This document summarizes Open SUNY Affordable Learning Solutions (ALS), a service that assists SUNY faculty, librarians, and staff in identifying lower-cost educational materials including Open Educational Resources (OERs). It provides an overview of OERs and their importance in reducing student costs and improving outcomes. Open SUNY ALS connects campuses to OER services, showcases OER faculty projects, and offers tools and support for finding, evaluating, advocating for, and learning about OERs. It also highlights how IITG grants, librarians, and instructional designers can support OER adoption and creation across SUNY.

1. Open SUNY Affordable
Learning Solutions (ALS)
CIT June 2, 2016
3:30 - 4:00 pm Flagg 102
presented by Karen Gardner-Athey
SUNY OLIS Professional Development Coordinator

2. What is Open SUNY Affordable
Learning Solutions?
• A one-stop overview of OER and Open activities in SUNY
• One of the initiatives in SUNY to provide affordable
educational alternatives to traditional textbooks
•A service to assist SUNY faculty, librarians, instructional
designers, and staff to identify lower-cost, electronic, free, and
Open Educational Resources (OERs)
•A California State University-MERLOT partner benefit service

3. opensunyals.org

4. The Focus is OER
Open SUNY ALS currently offers tools and support for:
• Connecting Campuses with SUNY OER Services
• Showcasing SUNY OER Initiatives
• Learning about OERs
• Finding OER
• Evaluating OER

5. What are OER?
The SUNY OER Success Framework uses the Educause
definition:
Open educational resources (OER) are any resources available at little or no cost that can
be used for teaching, learning, or research. The term can include textbooks, course
readings, and other learning content; simulations, games, and other learning
applications; syllabi, quizzes, and assessment tools; and virtually any other material that
can be used for educational purposes. OER typically refers to electronic resources,
including those in multimedia formats, and such materials are generally released under a
Creative Commons or similar license that supports open or nearly open use of the
content. OER can originate from colleges and universities, libraries, archival
organizations, government agencies, commercial organizations such as publishers, or
faculty or other individuals who develop educational resources they are willing to share.
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELi7061.pdf

6. What are OER?
SUNY also uses the brief and memorable version,
authored at Tompkins Cortland CC (TC3):
Open Educational Resources are teaching and
learning materials that may be used and reused, at
low cost or without charge. OER often have a
Creative Commons or GNU license that states
specifically how the material may be used, reused,
adapted, and shared.

7. Why are OER Important?
Figure 1: Estimated Increases in New College Textbook Prices, College Tuition and
Fees, and Overall Consumer Price Inflation, 2002 to 2012
textbook prices increased by a total of 82 percent over this time period,
while tuition and fees increased by 89 percent and overall consumer
prices grew by 28 percent.

8. Cost Affects CompletionThe famous Florida Virtual Campus survey

9. Cost Affects CompletionThe Buffalo State College textbook affordability
survey is even more dramatic:

10. http://www.uspirg.org/reports/usp/fixing-broken-textbook-market
Cost Affects Completion
“Nearly half of all students surveyed said that the
cost of textbooks impacted how many/which
classes they took each semester.
Students attend college seeking job preparation
and/or degree attainment. Careful course selection
is often necessary in order to yield the results that a
student is seeking within the timeframe they are
prepared to study. It is especially concerning that
this process may be being undermined by high
textbook costs.”

11. Cost Affects Completion
•Since Fall 2013, Dr. David Usinski at Erie County Community College has used
open textbooks, Open Learning Initiative's Concepts in Statistics,
and MyOpenMath in two courses to save 440 students $120 on textbook
costs, totally $52,800.
Pass rates increased from 67% to 87%
Fail rates decreased from 22% to 11%
Withdrawal rates decreased from 11% to 2%

12. Connecting Campuses with SUNY OER Services
Open SUNY ALS connects campuses to Open SUNY Textbooks &
SUNY OER Services (http://textbooks.opensuny.org/suny-oer-services)
Open SUNY Textbooks (OST) announced a new service model,
SUNY OER Services, to support SUNY faculty and SUNY campuses
with their efforts to scale up open educational resources (OER)
adoption, adaptation, and creation initiatives.
Open SUNY Affordable Learning Solutions both promotes this
ground-breaking program and serves as a resource in its suite of
services.

13. Showcasing OER Faculty
Open SUNY ALS also celebrates OER faculty on campuses across
SUNY, for example:
• Kristen Munger, Ph.D., Associate Dean in the School of Education
at SUNY Oswego edited and co-wrote the open textbook Steps to
Success: Crossing the Bridge Between Literacy Research and
Practice
“The book includes chapters related to scientifically-based literacy research, early literacy
development, literacy assessment, digital age influences on children’s literature, literacy
development in underserved student groups, secondary literacy instructional strategies,
literacy and modern language, and critical discourse analysis. ”

14. Finding OER
•The goal of SUNY OER Services is to give faculty and instructional
•designers easy access to curated, modularized, OER content.
•But so much OER is in repositories that require the tenacity and
skills of librarians and other information professionals.

15. Finding OERsA Babson Survey Research Report,
http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/oer.html,
finds that "The time and effort to find and evaluate
are consistently listed as the most important
barriers by faculty to the adoption of open
education resources."
Finding OER can with the
MERLOT repository and
branching out to multiple
resources.
http://opensunyals.org/libraryresourc
es.html

16. Evaluating OERs
It doesn’t stop after you find
the OER!
•Open SUNY ALS provides
Instructions for evaluating
OERs
http://opensunyals.org/libraryresources.html

17. Advocating for OERs
Open SUNY ALS offers
advocacy materials for
campus-based OER initiatives:
http://opensunyals.org/whatis.html

18. Learning About OERs
Two self-paced Open Courses
are now available:
Introduction to OERs
&
Intermediate OER Topics
(adopted from OER 101)
http://opensunyals.org/learnmore.html

19. Learning About OERs
Facilitated versions of
Introduction to OERs and
Intermediate OER Topics are
also available via the COTE
professional development
offerings
http://commons.suny.edu/cote/

20. IITG and OER
Innovative Instructional Technology Grants (IITG):
launched Open SUNY Textbooks
Current OER projects underway are:
•SUNY Open Educational Resources: Improving Faculty Discovery and Adoption
•MVCC Open Physics Lab
•Open Media Lab – Old Westbury
•Quality by Design: Strategies for Effective Teaching and Quality Course Design. An online
faculty development course and Open Educational Resource (OER) – University at Buffalo
http://opensunyals.org/iitg.html
http://commons.suny.edu/iitg/

21. SUNY Faculty are at the heart of the OER mission
• Open SUNY ALS is one of the MANY supports
that SUNY OER Services offers to guide and
empower faculty in the adoption, adaptation,
and creation of OER
Faculty and OER

22. SUNY Librarians can:
•assist instructors in narrowing down the vast array of OER by using effective search
strategies and applying multi-level evaluations http://opensunyals.org/libraryresources.html
•support OER incentive initiatives on their campuses (the librarians at SUNY Geneseo created
the Open SUNY Textbook initiative )
http://opensuny.org/omp/index.php/SUNYOpenTextbooks)
•OER are stored in a wide variety of repositories, and, although metadata standards exist,
there is little consistency between how open learning objects are cataloged and retrieved.
SUNY librarians can help implement metadata standards for both campus-specific and SUNY-
wide OER repositories http://opensunyals.org/searchotherrepositories.html
Librarians and OER

23. SUNY instructional designers can:
• include OER instruction in faculty workshops teaching online course design
http://commons.suny.edu/cote/course-supports/
• include OER tools in the faculty resources provided in the campus learning
management system
• assist faculty with the transition from a traditional textbook to open
alternatives
Instructional Designers & OER

24. Questions?
•Thank you so much for attending this session!
•Any questions?
•Feel free to contact Laura K. Murray, laura.murray@suny.edu ATIS OER
Coordinator