OE Week: 5 Z-Degree Campuses in 50 minutes

Open Education Week

5 Z-Degree Campuses in 50 minutes

Ten Minnesota State colleges currently offer Z-degrees, with 15 more colleges and universities on the way. Hear stories from five Z-degree campuses.

Hosts

Century College

Transforming Higher Education with Open Educational Resources

In this session, Caroline Toscano and Michelle Schoenecker will discuss faculty, student, staff, and leadership perceptions of the OER and Z-Degree initiative. In addition, they will touch on the importance of accessibility and how OERs provide students with first day access to course content.

• Dr. Caroline Toscano is an instructional designer at Century College
• Michelle Schoenecker is the Director of the Center for Professional Development and Collaboration at Century College

Lake Superior College

Filling in the Gaps: Sustaining a Z-Degree

Amy Jo Swing and Jody Ondich from Lake Superior College’s Center for Faculty Innovation will discuss ways they used their most recent Z-Degree Sustaining grant to expand Z-Degree offering and fill in gaps left in the AA degree as well as how to leverage library resources.

• Jody Ondich teaches philosophy at LSC and works in the college Center for Faculty Innovation
• Amy Jo Swing teaches English at LSC and is a member of the Center for Faculty Innovation

Minnesota State Community and Technical College

Z-Degrees: Navigating Sustainability and Innovation

At M State, we have several OER/Z-degree initiatives that, while distinct, intersect in many ways. We must expand existing capacity while ensuring the quality and sustainability of our Z-degrees. At the same time, we are exploring innovative approaches and tools (such as artificial intelligence) to enhance accessibility, adaptability, and personalization of learning. We will give examples of strategies we plan to use to achieve our overall goals.

• Marsha Weber, Dean, School of Business, Information Technology, and Academic Innovation at Minnesota State Community and Technical College

Northland Community & Technical College

OER Culture-Building at Northland

For the last decade, Northland Community & Technical College (NCTC) has been building and sustaining a Z-Degree as well as a culture of OER usage. This culture is anchored in a fruitful collaboration between faculty and administration around both the goal of making college more affordable for students and the belief in the spirit of openness in education.

• John Fields, Vice President of Academic and Student Affairs at NCTC, has been committed to OERs since adopting an one in his French course in 2010. At Blue Mountain Community College, he worked with faculty to save students over one million dollars in textbook costs between 2018-2021 through use of OER.
• Stephen Nelson has been a Philosophy Instructor at NCTC since 2012 and has been working with OER since 2015. He’s been faculty lead or co-lead on multiple OER-related grants, most recently on NCTC’s third round of Z-Degree funding from Minnesota State.

Rochester Community and Technical College

Teamwork Makes the Z-Degree Work: RCTC’s Success Story

RCTC faculty have been involved in open educational resources initiatives for the past six years. After learning how to develop OER in Minnesota State Learning Circles, Mike Mutschelknaus moved on to act as a faculty OER mentor and leads a collaborative campus team of faculty, IT staff, administrators, librarians, and bookstore managers. This team, responsible for implementing the campus Z degree, is the focus of his presentation today. Other campuses can improve their team processes by learning what collaboration strategies have been effective at RCTC.

• Mike Mutschelknaus is an English instructor at RCTC

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Accommodations: If you require accommodations (live captioning, etc.) to participate in this event, please send an email to the person at the bottom of this page.

Questions?

Contact facilitator Michael Olesen.