090805+Minutes


 * Library and Media Directors’ Council** **Whatcom Community College** **Summer 2009**
 * Wednesday, August 5, 2009**


 * Attending all or part of the meeting:** Andrew Hersh-Tudor, Wenatchee; Charlie Crawford, Pierce; Darcy Dauble, Walla Walla; Deb Gilchrist, Pierce; Doug Ammons, Clover Park; Eric Palo, Renton; Jane Blume, Bellingham; Jeanne Leader, Everett; Jon Kerr, Lower Columbia; Lauri Kram, Edmonds; Linda Lambert, Whatcom; Mary Ann Goodwin, Spokane Falls; Mary Carr, Spokane; Michelle Bagley, Clark; Sharon Simes, North Seattle; Sue Gallaway, Centralia; Sue Schub, Bates; Tim Fuhrman, Big Bend; Tom Moran, Shoreline; Wai-Fong Lee, Seattle Central; **via Elluminate:** Cable Green, SBCTC; Joan Weber, Yakima; Michaela Murphy, South Puget Sound, Rand Simmons, WSL.

Deb welcomed us to Summer LMDC.


 * Minutes, Jennifer Dysart.** Darcy moved to accept the Spring minutes, Linda seconded. Comments? Eric commended the minutes; Jennifer replied that it’s much easier when you have a recording to work from. Minutes approved.

Darcy: In the minutes, we talked about the new draft accreditation standards and that we would discuss them. I saw it on today’s agenda at one point, but it’s not there now. Deb: that’s true; we’ll add it back on as a last agenda item.

Jennifer: I propose that we move the LMDC website to a wiki. That way we don’t have to wait for LMDC to post things, and members can make their own additions and corrections to things like the membership list.

General agreement; Jennifer will create the wiki.

Thanks again to Mary, who has being doing the job for 10 years. (General round of applause.) Thank you, Mary, for generating the report for this meeting. I’m still working on getting things set up at Centralia.
 * Treasurer’s Report, Sue Gallaway.** []

Our balance as of July 29 is $7,221.59. All expenses are complete, including dues from last year and the expenses from the retreat, except for a couple of outstanding dues. I’ll be following up with those when we send out this year’s dues statements.


 * Report from IC**. Deb: Laura can’t be here today. I’ve asked Sue and Jennifer, and Lauri who is on her way here, to give us a brief report on what happened at the Instruction Commission retreat.

Sue: This is the first IC meeting that I had been to, and the purpose was for the executive committee of the IC to meet with the executive committees of all the councils. LMDC was one of the councils that was there. We got an update from Jan Yoshiwara at the state board about futuring.

Jennifer: The state board has been doing a lot of looking forward, and the presidents’ group has been doing a lot of futuring. Jan came to Green River a couple of months ago and presented to the Deans Group. A lot of the things that she talked about were the same things that she talked about at Green River, so I will post her documents from the Green River meeting to the listserv.

They talked about trends, in our communities, in community colleges, and also in Higher Education in general. They talked about changes in our population, and also some of the things the president’s group has been discussing and speculating about. Cable via chat: this is a report of the Mission Study Task Force. []. Jennifer: it was a combination, wasn’t it.

So they did the futuring piece and then broke up into groups to look at the IC strategic plan for next year. They tried to have all the groups have representatives from all the councils. We spent time going through the goals, writing, reviewing, and asking questions. IC will review all the material generated and put them back into their strategic plan.

Deb: I left so much time on the agenda because I wanted to make sure that we understand what’s on Instruction Commission’s mind, and that we’re responding in the way that we need to. Later on we’ll talk about how we can actualize our strategic plan: what are the specific deliverables and actions that we need to take this year to make that plan happen. Was there anything that you heard at the IC meeting that struck you as important for us? Our ears should really be up. Jennifer: I was with the group working on the technology piece. There wasn’t really anything new; the libraries’ interests were represented. Sue: I was with the Basic Skills group, and we didn’t have anything glaring. Deb: We’ll interpret that as “we’re on track.”

What Jan was talking about at IC was the Mission Study Task Force update. This is the set of slides that Jan gave on July 28 to a joint meeting between the HEC board and the state board. I’m not going to read through the slides, but just hit the high points very quickly to emphasize what the HEC board system design study, the SBCTC’s Mission Study Task force, and the presidents’ group are looking at as big trends.
 * __Report from the State Board, Cable Green__.**

This info is from the Mission Study Task Force. Enrollments are growing like crazy. We think about the fact that people are out of work and going back to school, but it’s also the largest high school graduating class in the state’s history. We’re up 8.2% over the previous year. It’s hard to serve because we’re over capacity, but also once we’re over-enrolled we don’t get the state FTE funds though we do get the tuition. It’s even more of a challenge to serve more and more students in down budget times.

Enrollments are growing in all mission areas. Worker retraining is up 36% as a direct result of a down economy. eLearning continues to grow, up 25% each year, which is 4737 more FTEs than we had the year before. We don’t code hybrid courses well—we under-code them—but even the coding we do shows that they are up 45%. FYI, nationally, the data and best practices are pointing at hybrid learning as being a significant way that we deliver instruction in the future. There will always be 100% online which will serve a niche group, there will always be face-to-face (maybe just web-enhanced), but the reports and what a lot of us believe is that the really significant growth will be in hybrid.

Dual credits are also growing; running start and college in the high school are growing with everything else. Opportunity grants run out of money every year, but even faster this year with so many people out of work who need financial assistant.

Those are the big trends. Here are the highlights of the Mission Study Task Force at this point. I say “at this point” because the HEC Board System Design Study is not this far along. Both of the studies are influencing the other. As the HEC Board comes out with recommendations, it may tweak the Mission Study Task Force as well. The presidents are also having this kind of conversation. They continue to refine what their own comments and input are, and they continue to influence the recommendations of the Mission Study Task Force. The Task Force is heavily made up of presidents, as well as trustees, faculty, and others.

Some of the major findings [bullets are from the slide]: · Majority of growth will be population driven, more students of color, and older students who want workforce education, attend part-time, at locations close to home and work · Increase participation by low income young adults, Hispanics, adults without college credits, Central and SW Washington

Cable: Hispanics will make up 25% of the growth over the next 10 years in the state of Washington. That alone has me thinking about if we need to translate everything we do on WAOnline into Spanish as well. The answer is probably going to be yes. · By 2020, all students will be taking courses supported by digital technologies, all students will be using student services online

Cable: the most significant point is that all student services are online. The Mission Study Task Force says that we need to get there as soon as possible. It’s in line with the Strategic Technology Plan as well. The Mission Study Task Force has said several times that we should move faster in implementing the great Strategic Technology Plan.

· College facilities attract college attendance. Most students live 20 minutes from campus including online students, 10 minutes for low income students

Cable: this came out of a state board transportation study. It doesn’t matter if you’re rural or urban, you’re willing to drive about 20 minutes, but if you’re low-income you’re willing to drive about 10 minutes. You have less time and money to spend on gas and auto maintenance and things like that.

The really interesting thing is that you’d think if you were online it wouldn’t matter where you live, but it does. Students taking 100% online still live within 20 minutes of the campus. There will be a national Sloan report that comes out this fall that says that even online students live within a 35 mile radius of some educational institution. No one’s really teased out why that it, but it’s interesting research to come. · Reductions in state resources will persist

Cable: No big surprise; no one expects any more money to be coming into the system anytime soon based on budget forecasting. · Centralized administrative technology creates efficiencies · Washington’s community and technical colleges spend less on administration per student than universities, or national peers · Multi-college districts spend less on administration per student, offer consistent policies to students, and provide single voice in local community

Cable: This is out of the strategic technology plan. Lots of discussion, particularly around administrative functions, to really centralize and create efficiencies. You’re seeing that come out of the WAC technology plan now, and work that ITC is doing as well. Discussion around real commodity stuff: email, email archiving, active directory, login/password type stuff. Really centralizing and gaining efficiencies. There was analysis about how much we spend on administration, including admin staff. Our system spends much less per student than peers.

Draft recommendations (from slide) · Grow capacity to keep up with population growth · Create innovation fund for underserved regions and populations

Cable: actually have a pot of money for pilot programs · Continue to focus on high demand programs and IBEST through targeted enrollments

Cable: IBEST is getting a lot of national attention. The idea is to take programs that work and expand them. There’s some work right now with foundations to do exactly that with IBEST. · Expand applied bachelor’s degrees to all regions through university partnerships, Centers, and CTC BAS degrees · Serve emerging needs for new locations with existing college districts · Accelerate adoption of digital technologies through system level purchases of eLearning tools and online student services · Pursue open courses, open textbooks · Standardize technology infrastructure to support transfer of innovation among colleges · Centralize administrative functions through technology to create efficiencies and improve service · Create incentives for collaboration among neighboring colleges · Focus on completion by increasing funding for Student Achievement · Build statewide faculty and staff development focused on technology, student success and underserved populations · Consider new innovative practices in program delivery and student success

Cable: There’s currently a fee that generates funds for new capital projects in the system. One idea for funding some innovation money is to exact a fee for student services, teaching and learning, potentially library services, innovation as well. I don’t know if that’s going to go anywhere but it’s an idea that’s going around with the task force members.

Cable shared the following document through app share [bullets are from the slide]:

State Board Update, Aug 5, 2009 · 1946 task force →o Opportunity for library resources →o Denise Yochum, John Backes (VPI, Shoreline), Ben Meredith (faculty and ELC, Olympic) →o Sub-committees / work teams? If so, --Cable, LMDC member(s) →→ § Get on and actively participate in eLearning, library, open educational resources and pooled enrollment sub-committees

Cable: This is the HB1946 task force that Reuven Carlyle sponsored. It will likely start this month. The teams have been put together from the universities, the CTCs, and all the other partner agencies. This is really about getting together as public higher education, figuring out how we can better share technologies and support services around student services, library resources, eLearning, pooled enrollments, ability to share content. Organizing principles are how you share technology and content.

This looks to me like the best shot that we’ve got for improvement in the amount and quality of library digital resources that you have laid out as a need for the system. I think that for several reasons. First, because it’s called out as its own category in the task force, so by law they must talk about how they’re going to share licenses to databases across all of higher ed, how everyone will get access, how you’d have a model and the governance would work. They have to deal with it and report back to the legislature. We have invited 6 folks and 2 from the union to be on the CTC contingent to go to this task force. Denise Yochum (Pierce), the only president on the task force, is very interested in libraries. John Backes has library matters as a top priority. Ben Meredith was chosen by the union to be their faculty rep. As an eLearning director, he’s also interested in additional library resources. Several others on the committee are very supportive as well.

I think there will be an opportunity to be on subcommittees/workteams. If so, I will contact Deb so LMDC can get reps onto the teams. I’m actively monitoring and will keep Deb well informed. Sharon: How would we participate? Do we call or email you? Cable: the HEC Board is responsible for coordinating this and they have not yet called the first meeting. All that’s happened to date is that we have those representatives for the steering committee. Mike Scroggins, SBCTC; Denise Yochum, Pierce; John Backes, Shoreline; Alan Ward, North Seattle; Joe Huang, Green River; Mary Harding, Lower Columbia; Rassoul Dastmozd, Clark; Ben Meredith, Olympic; and Brian Holt, Seattle District. This is who we were allowed to send. IC and student services had been asked who they’d like to send, and this is the group. You’ll notice there aren’t any council people on it; Ben Meredith is there only because he was picked by the WA Education Association. We’re thrilled that he’s on it. Back to your question, how do you participate? I don’t know that there will be sub-teams or work committees, but I expect that there will be, that they’ll want participation by folks who really know what needs to be done. The steering committee folks, including those sent by the universities, are not library directors. They’ll need expertise to flesh out the details in the final report. I think what will happen is that the steering committee will meet, and we’ll ask them to suggest the idea of work teams. If the answer is yes, then there will be some sort of process that the HEC Board or the chair of the task force will lay out, as to how many can be on the teams, how many from each sector. All the politics need to happen. Ultimately I’ll know because I’ll be staff to this task force as well. I will come to Deb and tell her, “Good news! LMDC can have 2 slots or 3 slots on the task force. Who do you want to put on?” That will be a decision for Deb and the processes that you have for LMDC. · eTutoring (20 colleges in—14 to go) & Quality Matters = system wide—centrally funded…..following the model LMDC started with QuestionPoint

Cable: I was tickled pink in the way that QuestionPoint rolled out. It’s a good model so we are following it with eTutoring and Quality Matters. Most colleges were paying $2500 for eTutoring, but some colleges didn’t have the money, so SBCTC said that they’d pay for it. Just like QuestionPoint, all the colleges contribute a bit of tutoring time to the consortium. It includes not only our group but also WA State University and two community colleges in Oregon. The consortium is growing all the time. Other universities in WA are considering joining.

Quality Matters is an instructional design rubric and a set of practices for designing and evaluating online and hybrid classes. The rubric is so good, based on research and best practices, that it’s good for evaluating any courses, online or not. Many colleges, led by the eLearning directors, are getting interested in it. We just wrapped up a pilot of roughly 13 master reviewers (extensive training) and 2 peer reviewers trained, who can go back and provide those services and education to faculty at their colleges. People liked it so much that we’re going to roll it out in the QuestionPoint model, fully funding it from the State Board. Any college who wants access to its rubrics, professional development for faculty, to go through additional training—we’ll provide it centrally at no additional cost to the colleges. · Research and run RFPs for new WAOL teaching and learning services for all 34 colleges: →o Lecture Capture Suite →o streaming media server—so you all can share your copyrighted digital reserves with students

Cable: there was a little bit of new money this biennium. The legislature asked us to use it to improve and increase eLearning capacity and invest in open educational resources. On increasing capacity piece, the eLearning Council and Instruction Commission asked us to move forward with two RFPs. One of them was to purchase a lecture capture suite. If you’re familiar with tools such as Echo 360 or Tegrety? or Media Site?—basically suites of software so that when the faculty walk in the classroom, they can push the go button on the computer—it’s usually that simple. They do their thing, they lecture, they have a mic on, they’re working on the web, might have powerpoint. Everything is captured, they push stop and walk away. Derivative works of their presentation are created, so not only the full lecture capture and all the multimedia that goes with it, but podcasts and vodcasts. They can go out to smart phones. In many cases, the text translation happens to the extent that the software and the servers are good enough to do that. This isn’t just useful in the classroom, but it’s also client software that could go on someone’s laptop and they can use it if they’re creating lectures from home. Students can take notes while the lecture is happening, everything is time synced. It’s pretty slick software. Many of our colleges who have larger IT budgets have purchased this software and are very happy with it. Smaller colleges can’t afford it and don’t have the software. This was identified as one of the most important things to help us move forward with bringing digital technologies to the classroom. Specifically the physical classroom is the target, though it could be used by online or hybrid professors as well. Because it’s not trivial or inexpensive software, there will be a formal RFP process, just as there was for Angel and Elluminate.

The second one is a streaming media server. You know that through WA Online we’ve had a dumb file server, unlimited space for someone to put files up for their courses. More and more, they’re wanting to share copyrighted or licensed material. It needs to be shared via streaming rather than downloads. There’s lots of material through the library and departments like can’t just be thrown out on the open web. We’re looking at different options. Using the Amazon cloud may be an option too. I need to have our techies and programmers dig into it a little more. One way or another we’ll come up with a solution, and it will also be centrally funded and available to all colleges at no cost. · Target online/hybrid learning professional development opportunities for ABE/ESL and Workforce faculty (with $50K SLOAN & Gates grant)… SLOAN-C College passes (all colleges currently have 8 seats for 2009)

I just found out today that we got a grant ($25K from SLOAN and $25 from Gates) for more SLOAN-C college pass online professional development seats, targeted for ABE/ESL faculty. SLOAN foundation has some of the best online faculty professional development activities for faculty trying to learn online course development, online or hybrid teaching and learning, evaluation, etc. These are very high-quality, in-depth, 2-week-plus long workshops. To date, the SB eLearning team has bought 8 seats per college for 2009. They were gobbled up very fast. The faculty love them and they learn a lot. This is an effort to focus passes directly at workforce, ABE, and ESL faculty for two reasons: those groups of faculty have expressed a real interest in increasing their capability to learn and tech online, as do the program directors who run those programs at the state board and at the colleges. · Partner with Bill Moore and Noreen Light to launch faculty learning communities; $100K

Cable: Both Bill and Noreen are at the state board; they work with faculty and faculty professional development folks at your colleges. They’ll be launching faculty learning communities. They’ll provide $50, eLearning will provide $100K. The idea is that the money will flow to the colleges to those groups of faculty who will become the experts in our system around X. X might be the new role of faculty in the 21st Century and how roles are changing. The X might be information literacy and how to weave it throughout the curriculum. It can be anything that the faculty who get together want to submit an application for. I think that Noreen is looking at something like $10K grants to move groups forward. · Mission Study Task Force (draft) recommendations—slides (HECB) · Invite Universities to join SBCTC Elluminate license. Renegotiate license if needed.

Already talked about the Mission Study Task Force. Just fyi for you, Elluminate has been so successful in our system that it’s caught the attention of the 4-year colleges. We’re meeting with them next week to talk about how they can join our license. · Monitor Obama’s American Graduation Initiative →o Get access to grants to build open courseware ($50M/year)

This is a multi-billion dollar initiative that includes everything from financial aid to open courseware, which is what I’m tracking. The open courseware piece is proposed to be $50M/year. It’s very similar to what we’re doing with our 80 courses with the Gates Foundation. Deb and I will talk about that next.

Tom: What’s the timeline for the lecture capture software RFP? Cable: as soon as humanly possible. I’m waiting for the contract and legal support that I need. Some of the staff who used to do that are gone from Olympia, and we’re in the process of hiring another contracts person. When that new person gets on board, we’ll move forward with the lecture capture RFP. If you’ve worked with RFPs, you know they are heavy on logistics, work with OFM, the attorney general’s office. Without having someone who’s an expert in those activities I can’t move forward. We expect to have someone within perhaps the next 2-3 weeks. We’ll put together a system group to start the RFP process shortly after that. One question for LMDC: are you interested in having library directors on either of those 2 groups? Deb: Absolutely, no brainer for us, and we thank you for that.

Darcy: at the same time we’re talking about streaming media, are we talking about increased capacity on bandwidth? That’s a major roadblock. In addition to be able to afford these tools, need the bandwidth to run them. Cable: I’m with you. There are 2 major bandwidth issues. One is between the colleges and K-20, but they’re all connected with fiber. So it’s not a technical issue, but a budget issue--can the colleges have the IT budget to open up the pipes to the K-20 network? The good news is that it’s just a budget issue, and the bad news is that everyone’s had budget cuts and it’s more difficult to find money. It’s an issue of prioritizing at the college, and it’s a college issue. To date, there hasn’t been any conversation about centralized subsidization of college bandwidth. The central money has gone more around application services while getting access from the colleges to K-20 has been a college budget discussion. If that needs to change, probably the best route is through the IT commission, and then up the WAC technology and get it on their agenda. The other bandwidth point is off of campus, at the faculty and students’ homes. To take advantage of most of the high-end technologies and software that we talk about, you really do need a broadband connection, which means DSL or better. Dial-up works but it’s painful. There are several national initiatives, also part of Obama’s Graduation Initiative, with broadband stimulus money. Rand has kept LMDC very well informed about the broadband stimulus money. Mike Scroggins is our lead for that at the state board, and is on the governor’s task force. It’s a tricky issue. There’s the public good aspect of getting broadband out to rural areas. It’s almost the same issues we had decades ago about telephone service to rural areas. The providers don’t want to pull the fiber and cables out there because there aren’t that many customers. Does it become publicly subsidized? The hope is that part of the broadband stimulus is that it’s a necessary good to have all citizens connected to broadband so that they can fully participate in the 21st century economy and society.

Mary: I thought I’d bring you up to date with what the ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) is doing with HR 3221 [to amend the Higher Education Act]. ALA and ACRL were nonplussed to see that libraries weren’t mentioned anywhere. We’ve been working with AACC to add language. We’re going to Loebsack’s office (the person sponsoring it out of Iowa); not someone I know but they’re getting people who do know him to go see him and to add library services into 3 parts of the resolution. One is Section 503F3U, section b, where it talks about information literacy activities. 503F4A would add information literacy. And 505 where it talks about open online education, it would add “and related education materials” so that libraries have a place in this too. Cable via chat: good additions. Mary: I’ve spent tons of times on this, Julie Tuderro and myself who are on the ACRL board from community colleges. We were not happy at all when we saw the language. Since I’ve been on the AACC board, we made some connections and got our legislative folks to work with them. They are certainly for it, but want to make sure that it happens in such a way that it doesn’t rock the boat. With the recess coming up, we think we have time to get that added in. Loebsack’s apparently quite friendly to libraries.

Mary: what is this, Cable, the American Graduation Initiative? Cable: right, if you look at the White House’s web page, the broad umbrella over all this stuff—not the broadband stimulus money, but the increased financial aid, the open courseware and all that—it’s called the Mary: I’ll send you what the language looks like. Lynn Bradley’s one of our ALA legislative folks, and I’ll clip it out of her email. We’re working on it nationwide to get that added.

Rand: I understand the [?]Nowinet folks have been talking to the community college people. You talked about K-20 reaching all the colleges. Is this reaching off-site locations that ? [?]Nowinet is talking about? The second question is, I understand that there will be a K-20 application—it’s very muddy as to what it’s about, and I wondered if you had information.

Cable: I don’t, Rand. The best person to talk to is Mike Scroggins. He sits on the K-20 board and would know what’s going on and what the connection points are. All I know about K-20 and connection points and bandwidth is that all the colleges and universities are on K-20. When it gets out to other organizations I’m less knowledgeable. Mike Scroggins is…and the K-20 website has a map that shows connections; it’s quite good.

Cable: That reminds me. One of the other points that was discussed as part of the Mission Study Task Force—because of the point that you get higher participation rates when you have an physical educational presence within 20-30 miles—the MSTF is talking about how do we get more physical entities into the rural areas in the state of Washington. How do we get into those possibilities and expand our presence without massive capital investments when there’s no money. One of the ways you do that is lease space. Another is to partner with a local library or a K-12 entity. One of the richer conversations that I heard was talking about…the town Othello was used because it’s equidistant between two of our community colleges in the center of the state. Half of the students go to one and the rest to the other, but it’s 1.5 hours either way. What if we could get high-speed broadband to the public library in Othello. Put an omnidirectional wireless antenna on the roof, and spread high-speed wireless to the entire town. Reach into that community with some face-to-face instructor assistance who facilitates online or hybrid classes. Then library resources from elsewhere could be accessed from that local public library. Ideas like that are starting to float—I’ve heard it discussed in some of the broadband discussions where libraries can be focal points of education and also of internet access in locals where those two things do not currently exist. There are strong allies in conversation in the MSTF, which could be a strong recommendation coming out of it. For what it’s worth.

__Gates Foundation Grant, and Priorities for Expenditure of Technology Resources for FY10__. Deb: I sent out an email to the library directors’ list summarizing what some of our ideas were about how the money could be used, as well as asking for new ideas. The idea that came to the top was one that you had suggested, about really cementing information literacy. Could you talk about the background of the initiative and then we’ll talk about what it might look like and some of the tangibles about the money.

Cable: I’m 2 years into my job, and have decided that my job is about two things. First, helping folks to share technology and support services around the technology (professional development). That’s one bucket; bucket number two is around sharing content, specifically digital content. That includes textbooks, courses, learning objects, library resources; anything digital that’s used for learning. The Gates proposal, which hopefully we’ll find out Aug 11 that we’re funded, is a 5.3 million grant with 4 pieces. One piece is course redesign. This is the first system-wide proposal since I’ve been here where we have the opportunity to share content on large scale, in our highest enrolled courses. No surprise, our highest enrolled courses are the same courses that are highest enrolled at community and technical colleges across the nation.

FYI, Gates will fund 25 courses, legislature has funded 55, for a total of 80 courses. [Cable displayed the list of courses.] The project is about redesigning some of our highest enrolled courses for the following reasons. One goal is to update them. Another is to increase completion rates. The first 25 courses and the courses in pink have lower than average completion rates (under 88-89%). Another reason is that these are often gatekeeper courses—students need them because they are required in their educational pathway. If they don’t get it when they need it, it delays their timeline which causes trouble in all sorts of ways. How did we choose these courses? All are high enrollment. They disproportionately serve low income students (that’s where Gates’ interest is). We also chose courses that young students tend to take, also a focus of Gates. They have lower than average completion rates and high enrollment. We were looking for classes where if we redesign them, that a lot of people could potentially use them.

I’d like to emphasize that this is not about mandating curriculum or standardizing curriculum. It’s the first fear of faculty, and this is not what this project is about. The outcomes are that the courses will be updated and redesigned; they will be digital because it’s easier to share with world but they don’t have to be taught online or hybrid (Gates is interested in having the material shared globally). They will be modular, re-mixable; you can mix and match to suit your needs, using only portions that you want. They will have Creative Commons licensing. The courses will remove commercial textbooks and use either free or low-cost materials—that’s going to be a challenge.

During the redesign, we have the opportunity to weave through different threads of skill building and instruction across the curriculum. One of those is information literacy. Let me talk about the design teams redesigning these courses. For example, math. There are 10 math courses, so it’s likely that there will be one or maybe two teams redesigning. The teams will predominantly be the faculty who teach the subject (faculty will apply to be on these teams). The grant money will flow to the colleges to buy release time or provide honoraria to the faculty on the teams. Other folks on the teams will include librarians, library directors, research librarians, whoever LMDC/we think will be the best folks to be on there to help find and vet appropriate educational materials. The teams will need help finding other courses out there in the world, figure out the materials levels, etc. We’ll have the Quality Matters-trained folks involved because they have instructional design expertise. The bookstore managers have asked to be involved; if new coursepacks are created, they want to be involved in printing and distributing them. I’m leaving out a lot—we’ll put together a formal description of the project and get it to the colleges.

What Deb and I have talked about is, what does LMDC want to weave through these courses? What should we tell the design teams that this is a requirement of your redesigned course? Part of what everyone will do is to weave these 5 (or whatever) skills through their courses, and we’ll show you how to do it.

I want to point out the cost of the textbooks that students are currently using: over $40M a year combined cost for these courses. I’ve been told that this number is low. Those are the kinds of savings we’re talking about IF colleges adopt these courses, which is totally up to the colleges and the faculty and the curriculum committees. A hope is that even if the faculty want to keep their own material, hopefully they will consider using the instructional materials, course packs, textbooks, some pieces of the section. That would be a huge win. A first year goal is to get up to 20% adopted by faculty/colleges, taking the first step, greatly reducing the cost to students.

If you look at the grid, we’ve started to cross-match what courses are already available. WAOL already has a bunch, as well as which have been redesigned through Carnegie Mellon’s initiative, MITE, Flat World. We also have what are they already using for open textbooks. You can see that there are bunch of algebra and calculus textbooks—there are multiple columns of these. We’re trying to do some of the pre-work that we can hand to the redesign teams.

Back to the question. One option is to weave skills/competencies through all 80 courses. That’s a huge opportunity. LMDC will be a lead on what that should look like and professional development, both upfront in face-to-face professional development, and also ongoing as they have questions about information literacy.

The second thing that Deb brought up is new money that we got for next biennium to support eLearning and new courseware. I asked Deb if there’s a special library project for $100K or so that would support online learning. The idea is to plow more resources into this project, cement information literacy into the courses.

Deb: we think that if the Gates grant comes through, there’s enough money in the 5.3 million initial allocation to go ahead and do that work without needing the extra $100K. Cable: that’s my gut on it at this point. FYI, Gates would be $750K for this project and the legislature is giving $825K, so roughly $1.6M, give or take, to support this project. That may not be enough depending on how we organize the redesign teams and how many people are on them, etc. I think I can get access to another small pot of money to buffer that up a bit. I think that LMDC can consider that $100K as separate from this project, for a different project that you want to engage in. The only strings attached are that it needs to tie back to eLearning, online learning, hybrid learning; something about using technology to support teaching and learning.

Deb: I’d like to separate the discussions initially. I’d like to go back to the course redesign concept. I say this as a person at the table, not in the role as chair. When you talked about infusing information literacy—one of the results we would want from infusing IL would be for students to have the skills to acquire in all different ways. But the language in the grants keeps talking about open resources and open textbooks, without looking at the library as a place of inquiry, or other sources that might already be available. How do we infuse that language, or is there a specific reason why it doesn’t make it there?

Cable: When we were at North Seattle at LMDC, y’all hooked me on resource-based learning. I have been infusing that not only into new legislation, but also into the grant proposals. For example, in HB1025, I added some new language to the law by suggesting it to legislators: when the goal is to reduce educational materials cost, the existing language said that faculty should work with bookstore managers and with publishers to look for the least costly options. After I walked away from that LMDC meeting, I went and testified that the language should be adjusted to also working with your college librarians on resources already in the library, or something like that. And that passed and it’s now a law. That’s one example of where I heard you, and it is infused. In fact, I’m writing that up now, and will send to you. We did the same thing with the Gates grant. It could have said, and probably would have had I not been educated by LMDC, that the goal is to have an open textbook for all these 80 courses. That’s not what it says, but that we seek to lower the educational costs by any means necessary; that could be through an open textbook, open materials in a coursepack, existing library materials or resources. It’s one of the reasons why we are putting librarians on the redesign teams. At least in those two major spaces, I think I’m responding to what LMDC asked me to do. If I am not, please correct me my actions and I’ll try to learn.

[Cable displayed the text of 1025; “working closely with publishers and local bookstores to create bundles and packages if they deliver cost savings to students” was struck; “adopting free, open textbooks when available, and working with college librarians to put together collections of free online web and library resources” was added.]

Sharon: It just needs to be more intentional. I think there’s a hole where the state doesn’t realize how much money they’ve already put into us. They should be promoting us. We’re the best game in town.

Cable: Along the lines of “we’re the best game in town,” and “they don’t realize we have all these resources,” this needs to be talked about more. I’m with you 100%. There are two big opportunities laid out in front of us right now. I’ve already talked about 1946 as a way to go get significant state-wide resources, to get the access to the library digital resources that our system does not have not. I think the big opportunity to do exactly what Sharon just said, to let everyone know all the great resources that we already have is really through this course redesign process. The faculty on the teams know where some of the resources are that they need to redesign their courses, but to the extent that the librarians can help those teams, “you’re not going to believe how many resources we’ve got—check this out!” That’s going to be hugely beneficial and an opportunity for the library and library resources to shine though these 80 courses. That’s my hope.

Deb: So if we moved on to what we could do with the $100K, the original ideas were to dump even more money to enhance the work of infusing information competency/literacy into those courses; another was to look at the what next phase is to move our online IMLS systems and other instructional resources forward, maybe infusing web 2.0 possibilities…whatever that would be to enhance online learning. The third idea was work to expand Clark’s efforts to develop Camtasia modules for online learners, so we could have a full or more complex, or maybe more developmental suite of those. Another is cataloging and organizing the items in the shared digital object server so that there’s some logic to all of that; however we could be helpful there. I don’t think that we received any other ideas, but we could brainstorm now. Darcy: A concrete idea is to piggyback on working with faculty transferring from Blackboard to Angel, to develop a resource page for Angel, something very focused and defined. I don’t know how we go about doing that; workshops across the state. We’d have to get buy-in from leads for instruction. Maybe this would fit into their plan of work for this next year in some way. It would certainly fit in with our activities in our strategic plan. Deb: it’s interesting that Google is one of the default resources that they’ve chosen to put on the page. Any other ideas?

Sharon: what about the idea of college readiness? There’s been some energy around that and momentum points. How can libraries help students to move forward. I know we’re going to talk about it tomorrow. There’s a group brainstorming about ESL, ABE, and how libraries can get involved. That whole… Deb: remember, it has to be in the context of eLearning; we’d have to take that emphasis. Sharon: IRIS onto the resources page for Angel. Wai-Fong: Library resources are a key part of courses as a matter of course. We’re all customizing IRIS, and we’re supposed to be sharing our customization. Let the faculty members know how we can. Darcy: the plagiarism tutorial is popular/great. Deb: the thing I like about that is that it works with not just the 80 courses that are going to be totally redesigned, but works with what’s on the ground now and gets an immediate infusion.

Deb: I wonder if we could package it as a librarian instructional designer, what we’d be doing is making suggestions for even more IL infusion, having the resource page designed, how to work with IRIS and other modules. Could be release time for someone in our system. Tim: that’s a fabulous idea. Cable: that’s a heck of a good idea. There are never enough people to be experts in the things we need them to be experts in. The net result is usually that locally the investment’s not made. We talk about doing it at system level and it typically doesn’t happen. Great opportunity. The double bang for the buck is that that person could also be heavily involved in course redesign. It could be one of LMDC’s key liaisons to the redesign teams in helping the faculty teams incorporate existing library resources.

Deb: is that the consensus? Anything to add to the concept, or have alternative ideas? (Joan and Michaela send smiley faces from their remote sites.) Wai-Fong: we need to develop policies, such as copyright policies. Deb: we’ll refer this project to one of the small groups that will work on actualizing the strategic plan.

Cable: just to clarify, I’ve got $100K over the biennium. If you want to work in FY10 we could, but if you’re looking at FY10-11, it would be $50K a year. Keep that in mind when you’re thinking about how much of someone’s time you could buy out. The second thing is that I’d need a proposal from LMDC that said, “we’d like $100K over the biennium, and here are the services that will be provided,” etc. Probably the way that we’d move the money is, it would be a person at a college, and we’d set up a ?? grant to that college. I can turn those around very quickly. Once LMDC decides what it wants to do and I get a proposal, we can move on this very fast.

Deb: hopefully we’ll have something in rough form by tomorrow afternoon, and final form in the next couple of weeks.


 * __Actualizing the Strategic Plan, Deb Gilchrist__** As I said as we opened up today, I felt like the most important thing we could do in this meeting is to decide what the actions are for specific aspects of our strategic plan. We need to make sure that we have the timelines and concepts that we need to do this well. This is our contract with the Instruction Commission. Lauri and I grouped the elements of the strategic plan into themes, and we made a checklist for groups to work with. Think about not only what’s on the paper, but in light of what we’ve heard today, in light of what we know is going on culturally, educationally, professionally in terms of libraries, every other element…if there are things that need to get added, let’s do that too. This is a potential for amending the strategic plan.

On the chart, we have the elements down the left-hand side. There’s a column for priority, which refers to the next columns, action and deliverables. What specific things do we need to accomplish to achieve the plan? The next column is resources, if any, needed to get it done (beyond our own time), then who’s going to take leadership, and then timeline. Consider the timeline the biennium; it’s a two-year strategic plan. I was afraid when I put the leadership column that the action and deliverables might be limited because it’s too hard or not accomplishable for the people in the group. Stay in the brainstorming, big idea mode. If later on we can’t identify leadership we can decide then to remove something, or break it down smaller.

Darcy: we should also be thinking about things that are already going on, already being accomplished. We may change priorities of the things we’re working on because of this. Deb: Absolutely.

Deb: the strategic plan is ambitious. There’s nothing fluffy there. [Break out into groups to work.]


 * __Basic Skills 101: “It’s like sorting confetti in a wind tunnel,” Jon Kerr__** Deb: The LSTA grant is possible because of the interest and generosity of the folks at the state library. This spring, the team working on that grant had several days where we were very focused on narrowing down research questions, really figuring out what the library, librarians, and information competency contribute to the success, well-being, thought process and direct achievement and learning for our Basic Skills population. We thought that we needed to become more educated about what all of those things, how they work within our system, how we can support this community better. Luckily for us, Jon Kerr is a strong member of our team. I’ll turn the time over to Jon.

[The video audio caused a conflict with the Elluminate audio, so Jon’s opening remarks are summarized.]

Jon: I work with Basic Skills at Lower Columbia. Our library is now an “empowering info hub” which includes the library, eLearning, and tutoring all together. There is standing-room only there. But there’s a problem: Basic Skills is not a part of it. Having the LSTA grant talk about Basic Skills is exciting; integrating information literacy into Basic Skills is the most innovative thing ever. People don’t know what libraries do. Washington can be a leader, especially with the LSTA grant. I want to give you insight into the world of Basic Skills, to give a framework to understand. Basic Skills 101 starts with a short video, “Perfect Storm,” which talks about the research from ETS [Educational Testing Service, makers of the SAT], “America’s Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing our Nature’s Future.”

Video: "America: The Perfect Storm." Three forces are combining to make the perfect storm. The first issue is globalization. The knowledge economy is replacing industrialization, and US graduates are competing with the whole world. There’s job loss in the Unites States. Jobs are highly technology- or digitally-based. We have to acknowledge that the educational system of the past is failing miserably. Our graduates don’t have the literacy skills to compete and illiteracy is rising. Half of high school graduates don’t have the math skills needed to work. As a result, the economy is staggering.

The second issue is shifting demographics. We have a high number of immigrants, and immigration will represent more than half of our population growth. That compounds the lowering of skills levels. Our population increasingly lacks the skills necessary to compete in a global economy.

A poor economy plus lack of skills plus increasing illiteracy equals a perfect storm.

The middle class is shrinking as wages for low-skills jobs decline and wages for high-skills jobs climb. It creates an extensive under-class, and more problems. It’s been incremental over years. ETS is looking at the problem; there must be a shift in education or “the American dream will fall by the wayside.” We must invest in education.

[[]]

Jon: That is the world that Basic Skills is driven by. Our funding, and a lot of funding is coming our way, is driven by these issues. The “Perfect Storm” research found that baby boomers are leaving the workforce in great number, and will continue to do so until they’re gone. That’s our skilled workforce. The new positions are requiring higher skills than the positions being vacated. The US knows that we don’t have the workforce to fill the jobs. We have the population, but not the skills. 10 years ago, WA looked at our numbers and realized that was true for us as well. The research became known as “Washington State’s Perfect Storm,” and it’s been a real driver for change.

As you know, CTCs have a threefold mission: prepare students for academic transfer, provide workforce preparation, and provide adult basic skills and literacy education. Literacy education—libraries are participating, but we never hear about them. Basic Skills is now being talked about as the educational foundation that puts students on the clearly articulated pathway to both academic and transfer. Basic Skills students must be information literate if they’re going to succeed at the next level. I’ve been director of I-BEST at two different colleges now. Our I-Best students do amazingly well—better than the average student when they have that support. But when they finish I-Best, they are still information illiterate. Our I-BEST programs have not been filled with that.

Who are our Basic Skills students? By law, we must target students in the most need. For us, that’s students 16 years-old and older who test below 9th grade level in reading, writing, and math; also students without a high school diploma; and second-language students.

Over the past 10 years, and especially over the last 5 years, Basic Skills has seen many changes and mandates at the federal and state levels. It has catapulted our programs from the dark corners of the campuses onto the main stage. That’s a big change for Basic Skills faculty as you begin to work with them. Some of the drivers of change have been moved by the CASAS (Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System) test, the tipping point research (David Prince), the student achievement initiative, and the I-BEST revolution. The I-BEST revolution has taken our students and shown that they have the skills, with support, to be successful at college-level right now. Also the Washington State Adult Learning Standards. These drivers for change have changed the organization of Basic Skills in WA state.

CASAS is the standardized test that’s federally mandated for our accountability. When a student takes the CASAS and makes a certain gain, we get money from the federal government. It’s a very important driving force.

[Chart, “Washington State, NRS and CASAS Competency Levels: Effective July 1, 2006,” []] In WA state, we have 6 levels of ABE, ABE 1-4 and GED 1 and 2 (federally they’re called ABE 1-6). They span from zero to twelfth grade. Level 1 ABE is 0-2nd grade, etc. There are also 6 levels of ESL.

The levels are determined by CASAS score—reading and math for ABE, and reading and listening for ESL. They are placed at the lowest level. For example, if they are in ABE and test at level 5 in reading and 2 in math, they’re placed at the federal level 2 even though they may take a level 5 reading class. After 12 hours of instruction, they take a pretest to get a baseline score. At the end of every quarter, 45 hours or more of instruction, they take a posttest. The posttest is what generates the federal and state money. Looking at the chart, the NRS (National Reporting System) level names are what we use in WA state, the same names you’ll see in the Washington State Learning Standards.

[Handout, NRS Level Descriptors: Educational Gain, []] This isn’t something that people usually see, and Basic Skills instructors often forget this. As librarians go in and work with Basic Skills students, they need to be aware of the NRS levels. This handout describes ABE levels one through 6. They describe a level 1 student at entry into the program, before instruction. The librarians I’ve worked with have found this to be as useful as the standards when they’re going into a class. It helps them to really understand what level they’re working with.

Back to the NRS/CASAS chart. The third column tells you the CASAS descriptors. Remember the first slide that said that Basic Skills 101 is sort of like sorting confetti in a wind tunnel? Welcome to the world of the Basic Skills. The CASAS titles are not used at all in WA or at the national level, but CASAS uses them. Your college may have its own name, too. However, whatever it’s called, all of the actual levels are determined by the CASAS levels. See the scores down the right-hand side.

[Handout, CASAS Skill Level Descriptors for ABE/CASAS Skill Level Descriptors for ESL, []] I apologize a little for giving you so many pieces of paper, but you’ll find that every teacher you come into contact with will use a different piece of paper. Some will talk about the NRS level, what the student looks like when they enter the class. Washington state standards (we’ll get there) talk about what the student looks like at the end, upon exit. They are very different documents. This handout, with ESL on one side and ABE on the other, describes what the student’s skills are based on their CASAS scores. When a student takes the posttest and moves from a 200 to a 215, what skill differences are there—just related to the CASAS test.

Students in Basic Skills are progressed in, I’d like to say, one way. Based on the policy at your college, every Basic Skills director or manager are required (they don’t all have it) to have the progression policy in their office, and it’s to be advertised. Some schools progress students based only on CASAS scores. Some schools move students based on classroom assignments aligned to the standards. Some schools move students on performance tasks/projects aligned to the standards. The major of the colleges does a combination of those 3 things. But that’s another thing: as we work with Basic Skills, we have to realize what it is that they judge as progression (at that college). Now, for the federal government, progression is when a student moves from ABE level 1 to ABE level 2, in any subject, reading or math, ESL reading or listening: cha-ching. The state gets federal money. It is a completion even if it’s a one point gain. We get credit for only one federal gain per student per year; many students make multiple federal gains. Then we have state gains. Local programs get the money from the state for a state gain. For a state gain, for scores 210 and below, for every 5-point gain on the CASAS test they get a state gain. For 211 and above, for any 3-point gain, they get a state gain. Each student can only get one state gain in one subject per year, no matter how many gains they have.

Now we have student achievement, the big change in Basic Skills. We have students who in the past have only been able to count as 1 state gain when they really have 9 gains in a year. Momentum points. Basis skills students have the ability to gain more momentum points than any other student on our campuses. As I said, we came from the dark corners to center stage—this is the financial reason why. A Basic Skills student has unlimited momentum points. For every 3- or 5-point gain on the CASAS, we get a college momentum point. Take a Basic Skills student in I-BEST, they get usually somewhere between 7 and 12 momentum points in a 45 credit unit: they get their 15-credit momentum point, they get their 30-credit momentum point, they get their certificate momentum point. An I-BEST student is gold in terms of bringing momentum funding to the college. Question: how often can they take the test? Jon: They can take the exam every 45 hours of instruction, but most do it at the end of every quarter. CASAS says 80 hours to make a significant gain. Washington state allows us to do it at 45 hours.

[Handout, WA State NRS and CASAS Competency Levels, []] So that’s why this one document is very interesting—it captures almost everything. The six levels for ABE and ESL, the different ways they’re referred to…you have to be very careful of the jargon.

I think the most significant result of David Prince’s tipping point study was to clearly identify what success looks like. This was very new, for Basic Skills especially. The tipping point research describes it as “one year of college credit and a credential.” So 45 credits and any kind of credential. It identified that tipping point as the greatest increase to economic attainment: that one year credit and a credential.

Information literacy is essential to getting our students there. We are foolish as library people if we don’t jump on that bandwagon and make it heard loud and clear. I have many I-BEST students who are lost the minute they move out of the I-BEST program. They haven’t had the resources that the library can provide and does provide to almost all the other students. I see the LSTA grant as a way to make this happen for us.

What the tipping point research did was track 35,000 working age adult students who came to the CTCs with high school education or less, or non-English speaking. It followed them for six years after they began college. What they found was that the highest wage bump was not for students with a BA, not with a masters, but for those who reached the tipping point. 45 credits and a credential. And it’s significant. For an ESL student, it’s $7000 annually for the rest of their life. $8500 more per year for an ABE student for the rest of their life if we can move them from ABE to that tipping point. $2700 and $1700 respectively for workforce students entering with a GED or HSD only.

The tipping point research found that the greatest need to fill the job vacancies is 45 college credits and a credential. We are the answer—CTCs are the answer—to the perfect storm. The next thing we did in Washington is to say, how are we doing in getting to this? I’m sorry to say that we found that up and down the educational pipeline, the 2-year system is hemorrhaging working age adults with high school education or less and our ESL students, at an alarming rate. Almost 1/3 of every new entering class is made up of prime working age (25-49) adults with high school diplomas or less and our non-English speaking. Eight of ten ABE/ESL made modest gain, at best earning a GED, but don’t go any further. Seven of ten workforce and transfer students who enter with a GED leave with less (many, a lot less) than 1 year of college and a credential. Two out of three who enter with a high school diploma also leave with less (some a lot less, like less than a quarter) than the tipping point.

This was an honest look at how poorly we were doing at getting people to the tipping point, and it floored Basic Skills. I know in my heart and from being around as long as I have, if we can seriously make an effort to move information competency into Basic Skills, we can make a huge difference.

Basic Skills is focused on putting strategies into place to be more effective in getting students to the tipping point. The most significant is the Washington State Adult Learning Standards. That, along with I-BEST, are the two initiatives that have done the most. You know the acclaim that I-BEST has gotten. I think that information literacy, integrated with Basic Skills, is the next best tool that we can provide.

The Washington State Adult Learning Standards attempt to answer the real life outcomes question of what our students do out there that we are responsible for here to carry out their lives as workers, parents, family members, and citizens. The Learning Standards, for the first time in Basic Skills, sets high expectations for learners while providing support for the teachers to help learners meet those expectations. Right now, a Basic Skills instructor’s life is trying to figure out, how do I align my work, my class work, to the Washington State Learning Standards? How do I incorporate strategies that get students to be successful? After my one year in working with librarians, I know the answer. It’s bringing a librarian into the classroom. They know those strategies. They don’t know our curriculum. Together we need to find a way to bring those two things together.

Think about information literacy. Our Learning Standards are: read with understanding, convey ideas in writing, use math to solve problems and communicate, speak so others can understand, and listen actively. I think of the big 6, and I think of these, and I think that they need to come together.

[Handout, The Washington State Adult Learning Standards, 2006, []] I’m going to have you turn to page 9. What does a learning standard do? For example, read with understanding (on page 9). It describes what learners should know and be able to do. It reflects a shared vision of what should be taught and learned in a content area. Most important, it’s a shared vision. We in the library need to know what that vision is. It guides alignment of curricula, instruction, assessment, accountability, and professional development. If you look on page 9, you’ll see the standard and then the components of the standard. The standard is the same at every level; it never changes. Teachers are working on, first, every lesson should align to every component of the standards. That’s the first thing you have to get your head around: the standard is the same at every level. The ABE reading standard and the ESL reading standard are the same. The ABE writing standard and the ESL writing standard are the same. At the bottom of the page are the indicators. Indicators describe specific things that learners know and be able to do at that level. It’s exit criteria. NRS describes what a student looks like at the beginning of level one. The standard describes what the student looks like, should know, and (really heavy on) be able to do at the end of that level. A student moving on to level 2 should be able to do all the level 1 indicators. It tells you what “read with understanding” looks like each level. That moves up to 12th grade level. The indicators are what we really want to align the information literacy work with.

The bottom piece is a performance descriptor. This is something that can be helpful to librarians as they think about the indicators. Sometimes people freak out as they see the indicators, “that’s really hard for a level 1 ESL student to do!” They have to remember that it’s an exit descriptor, and second, look at the performance descriptor. It talks about how well they should do that. It talks about fluency. It talks about independence, how they perform in a range of settings.

If you look at writing level 1 ESL, it will say (I’m kind of making it up, but not totally), “write a few simple familiar words with support from an instructor in a comfortable, familiar setting.” So yes, they can do the indicators, but they tell you exactly what the performance is. As you begin to design the lesson, you want to think about that they may not be able to do that by themselves at the end of it—that may not be the goal for a level 1 student.

Indicators also provide concrete, observable reference points for each stage of learning, and guide alignment of content standards with our measurable performance standards (CASAS test).

Basic Skills is in need of the genius of the librarians to help integrate information literacy into all that. I do have a little bit of an agenda as I speak to you today. That’s why I was nervous—what do I tell the smartest people on campus about Basic Skills. I thought, I’ll give it a try because I can get my agenda in.

Finding a way to incorporate a developmental approach to teaching information literacy will provide the students with the basic skills that are relevant to the new society. If you think back to the video, he said that the basic skills that are currently being taught are no longer those that are relevant to the new society. My heart is in Basic Skills and it’s true. We need to integrate information competency developmentally through Basic Skills and we will become the catalyst to transition students through Dev Ed and into college. You’re going to see Basic Skills and Dev Ed do this: [unknown gesture]. The library has to be an essential piece. It won’t happen if we are not the catalyst.

The Big Six meet the Washington State Adult Learning Standards. When we talked to Basic Skills instructors about information literacy—level 1 instructors—it freaked them out a little. When you take the bookmark from Seattle Central and turn it over and ask, “are you doing this?” “Yeah.” “Are you doing that?” “Yeah.” What if the students were doing this? What if they were doing it in the library? We also have to realize—I have one librarian who really doesn’t like to help the Basic Skills students. She doesn’t want to teach them the catalog because “they never get it.” Now, that was an exception. Most say “Bring them in! Bring it on! But help us. Tell us what we need to do.”

Any questions? Michelle: I invited I-BEST students in to work with the librarians. It was a good first step. We just showed them various things. Also, our ESL students are doing story time for the library. Darcy: I see your vision. One barrier is the protective attitude of the instructors. That area has operated on its own, and they have been poorly paid, without degrees. They don’t have teaching certificates. They do it for love of what they do and of their students. But they are protective of their students and their own area. They’ve been doing it for years, and are protective of their workbooks and curriculum. We’re making inroads because of these changes. Charlie: Big institutional change; our Basic Skills faculty are tenured, paid faculty now and it’s changing. Jon: I’m right in between where you are because I’ve only been where I am for a year, and it was exactly that. Right now, today, I’m having the refrigerators and microwave out of the ESL classrooms. It wasn’t like a real classroom; it was like a lunchroom. I’ve observed great lessons by great teachers, but just what you say. Basic Skills instructors are also afraid of moving students on, that they won’t replace them. I’m going to tell a little bit of a story on Pierce. I was at Pierce for 15 years, and when I started there, we were out in the community and they said to us, “we don’t send ESL students to Pierce because it’s a black hole. They go in and never come out.” We looked at the data and found students who had been at level 1 for 10 years. What we had was a big tea party. As ESL Coordinator, I said that this was going to change. Legally we can’t have them for longer than 3 quarters. What we found was that all of our young students moved on. Older students who were there for life-long learning stayed, but young students said that they weren’t learning. “Don’t give me a recipe one more day; I’ve learned about recipes. I don’t cook.” It wasn’t transitioning them into college, getting them anywhere. We changed that and quadrupled enrollment immediately. I’ve just been at LC for the last year; LC hadn’t met our targets for years; in the last year, we exceeded our Basic Skills targets at 148% and I-BEST at 190% this year. It’s a very hard change and an institutional change. I have some teachers who don’t like me very much. And there are others that love me dearly!

I always come back to—when I started moving from teaching, my passion, to administration, I thought—you have to do what’s best for the student.

Libraries have been wonderful, but I’m talking about doing something different. We need to make it a developmental, integral part of their learning. Deb: knowing the reality of some of the things that have come up at the table, and knowing that we share this dream what are you suggesting as our strategy? Jon: One of the things…you know the bookmarks from Seattle Central? One of the things I want to see is an initiative at LCC because information literacy isn’t really talked about. Yeah, there’s critical thinking, but not really the roles that libraries play in that, and not in teaching across…I want to see those big six taken out by the library staff and used across the curriculum. Being placed on our website, and being integral to basic skill.

Deb: in the grant, we need to look at an initiative, that it’s not only the research element, but really the infusion element and partnership that needs to be developed. We have the resources, the money there, but at some point… Jon: It needs to not be a project. It needs to not be, the faculty member and I are going to get together and do this really cool thing where one day we’re going to do this part of this lesson. The teachers need to be trained on what information literacy is. I’d love to see a little team teaching happening with the librarian in the classroom, with the teachers. Basic Skills instructors tend to be some of the best trained teachers in many places. Many of them come with a K-12 background. I hope the LSTA grant can support how it can be infused—a developmental look at it.


 * Thursday, August 6, 2009**
 * LSTA Grant Update, Wai-Fong Lee.** In order to prepare for the Basic Skills area of the grant, we had the research team set up a 2-day meeting in May. There were interesting discussions. They needed to decide whether they wanted to do research, which is tricky. What difference can information literacy make in Basic Skills education? Jon Kerr is passionate about it—the passion is there. We want to look at what’s going to be meaningful, linking to the momentum points.

[ a couple of minutes of notes missing while we struggled with the audio. Does anyone have notes to cover this gap?]

At the workshop, we also had a section with faculty who teach Basic Skills. We looked at what their challenges are. We found lots of common ground, lots of room for collaboration. We can proceed from our angle. It’s important to know what demographic changes will affect what community colleges do. The question is, what’s next?

Deb: There was a lot of good work done but group research is hard. We need to firmly identify the research question. We need a consultant to mold it all.

Mary: We’re pushing for community college libraries to be included in the CCSSE (Community College Survey of Student Engagement). The answer that came back is that libraries will not be included until there is research. We keep explaining ourselves to people; we have stories but no data. If we can show a bona fide research study that shows the role libraries play in student success in momentum points, it will allow us to be at the table.

Jeanne: Was there a momentum point discussion? What was it? Wai-Fong: Basically how much will information literacy help them to move forward? We need to know before we can truly say that we contribute to momentum points. Deb: The question is, what lends towards this. None of the education research is really controlled. We are confident that we can do this; don’t mistake our muddling for lack of […]; it just that it’s taking us a little longer to get there. [audio problems…] Wai-Fong: we’re working towards a solution. [audio problems…] All we’ve had to do at the end of the grant is sharing with the others. [audio problems…] Jon has been very disappointed. He is ready to move forward, but he’s had to wait, but he’s ready to go. Deb: We don’t need the research to start doing that. We could take the practical end of it and start implementing, and then we have the research as we go along. Wai-Fong: I agree. We haven’t really got to content yet; we’ve had many lengthy conversations but haven’t really come back together.

Darcy: Historically, don’t we have a control group, people not exposed to information literacy?

Wai-Fong: The other way I can see is within the college. You’re not going to be able to get all of the classes. We have some Basic Skills fulltime faculty...we can’t work with that many together; maybe the way to track is within your own college. Some are doing it, but some aren’t.

Mary Ann: We might have a control group at Spokane because our IEL people do IESL and ABE totally separate from the community college.

Charlie: The momentum points are geared towards Basic Skills and developmental education. We’re still struggling with transfer. Wai-Fong: our focus is Basic Skills. Charlie: with the grant, right.

Eric: We can see how hard it is to come up with something; we don’t have perfect groups here or there. The consultant is the best idea; they can say, yes, this is a good research study.

Mary: We are participating in the grant, but we have that problem of our developmental folks mostly being in the IEL. They’re kind of connected with SFCC but SCC has no GED, no ABE; we’re the only community college in the state of Washington that looks like we have no students at that level because they are all at a separate institute. We do have level 99 kind of classes and so that’s the level that Janine is working with. It’s different than what some of the other folks are doing. The other thing, which is developmental but in a different sense, is that Janine has started working on classes in our first year experience groups. She’s going to track those cohorts by student number all the way through to see who persists the most. She’s doing satisfaction rate surveys in between. We’re developing our own mini thing using first year experience as our beginning point. Whether they go through that, what they learn, what they do and if they get to the momentum point. There are other ways to do it, and it’s developmental of a sort, but not quite the way that was talked about yesterday. It might have some wider applicability other than our school.

Lauri: I’m not sure of the transfer connection, but I got an email last night from our VPI, it’s from Michelle Andreas from the State Board. She says, “On June 16, we assembled some of our system’s most greatest thinkers to capture ideas related to founding principles of I-BEST and other student success strategies to help students move farther and further in their education. I think that we’re likely to achieve the Gates Foundation grant this Fall which will give opportunities for innovative student success pilot programs in Dev Ed.” Then they attached a document with a summary of that thinking from that systems group. They’re asking for ways to increase Dev Ed student success and prepare for the Gates grant RFP. This might be something that we’d like to do. Deb: That’s great, I’ll put that on the list to talk to her. I have an I-BEST faculty in our screening committee for a new faculty member. It was interesting to hear her talk to the candidates about the role of the library in I-BEST. I was listening to all that thinking, wow, she is so sold on this. She said it was the difference between I-BEST being successful and being fabulous. I’ll talk to Michelle. Mary[?]: We could be the control group because our I-BEST is set up differently.

Deb: Just know that there have been fabulous discussions and fabulous work; if you haven’t had a chance to attend any of these sessions, they’ve been so interesting. Two days of really solid engagement and good thought. For the June session, I only went the second day, but mapping the standards, and Debbie Crumb’s contributions have really been [audio problems…]. So thank you for your support in sending folks. I hope you’re getting good reports back about their experiences. Wai-Fong: Look at the wiki, the report about the mini grants have been posted, except maybe one or two. You need to post those to get reimbursement. Deb: I’ll just close with a public thank you to Lynn Kanne because she’s been doing fabulous work.


 * Electronic Resources through Orbis Cascade, Andrew Hersh-Tudor.** We’ve just barely started, but we have 24 subscriptions with Orbis and spent $70K+. I’ve contacted Greg; one of the things he’s said is that they aren’t making money off of the program; they’re trying hard to minimize the amount of time administering it. For example, with the CINAHL subscription, we have 17 but Orbis only deals with one and we split it. I talked to my chief financial officer to see how he thought it was going, and he thought it was working fine at the Wenatchee end. Money’s going in, money’s going out, and he didn’t have any concerns with it. There are 26 of us participating. I still need some info from Lake Washington, Lower Columbia, Pierce, Shoreline, and Walla Walla. It’s not anything that’s preventing us from moving forward.


 * eLearning Council, Michelle Bagley**. I don’t have anything to report; we meet later this month. Deb: keep us posted.


 * Library Council, Tim Fuhrman.** [audio problems; details missing] Be sure to read Rand’s report, []. The state library’s been heavily involved in the Hard Times project, for which they are starting to receive national recognition. They are involved in the broadband initiative. It doesn’t really affect us much as community colleges.

Discussion about our IT departments and the broadband initiative.

Tim: The group met at Big Bend, and the Library Council actually met with our board of trustees. We all know how much support the state library gives us, but most of them haven’t got a clue how big of an impact they have on our ability to do our jobs. It was great that the state librarian, Jan, got to meet with our board of trustees. They asked great questions. It was a nice connection.

Deb: Were there any questions that came out of that that were very insightful, that we should make sure that we educate about on our own campuses? Tim: Nothing in particular. They didn’t know what the state library did; it operates so much in the background. I did a presentation on this is what Big Bend library wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the state library. It was great to make that connection.

Deb: Please bring our thanks back to them not only for their generous support, but the LSTA grant.


 * CLAMS.** Deb: We don’t have a CLAMS rep at the meeting.

Deb: I do have one small thing to add, and that’s about the tax, the bill. I wondered if because we don’t pay tax to the vendor, the vendor is not the one to relieve us of that. But it seems like we have to have the certificate from the vendor to say that this product meets the standard for this. I wondered if it would work if one of us did that to take care of it. We really only have to justify it internally to an auditor.

Discussion. Conclusion: It’s for the database vendor’s state audit, not ours. We supply the certificate, not the vendor. We’ll wait for more instructions/rulings.

Eric: Change of subject. In Rand’s written report from the State Library, he says that he’s joined the Connecting to Collections Conference, which is an effort funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to get libraries, museums, archives, and any other culture institutions to get together to talk about conservation and preservation issues. We get benefits from belonging insofar as our people attend the workshops, get grant funds, more training, remediating. It wouldn’t cost us anything; if you agree, I’d like to ask that the chair give him permission to write a letter of endorsement for the grant proposal when it comes out. Darcy: second. Unanimous support.For more information see: []

Darcy: I have a question about CLAMS. They had talked about working on alignment with our strategic plan. I wondered if they had done any work on that; if it had happened at their last meeting? Linda: Sally Sheedy is their treasurer; I’ll ask her if she has any information on that.

Discussion about CLAMS. Discussion of its role as a professional organization and its role in professional development. CLAMS was compared to WLA or ALA or ACRL. Suggestion from Mary to write officially what LMDC is as an organization, how we view CLAMS as an organization (its value to us and librarians, LMDC’s support of). Deb: The executive committee could write something worded in a positive, supportive way and bring it back.

Comment: In general, the librarians in CLAMS don’t have authority to commit institutions to system-wide initiatives; often the authority lies with directors who are attending LMDC. CLAMS’ constitution has a clause to work cooperatively with LMDC in matters of system-wide concern.


 * Thank you, Linda, for last night.**


 * Group work on Goals.**


 * Western Washington University, Chris Cox (Dean of Libraries),** **Sylvia Tag (Librarian).** Deb: We have had many conversations working with baccalaureate institutions. We’ve started working on a couple different projects, the rising juniors and other great conversations. Because we’re in Bellingham, we thought it would be a great time to continue that in an informal way. We’d like to ask Sylvia and Chris to start by updating us, anything from Jeff or anything you’d like to set on the table for discussion.

Sylvia: [note: technical audio difficulties for remote attendees. ] At Western, there are many committees operating simultaneously, and there is not necessarily great communication between committees. Committees have redundancies and it’s not always clear who they report to. The chair of the Academic Coordinating Committee (ACC) and the new Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education, plus a lot of other people, took various groups and made a new committee, the Committee for Undergraduate Education. It resulted in a decrease in the number of committees by merging other committees. It has representatives from all departments, the library, the Academic Coordinating Commission, a student representative, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the research office, and the director of the university writing program. It pulls all those people together to intentionally do something with rising junior and pre-major students.

Western has voted in the ACC to adopt/join/work with the nationwide LEAP (Liberal Education and America’s Promise []) initiative. LEAP focuses on educational outcomes, and information literacy is included in the LEAP essential outcomes. There is also Cindy Shepherd’s initiative, Compass to Campus. She had earlier implemented a program in Phoenix where 5th graders were linked with university students and mentored from 5th grade through graduation from high school. It targeted populations underrepresented in higher education.

The goal is not to get them to go to Western, but to get them into something beyond high school. It was widely implemented in Wisconsin. There have already been connections made in the community college system.

[audio problems, some information missed]

Those are our some major initiatives: the Committee on Undergraduate Education, the LEAP initiatives that have been adopted, and then Compass to Campus. We invite and beg for collaboration.

Deb: How much is IL defined in LEAP? And is it going to be adopted or just under discussion? Sylvia: Good question. Under intellectually practical skills, it says information literacy. However, it’s not broken down into outcomes. Officially there was a consensus vote to provide links to LEAP; to acknowledge the importance of a liberal education as part of our goals here at Western. I think it was an important introductory step. We have own institutional outcomes, goals, and objectives, so we don’t need to take theirs. It’s the expansion, the idea of thinking about liberal arts education as part of our goals.

Linda: Is information literacy listed at some other level as an outcome on campus? Sylvia: it is, but it’s not called information literacy. We did a survey trying to find out on campus where information literacy was being taught. That came out of the early state-wide initiatives about 10 years. There were 4 groups: critical reasoning, information technology literacy, and 2 others. The campuses had these groups that came out of that state-wide initiative. What the information technology literacy group did was survey all the departments on campus to identify where information literacy was being taught, and got wonderful feedback actually at the department level. What we hadn’t gotten to was the pre-major level, sophomores; that’s where the Committee on Undergraduate Education was concerned. In fact, originally the library was not included in the committee, and the argument to include the library was information literacy skills. Our colleagues at the table agreed that the library had to be included. We’re closer than we’ve ever been.

Wai-Fong: Among the six 4-year institutions, what kind of collaboration have you been working on the past 2 years related to information literacy? Are there any changes in that direction? Chris: I can answer that one, and the short answer is no. There’s the ICCL group, the Inter-institutional Committee of Chief Librarians, basically the deans and directors from the 6 state public institutions. In 2006, we worked with the community colleges a little bit to come up with the rising juniors requirements and also a half-time position. The half-time position description was for a person from the ICCL institutions to begin a conversation to the community colleges about information literacy. That position was advertised in the Fall and then nixed because of the budget situation. Sylvia will answer this as we go along…I don’t know if there’s an opportunity for the librarians at the different institutions who deal with information literacy to get together and talk. I don’t know of a particular venue for that right now. I know that some institutions are farther ahead than we are, definitely WSU is. One of the things that position would have been responsible for would have been to plan a summit between 4- and 2-years to talk about cooperative projects to achieve goals related to information literacy. One of the questions is that might something still happen without a spear-carrier to coordinate that.

There are synergies between what we’re teaching. Just like Sylvia, I’ve met with Linda to talk about collaboration, and Jane and a bunch of others just in this city; with the budget constraints, our staffs have shrunk. We don’t have the people to do these things, and any way that we can work together might get us to our goals of making sure that our students are information literate when they graduate from any of our institutions.

Deb: We have an LSTA grant, the first of 4 years. One of the projects outcomes that we outlined in the grant is to continue the conversation around the rising junior document. It’s written more broadly than the rising junior document, but to continue the collaboration. If indeed the library funds us for year 2, we would have a little bit of money to put towards that. It’s on our plate too, so I’m glad to know that it’s still of interest. Chris: Definitely. The deans and directors all agree.

Darcy: One of the strategies that group number 1 talked about as part of a 21st Century Library Project is to collaborate in talking about digital resources. We could use some of our LMDC funds to make that happen.

Eric: I understand that some meetings between 4- and 2-year librarians have been happening for a couple of years. Tom: It’s information sharing, and everyone’s invited, but it’s mostly UW librarians who attend.

Sylvia: When I look at my notes for the rising-junior conversations, when we met down in Olympia, really Jeff Purdue was the point-person for that. His position has shifted to be more collection development. That’s why I’m here today rather than him. But we were looking at coming out with a list of shared information literacy outcomes that we made for the rising-junior population. It seems fairly realistic that we could come up with and share those. Then we could do the hard work for regional and local levels, to see how we can get there. What does that look like locally, what does it look like at the places that we interact with most closely. There’s political weight of shared goals.

Wai-Fong: I like that idea. Everyone can’t move at the same rate. I’ve been involved with the discussions with the 4-years for a while, even though we haven’t met for 2 years. I think it’s a viable approach.

Deb: At our school, we have outcomes for information literacy and information competency. It’s one of our 5 core outcomes. What’s changing because of accreditation is that we’re being forced to assess if students are achieving the gen ed outcomes. We had so many outcomes, 7 for information literacy multiplied times 5 major areas. The faculty have gone back and reassessed and documented what we can assess in each course. Now we’re making a spreadsheet of what has fallen out and will go back to see if any of those are important enough to pick back up. Realistically, we never had time to do all of that in the first place. But now it’s more like departmental choice than faculty wisdom.

So information competency is being skinnied down. But we were waiting for the rising junior document so that we could approach it in a logical way. What we initially thought was a legislative process has melted away, and it sounds like the requirement for rising junior information literacy isn’t really going to be there. It’s going to be more of a collaboration that we want to make instead.

Wai-Fong: We reexamined things, and even with the leadership from the library, the result was that information literacy wasn’t one of the top five. Instead it’s infused and integrated in other outcomes. It’s a more enriched document, and information literacy is there. The concepts and process are there, but not listed as a separate outcome. We didn’t fight it—the concepts are there.

Sylvia: It can be challenging to navigate how things are labeled, the terminology used. It’s a valuable exercise to see what pieces are where, and to examine and prioritize within the library. I appreciate your experience.

Wai-Fong: the most effective marketing is when the library patrons start talking your language, and promoting what you want to promote. That’s what happened to us.

Deb: It looks like we’re on track for organizing something next year, whether it’s LMDC, grant, or local funds, whatever we pull together. Is there anyone who was working on that project who would like to work to liaison with you, Sylvia?

Discussion. Opportunities for collaborations (Jane: like the county-wide weeding project). Deb: what kind of mix of folks? Directors, library faculty? It depends on which project we’re working on. Multiple things, also finish the rising junior document. Multiple-year projects and collaborations.

Sylvia: I wanted to ask for your perceptions, your students’ perceptions of Western. In the context of information literacy, are there students who come back to use the library, or looking forward to enrolling, or…

Linda: I think it depends on the temperament of the student. We’ve had handfuls who have come back and said that the Western library is more impersonal; they have anxiety about the larger institution. In general, we do too much hand-holding at our library and do too much for them instead of teaching. Students’ personalities plus the larger institution. We have other students who come back who are really happy there. “There are so many resources!” And they are not daunted by it. We only hear from those who need more assistance. That may not help.

General: Our students feel lucky to get into Western; we don’t necessarily have feedback about the libraries. Sylvia: Any feedback that you get would be valuable for us.

Linda: Maybe there’s a way to formalize feedback from our students so that we can strategize. It would help us know what we need to do better (at CC and at 4-year) to prepare them for the next step of their education. Right now we’re talking about transfer students, which is 70% of what Whatcom has.

Sylvia: I’m on our admissions committee. There was some concern with students deciding not to graduate because of financial concerns. That’s making our enrollment numbers trickier, with students deciding not to continue on. There are different issues with traditional freshmen fresh from high school and transfer students.

Discussion of various educational paths of students, various articles read about graduating classes and educational paths.

Deb: We have a great relationship with the educational researcher at UWT, our major transfer college. That really helps us. Our students who transfer for their junior year have a slightly higher GPA in than the native students. It’s very interesting to look at those numbers. Darcy: I’ve heard that’s true on a national level. If they can measure that, they can measure information literacy. Deb: It wasn’t significantly higher, but it was there. Sylvia: Last year we voted to extend the grace period to two quarters for transfer students. There’s a two quarter GPA drop for first-year students, but it’s only one quarter for transfer students.

Mary Ann: I have a concern reading research that indicates that being a community college student is detrimental to earning a 4-year degree. It’s wonderful that they have a higher GPA, but that’s incidental to actually earning the baccalaureate degree. If there’s something that we collaborate with to help them get to that goal; if they’re not getting to that the degree and that’s their goal, then what happened? I don’t think anyone really knows. We don’t talk about that. We talk about how successful our students are. Sylvia: where is that data? Mary Ann: some of the national data on completion, accountability work that’s being done.

Group 1: [] Group 2: [] Group 3: Group 4: [] Deb: We have dates and places for our meetings this year. I wanted to tell you what a few of us talked about in the car last night and see how this would fly with you. There was great interest from the Spring meeting about meeting in person this year because there are new buildings we wanted to see. There are 3 buildings: Yakima, South Puget Sound, Pierce will be ready next summer. Because of that, there was a lot of interest in going places. But our experiment yesterday and today with having both Elluminate and people around the table—we did a quick evaluation of what worked and what didn’t work. What we’d like to propose is that we still do face-to-face for Fall and Spring, our fully-Elluminate meeting for winter, but that we try our meeting in the Fall with everyone at the table having a laptop. That way you can be logged in with Elluminate and see everything that people from the outside are typing. It will be more of a true conversation because we won’t be having 2 separate conversations with a small link in between. The Fall meeting is October 22-23 in Yakima. Discussion about bandwidth issues out of Yakima if everyone is logged in. Joan: I think our bandwidth is fine, but I’ll check into it and let you know. Deb: May 6-7 is South Puget Sound, and we will see what we do with that meeting based on our experience in Yakima. How does that sound? Joan: One of the things we can do in Yakima is to put everyone in a classroom instead of using laptops and wireless. It’s not best for a meeting, but it would work. Deb: Thanks, Joan. We’ll work out the details, but it sounds like we have a plan on how to be more inclusive with both Elluminate and those who are able to travel. I encourage you to come if you can. Discussion: When high-powered groups (like the presidents) show up on our campuses, they ask for wireless to be opened so they can get on, and it happens. We’ll just say that Deb Gilchrist says that we have to have wireless. Deb: Someone asked for an IRIS update. Anything more you can tell us, Michelle? Michelle: People are getting the files and integrating it. We’ll repost the contact person to get the files. Deb: Please tell your folks what great feedback everyone is giving them. Deb: I’d like to suggest that our Fall meeting be a true focus on accreditation, in the same way that we had the piece from Jon and the strategic plan this time. I spoke with Andrew briefly this morning. We may have a whole presentation from him about what his experience has been, maybe some comments from the evaluator perspective from those of us who are evaluators. Maybe some other information on best practices happening on our own campuses. We’ll make it a substantive item. Discussion: General agreement. Deb: Any other good-of-the-order items? Darcy: It’s really helpful to get the minutes in a timely manner. They’re so good, I need them in the interim period, so that I know what I need to take care of locally. Jennifer: Knowing that you care and read the minutes will motivate me to get them out faster. Deb: Lori to the rescue: she tells me that Feb 4 is the day that we designated for the Winter meeting. Deb: I’d like to thank Jennifer and Sue for facilitating all this technology. This is fabulous. Deb: I’d like to read something to you that came from a consultant that we have used at our college. It has both inspiration as well as impact as we move back to our roles. This is the President’s Prayer and Chinese Curse from Pamela Cox-Otto, who’s a consultant to community colleges. [] I’ll forward that if you wish. We have a hard year ahead of us, but there’s our inspiration for stepping forward and doing some of this work. Thanks for coming, and thanks, Linda, for everything.
 * Strategic Plan Report Out**