Open Educational Resources: OER, Building Collaborative Bridges
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The topic of providing Open Educational Resources, OERs, as an alternative to costly textbooks for students in higher education is on the minds of educators, administrators, librarians, publishers, and faculty these days. All are eager to ease the cost burden of higher education by providing students with freely available, openly licensed learning materials, but each constituency faces specific barriers and has specific questions to be resolved. At Emporia State University, faculty, librarians, and administrators are at the beginning of an exploration of the advantages and disadvantages that are part and parcel of creating, adopting, storing, maintaining, and licensing OERs. A task force has been formed to "establish a baseline for current OER efforts at ESU and to initiate a process of discovery to evaluate resources and infrastructure necessary to enlarge our OER efforts beyond the current baseline" (OER Task Force charge). Some of the topics that the Task Force may consider are * Weighing the strengths and weaknesses of including OER as a strategic plan initiative; * Analyzing faculty work conditions within an OER environment; * Determining the need to adjust institutional intellectual property rights policies; * Assessing student attitudes toward OER as well as preferences for digital or print resources; * Exploring faculty incentives for assessing/adapting/authoring OER; * Assessing the financial impact of OER to the bookstore and the Memorial Union; * Developing an information campaign to educate faculty, students, and staff about OER; * Exploring software systems, like Intellus, that might facilitate OER access; * Cataloging ready-made resources, like Open Stax, for faculty availability. One thing that is clear is that the collaborations among ESU constituencies, among institutions of higher education in Kansas and the Midwest, and among educators, administrators, librarians, publishers, and faculty are necessary to the success of an OER project at ESU. In this presentation, I propose to present the experiences of the OER task force, particularly their collaborations with both internal and external stakeholders, as well as the results of their work as a case study. I will focus on sharing how collaborations with stakeholders influenced the process, the choices, and the outcomes of the work of the task force; particularly those that are transferable and may have benefits for other institutions of higher education. Sarah Sutton, Associate Professor of Library and Information Man, Emporia State University School of Library and Information Management
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Open Educational Resources: OER, Building Collaborative Bridges
- 1. Open Educational Resources: OER, Building Collaborative Bridges NASIG 2019 Annual Conference – Concurrent Session Thursday, June 5, 2019 Sarah W. Sutton
- 2. About Emporia State University OER, Building Collaborative Bridges
- 3. My interest in OER • OER I3 grant recipient • OER researcher • ESU OER Task Force OER, Building Collaborative Bridges
- 4. OER at ESU • Work of the ESU OER Task Force • Collaborations with internal and external stakeholders • Results of the Task Force’s work • Influences on decision making • Outcomes of the work of the Task Force OER, Building Collaborative Bridges
- 5. OER Task Force Charge To establish a baseline for current OER efforts at ESU and to initiate a process of discovery to evaluate resources and infrastructure necessary to enlarge our OER efforts beyond the current baseline.
- 6. Topics for discussion • Weighing the strengths and weaknesses of including OER as a strategic plan initiative; • Analyzing faculty work conditions within an OER environment; • Determining the need to adjust institutional intellectual property rights policies; • Assessing student attitudes toward OER as well as preferences for digital or print resources;
- 7. Topics for discussion • Exploring faculty incentives for assessing/adapting/authoring OER; • Assessing the financial impact of OER to the bookstore and the Memorial Union; • Developing an information campaign to educate faculty, students, and staff about OER; • Exploring software systems, like Intellus, that might facilitate OER access; • Cataloging ready-made resources, like Open Stax, for faculty availability
- 8. An operational definition of OER “Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license, such as Creative Commons, that permits their free use and re- purposing by others. OER include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.” (adapted from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation)
- 9. An operational definition of OER - Complications • Faculty: “I have identified ebooks the library owns with unlimited licenses that have become the course textbooks. They are free to students.” • Students don’t recognize the difference between true open and no cost to them at their point of need. • Parents • don’t recognize the cost of library resources even when it’s identified as a line item on a tuition bill • consider textbooks to be non-essential costs
- 10. Weighing the strengths and weaknesses of including OER as a strategic plan initiative. • Students are actively seeking an increase in the use of OERs. • It is a topic on the agenda of the Kansas Board of Regents. Cultivate Open Education Resources to promote educational accessibility and to facilitate curricular innovation.
- 11. Faculty related issues • Analyzing faculty work conditions within an OER environment • Exploring faculty incentives for assessing/adapting/authoring OER • Determining the need to adjust institutional intellectual property rights policies
- 12. Student related issues Assessing student attitudes toward OER as well as preferences for digital or print resources. • Cost • What constitutes “free”? • Format
- 13. Other actions and considerations • Don’t under-estimate the value of the library in support of OER. • Centers for faculty enhancement. • The value of ”ready made” courses. • The “seedy” side of OER.
- 14. The final OER “Road Map” for ESU • Stage 1: Surveying the OER Terrain (~ 4 months) • Stage 2: Building Networks through OER Education (~ 4 months) • Stage 3: Developing OER Infrastructure (~ 1 year, then ongoing) • Stage 4: Institutionalizing OER (~ 1 year, then ongoing) • Stage 5: Marketing OER Success (~ 4 months, then ongoing)
- 15. References and Resources • Bell, S. (n.d.). Course materials adoption: A faculty survey and outlook for the OER landscape. Retrieved from http://www.choice360.org/content/2-librarianship/5- whitepaper/bell-white-paper-october-2018/100318_bell_white_paper.pdf • Butcher, N., Commonwealth of Learning, & UNESCO. (2015). A Basic guide to open educational resources. Retrieved from https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000215804 • Colson, R., Scott, E., & Donaldson, R. (2017). Supporting Librarians in Making the Business Case for OER. Reference Librarian, 58(4), 278–287. Retrieved from lxh. • de Langen, F. (2011). There is no business model for open educational resources: a business model approach. Open Learning, 26(3), 209–222. Retrieved from lxh. • ESU Office of Institutional Effectiveness. (2018). ESU databook fall 2018. Retrieved June 5, 2019, from https://www.emporia.edu/oira/documents/institutionalresearch/ESU%20Databo ok%20Fall%202018XA.pdf OER, Building Collaborative Bridges
- 16. References and Resources • Jaggars, S. S., Folk, A. L., & Mullins, D. (2018). Understanding students’ satisfaction with OERs as course materials. Performance Measurement & Metrics, 19(1), 66–74. • Kansas Board of Regents. (2019). Kansas Board of Regents minutes for January 16, 2019. Retrieved from https://www.kansasregents.org/resources/PDF/About/Board_Meetings/FY_2019 /A_Jan_16_2019_Board_Minutes.pdf • Seaman, J. E., & Seaman, J. (2019). Freeing the textbook: Educational resources in U.S. higher education, 2018. Babson Survey Research Group. • William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (2019). Open educational resources. Retrieved June 5, 2019, from https://hewlett.org/strategy/open-educational- resources/ OER, Building Collaborative Bridges
Editor's Notes
- Goal: Present the experiences of the OER task force, particularly their collaborations with both internal and external stakeholders, as well as the results of their work as a case study. I will focus on sharing how collaborations with stakeholders influenced the process, the choices, and the outcomes of the work of the task force; particularly those that are transferable and may have benefits for other institutions of higher education.
- The university was founded in March of 1863 when the Kansas Legislature passed the enabling act to establish the Kansas State Normal School. The school's first graduating class consisted of two women in 1867, the year the first permanent building was completed. In February, 1923, the name of the school was changed to the Kansas State Teachers College. In July, 1974, the name was changed to Emporia Kansas State College. On April 21, 1977, the college became Emporia State University. The Kansas Board of Regents is the governing body for ESU. 3,569 undergraduates, 2,227 graduate students 90% of undergrads are full time students, 80% of graduate students are part fime The library science program is the biggest graduate program 67% of students are white and 76% are Kansas residents We are the smallest of the KBOR institutions by FTE student count Second lowest in undergraduate tuition and fees costs per semester of the Regents institutions, $3,379 (the lowest is Ft Hays State at $2,566) Average loan debt for undergrads at graduation is $20,382 (Spring 2018) (ESU Office of Institutional Effectiveness, 2018)
- My interest in OER has it’s beginnings in both my work as an e-resources librarian and in an elective course I developed a couple of years ago for the SLIM program: e-resources management. In fall 2018, a series of events occurred that all had bearing on my interest in OER and culminated in, among other things, my proposing this concurrent session. First, I became the recipient of an internal grant to create OER materials for an elective course I teach in e-resources management. Since I literally wrote a textbook on e-resources management that was published in 2016, I wanted to do something different. I chose to create a series of interviews on course topics with experts in the field of e-resources management. Topics include acquisitions, licensing, copyright, assessment and evaluation, and working with vendors. I’ll use the interviews as the center piece of each module, replacing the textbook. At about the same time last fall, the Provost and the Dean of Graduate Studies at ESU convened a task force “To establish a baseline for current OER efforts at ESU and to initiate a process of discovery to evaluate resources and infrastructure necessary to enlarge our OER efforts beyond the current baseline.” They sought a faculty member from each academic division and I volunteered to represent the School of Library and Information Management. And finally, I reconnected with a SLIM doctoral student with a desire to explore faculty knowledge of and engagement with open educational resources.
- My goal tor this session is to share with you the experiences of the OER task force, particularly our collaborations with both internal and external stakeholders, as well as the results of our work during the spring semester. I will focus on sharing how collaborations with stakeholders influenced the process, the choices, and the outcomes of the work of the task force; particularly those that are transferable and may have benefits for other institutions of higher education.
- As I mentioned, the charge of the task force from the Provost was “To establish a baseline for current OER efforts at ESU and to initiate a process of discovery to evaluate resources and infrastructure necessary to enlarge our OER efforts beyond the current baseline.”
- By the time the task force met for the first time, the chair, the dean of the ESU Graduate School, had prepared a list of potential topics for discussion with the intention of creating a report to the Provost containing recommendations for concrete steps the university could take to expand university efforts to support the creation and use of OERs. The topics proposed by the Graduate Studies dean were that we consider: Weighing the strengths and weaknesses of including OER as a strategic plan initiative; since the President of the University, who had been in her position for 2 years at the time, was making preparations to update the university’s strategic plan for 2015-2025. Analyzing faculty work conditions within an OER environment; Determining the need to adjust institutional intellectual property rights policies; Assessing student attitudes toward OER as well as preferences for digital or print resources;
- Continuing, the topics proposed by the Graduate Studies dean were that we consider: Exploring faculty incentives for assessing/adapting/authoring OER; Assessing the financial impact of OER to the bookstore and the Memorial Union; Developing an information campaign to educate faculty, students, and staff about OER; Exploring software systems, like Intellus, that might facilitate OER access; Cataloging ready-made resources, like Open Stax, for faculty availability
- One of the first steps the task force took was to adopt an operational definition of OER. We settled on an adapted version of the definition provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, but the process was complicated by a number of things, not least of which was the number of definitions out there. The variation we discovered in our faculty’s and student’s perceptions of OER, but we also considered a definition by Creative Commons (2016) and UNESCO (2015).
- Another complication that became clear in our discussions of an operational definition was that there was a big variety of understandings of OER among ESU faculty, students, and parents. Both faculty and students fail to recognize that library resources are not free. This is a comments from a survey of faculty that the task force conducted this past spring. Moreover, both students and their parents consider textbooks to be non-essential costs of higher ed, as opposed to essential costs like tuition and housing. These ideas came from multiple sources: the results of both the faculty survey conducted by the the task force and a survey of ESU students, but multiple anecdotes shared by members of the committee with faculty and students. One final thought on developing an operational definition of OER: at the time, the task force adopted it, we considered our operational definition to be ” the operational definition of OER for Emporia State University” (minutes of the March 2019 meeting of the ESU OER Task Force). But we didn’t make any effort to market, so to speak, the definition. One consequence of this was that when the School of Library and Information Management was revising their promotion and tenure guidelines and I suggested the inclusion of a working defining of OER in the context of providing faculty with credit for creating OERs, I was met with some resistance because SLIM faculty were unaware that a definition had been adopted. Nor does the definition appear in the final recommendations to the Provost. So, in retrospect, I think it would have served us well to share our definition of OER far and wide.
- Incorporating OER as an initiative to be added to the revised ESU strategic plan was another of the action items that the task force agreed on. Our reasons included That students are clearly seeking increased use of OERs, particularly in general education courses, which was evident from a student government initiated survey of ESU students thoughts about OER as corroborated by the results of student evaluations of courses (which are conducted for all courses, every semester) reported by a member of the task force representing the ESU Instructional Design team. That it is a topic high on the agenda of the Kansas Board of Regents, which accepted for review an OER Action Plan from the Kansas Board of Regents Students’ Advisory Committee. This committee is made up of representatives of student government associations at all of the Kansas Board of Regents institutions. As a result, the task force made a recommendation to the ESU President’s Strategic Planning Committee that this statement be included in the revised university strategic plan. Take home message: incorporating the topic of OER into institutional strategic plans and other institutional documents gives it some “teeth.”
- Several of the topics the task force considered were directly related to faculty. These will probably not be a big surprise to those of you considering the state of OER at your own institutions. Both developing OERs and just using OERs places a burden on already overburdened faculty. One of the many advantages of using traditional textbooks for faculty is the time savings. Clearly it takes less time to select a traditional textbook for a course than to create one. But this is tied up with the issue of quality as well since there is an established method for vetting the quality of a traditional textbook whereas at the moment, the determination of quality of an OER is left to the individual faculty member; there few if any standard means of establishing OER quality. So although adopting an OER is less time consuming than creating one from scratch, there is a time commitment inherent in determining the quality of OERs. In other words, you have to spend more time making an personal judgement of quality because there isn’t an established quality check in the OER publication process as there is in the publication process for traditional textbooks. The need to incorporate incentives for faculty to create OERs is also a familiar one to anyone who has tried to promote open access publication of any kind. It’s well established that the rule of academia is still publish or perish, and until faculty are able to receive credit towards promotion and tenure for the efforts to create OER, I think we’ll see the same resistance to it that we see to faculty publishing in open access journals. That said, there is a trend toward providing faculty with incentives outside of P&T to create OERs. Many institutions, ESU included, have established financial incentives for OER creation and adoption. From my own recent experience with this, I can say that although the grant I received to create OERs for my e-resources course was quite a bit larger than what I earned from publishing a traditional textbook; there comes a point where you just don’t have time to do both. When that decision point is reached, in other words, if I had to choose between creating scholarship that would count toward a promotion that was accompanied by a raise in salary and creating scholarship in the form of OERs that was accompanied by a one time grant, I’d still have to choose to work towards promotion and tenure. Not only because the greater financial stability that a raise gets me, but also because of the other “currency” inherent in publishing for P&T: recognition, which can be, in some P&T documents of even greater value. Finally, existing institutional intellectual property rights policies can also be a deterrent to faculty creating OERs. The best example, again, comes from my own experience: I’m still not entirely sure whether I actually have right to publish the OERs I’ve created. If, in fact, they constitute work for hire at my institution, then I don’t really have the right to make them open by licensing them under a Creative Commons license, publishing them in the Canvas Commons (which is a web space within the Canvas learning management system devoted to sharing learning objects), or, since the OERs I’ve created are videos, publishing them on YouTube.
- Students are, of course, at the heart of the OER movement. And ESU is no exception. I’ve already shared that our students’ need and desire for lower textbook costs is well established. The evidence is in their responses to course evaluations, and survey response, and urging student government to take up the issue with our board of regents. But it’s also clear that we’re getting some mixed messages from our students. That takes the form of misconceptions about whether library resources are free. It also takes the form of the question of format. In the survey student preferences for OER conducted by ESU’s student government association, 66% of students had never purchased an e-textbook. And they were split 50-50 on the question: “If you had the choice, which would you prefer (1) a free online version of a textbook or (2) purchase the hard copy version for $20-$40?” 50.27% said they’d choose the free online version, 41.98% said they’d choose the hard copy version, and 7.75% had no preference. In another class I’m teaching this summer, I gave my students this exact choice, and 1/3 of them chose to purchase the hard copy of the textbook rather than use the “free” version from the library. That’s less of an isolated event than it might seem; in conversations with faculty colleagues across campus, the vast majority of students still seem to prefer printed texts.
- Along the way, as the ESU OER Task Force conducted its work, several members of the task force, including myself, sought out colleagues at other institutions to pick their brains about OER on their campuses. I want to share the highlights of what we learned. First, in every case, librarians were central to the success of OER initiatives. In several instances, the library employed a librarian whose primary responsibility was work with OERs. That work included creating and maintaining OER repositories, being the experts in sources of OER materials, assisting faculty to find and to create OER materials. This work was vital, they said, for reasons that will seem obvious to you, to faculty success with OERs and the resulting reduction of textbook costs on campus. Another piece of infrastructure that was present in many cases was a center for faculty enhancement, an institutionally funded initiate that provides support and professional development and tools for faculty to enhance their teaching. In some cases this was located, physically and/or administratively in the library, in others it was located within IT departments or stood alone. The task force also explored some software systems and sources of ready-made OER resources and/or courses. To my mind, those that we explored remain under-developed, at least for our purposes. For example, we participated in a demonstration of a software system that provides ready-made course modules and even whole courses to be adopted or adapted by faculty in their teaching. The advantages of these systems overall seems to be the ready-made part, and the fact that they are vetted for quality. The disadvantages were that they seemed to include more OER materials created by employees of the system publisher than OER materials created by teaching faculty and that they didn’t integrate into our existing course management system. What’s really needed, in my opinion, is robust index of OER materials, perhaps to some extent vetted for quality (or alternatively including a crowd-sourced rating system). I’ve heard rumors that there are some library vendors working on such an index, but I’ve not seen one yet. We also learned about the seedy side of OER. Just like there are predatory publishers seeking to profit from the open access movement, apparently there are predatory textbook publishers that will take OERs from freely available sources, modify them slightly, and then sell them for profit. This comes mainly from a presentation given at a state library conference by a librarian at a large research institution, but I’ve heard some corroboration from other sources.
- The tangible result of the work of the OER task force at ESU was a road map for moving towards increased creation and adoption of OERs, particularly in our general education courses. This is a summary of what the task force recommended to the provost at ESU. Stage 1 includes the efforts of the task force to establish the operational definition for OER across the institution, consider the inclusion of OER as a strategic plan initiative, assess student and faculty attitudes and preference for OER. State 2 includes inviting guest speakers to education faculty on OER related topics, identify faculty with OER experience willing to serve as OER ambassadors to the rest of the faculty, disseminate information about readily available OERs for gen ed courses, endorse options like subscription e-books. Stage 3 incorporates pursing grants to develop infrastructure supporting institutional OER efforts, develop a campus OER website for information sharing, continue to incentivize OER adoption and creation, hire a dedicated OER librarian and instructional designer, invest in software to facilitate OER access and retrieval, work with the bookstore on print on demand options. Stage 4 involves recognition for faculty for creating and adopting OERs, making adjustments to intellectual property policies, distinguishing classes that use OERs in course catalogs, encourage departments to consider OER use and authorship within P&T decisions. Stage 5 involves developing a means of measuring textbook savings obtain from OER, marketing such savings to potential students, featuring ESU generated OERs in open access repositories, and developing a plan for sustaining OER efforts. These recommendations were submitted to the ESU provost just a few weeks ago and so I haven’t heard any news of his reaction or plans for implementation, but I’m hopeful. I’m also hopeful that you’ve found something useful in the story of our experience that I’ve told today, which you can take back and make use of at your own institutions.