This etherpad is for the ALAAC2018 Monday 10:30am–11:30am session:
Open Education Resources (OER): Where Libraries Are and Where We are Going https://www.eventscribe.com//2018/ALA-Annual/fsPopup.asp?Mode=presInfo&PresentationID=352299

Introduced by Sam Harlow #

  • Panel will focus on future directions of OER in libraries and also share stories of success

Beth Bernhardt & Cheryl Cuillier

  • Beth Bernhardt
    • Assistant Dean for Collection Management and Scholarly Communications
    • University of North Carolina Greensboro
  • Cheryl Cuillier
    • Open Education Librarian
    • University of Arizona
  • In Tucson, UA has about 43k students in a state not known for supporting higher education or education at all (we made the news a bit ago for the student walkout) also only state to zero out the funding for Pima & Maricopa County Community College systems
  • Maricopa Millions program has saved tons of money
  • Pima got an (Achieve the Dream?) grant for OER
  • So we’ve done things without the support or funding that she’s jealous that other panelists have
  • started with 2 courses, saved an estimated $750,000+ student dollars
  • They advertise “Textbook Heros” with faculty members who have adopted OER
  • Building Blocks of OER Inititives
    1. Open Textbook Network member
    2. Workshops for faculty (with $200 stipend for review of open textbook)
    3. OpenStax Institutional Partner
    4. Partnering with liaison librarians
    5. Partnering with Office of Digital Learning during course (re)design for online courses; switcing to online modality is an ideal time to switch class to OER textbooks, librarians help faculty find them
    6. Have an OER site, they link to other campus LibGuides, esp. with subject-by-subject textbook resources
    7. Events during Open Education Week & Open Access Week; pick a different week than big campus events like Spring Break or Homecoming
    8. Faculty Senate advocacy
    9. Dedicated OER position
    10. Coming soon: Grants for switching to OER
    11. Campus OER Action Committee

  • Programming: put up a whiteboard for passive programming that said “If you didn’t have to buy textbooks, what would you buy?” Lots of results about food insecurity, housing insecurity; Clearly not just saving money to spend textbook money on beer, they have heavy impacts that could be diminished by textbook savings

  • Library Campus partners in OER
    • UA Press
    • UA Bookstores
    • Central IT
    • Teaching Center
    • Disability Resource Center
    • Office of Digital Learning
    • Student Senate

Teri Gallaway

  • Associate Commissioner for LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network

  • Louisiana Board of Regents

  • Both OER and commercial Ebooks, looking toward Georgia and Florida as building their program
  • 66.6% of students on campus were not buying required textbooks
  • knew that flagship campus ran a food pantry

  • didn’t know more granular data about campus things

  • Faculty were price sensitive but hooked on the ancillary things and mostly satisfied with their course textbooks
  • Asked faculty what would get them moving on OER

  • training & enhanced findability were main two

  • Chose Textbook Network as a partner
  • program gives a scripted workshop to deliver to faculty

-Outcomes:

  • about 60 trainers statewide
  • 15 workshops
  • about 120 faculty reached
  • 53 projected open textbook adoptions between fall 2017 and fall 2018 from faculty reviewers

  • estimated 2.2 million in student savings via open textbook adoptions in 2018-2018

  • Worked to align all the known open textbooks to the courses in their campuses’ subject areas, to increase findability for faculty and demonstrate what they could use
  • lists recommendations from LOUIS group, both short and long term

Lindsay O’Neill

  • Instructional Design Librarian
  • California State University, Fullerton
  • represents Distance Learning Section
  • this is about my learning experiences… let’s not call them “failures” but emphasize growth opportunities
  • AER = Affordable Educational Resources; similar but different to Open Education Resources

  • she’s co-designed a course & redesigned a course; it’s a ton of work & is here to show the instructor’s perspective for course design with AER/OER

  • Learning experiences
    1. technology & copyright is an obstacle
    2. it’s all about the pedagogy, not the formats that you are choosing
  • How to read a library ebook: shows complicated flowchart

  • How to read an open textbook: shows much more direct path

  • Fun theme of Jurassic Park & Jeff Goldblum “life finds a way” slides sprinkled throughout
  • Slack Channels
  • Students & even other faculty would upload pdfs because of copyright & technology issues
  • initially Robin Williams’s The non-designers Design Book, which costs about $25
  • replaced it with Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual - cluttered, not so great, students hated it

  • now use Beginning Graphic Design modules, GCR LearnFree.org. uses universal design (videos with illustrations and also texts); way shorter than thick, terrible eBook, students got concepts much more quickly

  • Multimedia for Learning Allessi and someone, classic text that’s out of print and dated
    replaced with library eBook, students hated this one now using just 2 chapters of that library eBook instead of original 8, also added a job aid that has main principles, then also an active learning assignment instead of passive reading assignment

  • takeaways
    1. go active, look for active & multimedia learning options rather than another text; improve pedagogy
    2. go open! open better than affordable, but difficult for graduate-level courses; opportunity to have students construct materials usable in future courses, teach about Creative Commons license
    3. go slowly! change a little at a time, see if it works; be patient and empathetic with instructors

Nicole Allen

  • Director of Public Education

  • SPARC

  • works for non-profit organization rather than a library or campus

  • grassroots organizing and education policy background, got into OER activism as an undergraduate

  • about 9% of faculty across the US are using OER in their courses—tons of success

  • SPARC works in policy, also discuss trends

  • SPARC is a membership organization of research & academic libraries, global; trying to make open the default in research and libraries

  • discussing funding & policy wins, how states have gotten some kind of OER policy, from marking courses that use OER to a governor challenging faculty to adopt more OER
  • policy is a tool, not a goal; it’s not a way to make things happen, which requires cultural readiness
  • think about how policy fits into broader ecosystem of how open fits into your context and course materials
  • excited about how campuses and states have made progress, common trends

  • identifying first few faculty OER champions & getting them engaged

  • need to:
    • share best practices within open networks, list-servs are good but there has to be a better way to reach beyond early adopters
    • professional development, think about OER as a profession within libraries
  • similar evolution between OER and scholcomm, where there’s been a growth in positions at libraries/campuses but not yet robustly taught in LIS schools
  • journal, textbook, & education publishing truly starting to get disrupted by OER materials, open access
  • SPARC is starting to look at what the future of publishing, scholcomm, and libraries will be
  • we shouldn’t have to buy back from publishers the value that’s already been produced on our campuses
  • concerns about direct course costs model, since although it’s equal it’s far less equitable, gives us way less room to help those who already have the fewest resources and opportunities gain access
    think more critically about what future of textbook access could be; it’s dangerously close to a “big deal” sort of arrangement

Questions & Answers #

Q: how does the relationship with campus bookstore work? we have a big, profit motivated vendor

A: we have a campus-owned bookstore at U of A, campus textbook says that they make much more money from Wildcats merchandise and the Clinique makeup counter than book sales

  • we sat down with bookstore, which is losing money from students going through Amazon, so we’re working with them to know what not to buy
  • bookatore contracts were written without librarians in the room, so there’s a little room for librarians to get the data collected by bookstores about sales trends
    A: Lindsay’s used https://h5p.org which is short for HTML5 package; it’s a good program for web design, not a code editor, just visual, default is open & accessible (if you tag it correctly), she wants to see this grow in libraries