Thank you.

Kevin Corcoran (28:07.396)
Just listening to everything that you've produced, whether it's been the OER Starter Kit, the work on the tenure promotion, the this marketing toolkit. are we sure we're talking to Abby or are you your digital twin? But I I guess the transition to that is that you would think that you would get through one conversation without us talking about AI, but no, we're gonna bring that up because that's all everybody talks about for the last three years. understanding that there are

There is always a debate within the open community on something, and I think one of the more recent debates is around AI friend or foe. And we're just curious on where you take. Is this something that helps build content and break barriers? Is this something that goes against the true nature of Creative Commons licensing, or is it a

an unused w way to help discovery or some other avenue that you may have.

Abbey Elder (29:09.576)
I think it's a complicated question because when people say AI these days, it's often used as a marketing pitch because they say, everyone wants to hear about AI. But half of the things we call AI are not new. They're things that have already existed for five years and people have been calling it something else.

It's complicated in the video game space. People had to clarify when we're talking about enemy AI, this is something that's been around for twenty years. It's not a new thing. We're not using a chat GPT to make enemies. This is just the way that we've code in the behavior of the characters in the game. so in some ways when we talk about AI and open education, what we're just talking about is adaptive learning tools. We've had them for five, ten years already.

We're talking about things like Grammarly before it had all of the additional bells and whistles where it was just an advanced grammar checking tool. There are aspects of this that I think people have already been interested in thinking about for a while. Where I have concerns are the bloat, where we have a lot of tools that are just being added on for the sake of adding on, or where they might be offloading processes that are making things messier than they need to be.

So I have one instructor who has used an AI tool where she's uploaded content and had it put out exercises for one of her books. So she's got some review questions that she's put into H5P throughout her materials. And that's been really useful for her. But I have another author who has been using AI to help him work through drafts of a book. And I can see in earlier drafts that he had a lot of really

Clear, concise content, and now his content is three times as long, and it's got a lot of improperly formatted citations that may or may not exist. And there's some issues that are cropping up in the way he talks about things that were not there before. So I've had to walk back and say, hey, I know you're enjoying using these new tools, but I think it's stifling your voice and your ability to get across the actual points you want to make. And we're gonna have to have a conversation about this.

Kevin Corcoran (31:24.173)
Yeah, I guess it's so it's not a set it and forget it, but a guide on the side, so to speak. And I guess we're all it's all fun and games until there's a new AI company that is actually named Skynet, then we'll have to start worrying.

Abbey Elder (31:29.49)
Yeah.

Kevin Corcoran (31:44.889)
Mike, are you back in the game?

Mike (31:47.821)
I think I'm back in the game. Can can you hear me? Am I back in the game?

Kevin Corcoran (31:53.752)
You are, sir.

Mike (31:54.935)
I apologize for the technical issues. My gosh, I think the wildfires smoke and the heat on the east coast has just messed up my connectivity. so I don't know where when I disconnect it where you all had had left off. but Abby I I'd like to ask if if I could what what should we stop doing?

in the open ed community. you know, it I think as educators, we often take on more projects and then take on more projects. And at some point we have to stop doing some stuff. So what's one habit, assumption, or strategy we just may need to let go of?

Abbey Elder (32:46.046)
My main point that I like to say when I'm talking to folks like myself in the community, people who lead projects, and this is a soapbox I will happily stand on, is to say, stop talking about myths and misconceptions. Because 80% of the time what you're doing isn't dispelling the myths, you're introducing them to an audience that hasn't heard them before. Stop saying, don't worry, OER aren't these horrible things you've heard of. They might not have heard of that.

Brittany (33:08.894)
I'll

Abbey Elder (33:14.396)
Don't say, don't worry, no one's gonna steal your content and republish it and sell it. They probably weren't thinking that until you put it in their minds. instead just say, here's what you can do. If you have questions, ask me. Just start with what you do know and not with things that you assume people are thinking about in bad faith. I think that's a big thing that can help to dispel concerns in the movement, to help people get on get on board faster, and also

Brittany (33:32.926)
I think that's a big thing that can help to dispel concerns in the movement, to help people get on board faster, and also to stop ourselves from repeating really old arguments that may not even be spoken of in this space anymore. I love that.

Abbey Elder (33:40.424)
To stop ourselves from repeating really old arguments that may not even be spoken of in the space anymore.

Zach (33:53.239)
Absolutely. Okay, so visionary time. So looking ahead, what gives you hope about the future of the open education movement?

Abbey Elder (34:07.432)
What gives me hope? Okay, let's see. there's a lot of things. I I gave a talk a few years ago to the All Things Open Conference about open education and open movements and the way that we can compare them to different ways of seeing utopia and how we can move past seeing it as some impossible future instead of think of it sort of

Like solar punk, something that we can move toward in a practical way. How do we make this something that is sustainable, that we're actually taking steps toward and thinking about practically? And in terms of that for open education, I think a big piece of it is looking at all the amazing work that educators are doing. Practitioners are sharing their new remixes of material. People are updating content that they had before, people are making localized editions of OER.

Instead of just saying, look at OpenStax, they've got these 10 books, say, did you know that this person made a cool alternate version of this public domain text and their students commented on it? I think open pedagogy projects are a big point of contention for like the future of open education. How do we look at things that are exciting and different and able to be built upon over time? And then also not books.

the future of open education is thinking about it as a way of teaching, a way of being and a way of sharing information with one another, not saying, Here's a cool PDF. And I think we can already see a lot of that happening across our spaces.

Brittany (35:56.2)
Well, Abby, it was an absolute pleasure. So thank you so much. And as I believe we've told you, we end our podcast with our favorite thing on the planet, a terrible, terrible joke. And so I am fortunate enough to have the pleasure today to offer that joke. Are you ready? The answer is no. So.

Abbey Elder (36:16.787)
no.

Brittany (36:22.746)
Why did the open education librarian bring a toolkit to class?

Because when the textbook broke the budget, she knew it was time to open things up.

Mike (36:35.948)
Brittany. Brittany. I I think you found that when you were camping.

Zach (36:36.423)
Wow.

Brittany (36:36.722)
yes that you are so i think that i did i get a lot that's had no service so and i was not connected well with that everything to you and the mic is closed

Kevin Corcoran (36:38.116)
No. Just no.

Zach (36:41.472)
So bad.

Kevin Corcoran (36:58.529)
Awesome. Abby, great job.

Abbey Elder (37:02.036)
I'm