These notes are for the ACRL2019 Saturday 9:45am-10:45am session:
From Backstage to Center Stage: Community College Libraries and OER

Panelists:

  • Ms. Brenda Hazard
  • Gregg Kiehl
  • Katie Ghidiu

  • Carrie Fishner

  • Background of Fall 2017 $4M given to SUNY from NYS legislature to incentivize faculty to adopt OER to reduce the cost of college attendance

Hudson Valley Commmunity College in Troy, NY #

  • 7,400 fte, 80 programs/certificates, about 950 faculty (part/full time)
  • Had started doing some OER in 2015, SUNY albany used Information Literacy User’s Guide from ?SUNY Albany?
  • 4 faculty from social sciences & mathmatics decided to adopt OER
    • 3 of 4 were Open Stax texts, plus another
  • OER is a retention-related activity, so as a director it was something deeply connected to library work & also a great opportunity to work more robustly with faculty
  • made a 3 hour workshop, held in afternoon of annual professional development day
  • syllabus for that workshop is available online at their subject guide, the link is in their program materials
  • $100 stipend for faculty to attend that workshop
  • faculty asked what plans were & what support they’d need, then textbook approval when through department chairs (it’s their authority) so we got buy-in from departments
  • engaged bookstore from beginning, bookstore sells the physically bound copies of Open Stax books
  • still working on support for OER creation
  • planning for future: data for retention impact, sustainability, (and a third thing as well)

Monroe Community College in Rochester, NY #

  • 12,250 FTE which is down from 18,000 in about 2010
  • OER is a way that library has found to reduce costs for students
  • previously to Fall 2017 had done:
    • 2014-15 had SUNY innovative instructional technology grant awarded to two faculty for college success course textbook
    • 2016-18 Monroe CC awarded Achieving the Dream Grant with SUNY for Biology
  • Virtual campus has a model:
    • instructional designer
    • multimedia specialist
    • librarian
    • faculty
  • OER Development team
    • Librarian(s) - often creative commons & copyright, plus deep reference interactions about matching OER content to each faculty member’s planned learning outcomes
    • instructional designer
    • multimedia specialist
    • faculty
  • their LMS / (or registration system?) is Banner, in there students can select OER as a checkbox and it’ll bring up just OER classes
  • Bookstore will sell Open Stax, also print materials on the campus print shop but they’re getting overwhelmed, so looking at SUNY Press doing custom prints as well
    Student designed covers, student in graphic design course had an assignment where they had to partner with an outside institution to do work, a student (Jasmine?) was great and worked with librarians & faculty to do that work; highly encourage that approach if possible

Tompkins COurtland COmmunity College in Dryden NY #

  • 3,470 FTE annual, 140 academic programs, 61 full-time faculty, 195 adjunct faculty; small enough that the librarians can be very responsive to changing needs
  • academic libraries need to be involved in information creation as well as collection to remain important to faculty & students
  • provide closed captioning to faculty & students, tried to do that with OER by helping support video creation
  • camcorders & digital voice recorders; the audio conveys more polish in a video than the visual quality
  • use pluraleyes to do the audio/video synching, faculty wears lavalier mic for video’s audio instead of using the camera’s mic
  • also uses audacity (a free tool) to take a mono feed and make it stereo
  • AVS4You is low cost & simpler
  • Camtasia also drag & drop
  • Ensemble video hosting platform, a video server that integrates into Blackboard - it also has Anthem screen recorder & Amara Caption editor (Amara has good workflow, can work as a team)
  • offers cleaning up OER captions for accessibility compliance
  • there’s a conversion tool between the Amara and Camtasia video file formats

Delhi State University of NY in Delhi, NY #

  • one of 7 agriculture & tech in SUNY
  • prior to NYS funding they had OER on their radar but wasn’t doing much with it
  • were mostly coming at it from textbook collections, the reserves collection was big
  • had meeting in 2017 to start planning
  • she went to Provost and said that she thought library was the best institutional home for the new funding
  • put out a survey that went out to faculty in August when came back on contract, asked if they knew about OER, what they felt about it, were they using it
    • found out that some people were using it, needed help with licensing, were afraid of what using OER would mean for promotion & tenure, wanted compensation for the shift to OER
      used that feedback to shpe program on their ampus
  • what worked?
    • incentivized adoption, went through dean for approval, then library group, then signed off by dean; was $500 stipend for adoption; started at $800 but dropped to $500 for sustainability
    • community workshops, regular meetings to keep conversations going and provide supprt, what difficulties are you having & how can librarians help / how can peers help?
    • librarian & technology support, libguide: https://guides.delhi.edu/OER , worked with campus bookstore/printing and they’ve been great, also SUNY press and a separate vendor. They’ve decided that they don’t print in the library with their printer for scalability.
    • OER courses in student registration system (also Banner), coded & clickable filter for OER attribute; 51 course sections, 23 faculty teaching with OER in 4 of 5 schools
  • challenges & next steps:
    • getting niche programs involved when the faculty want it, students want it, but there’s no available extant content. So how to advocate for compensation for faculty to develop or adapt content? Supporting faculty through concerns about licensing, etc
    • a few textbooks that should be coming out soon
    • keeping faculty engaged
    • getting students engaged in creation process
  • talked up both the “save students money” aspect and “you have so much control over things” aspect of OER

Discussion #

use http://www.menti.com for voting on “What do you most want to learn about today (prioritize)?

  • Some group suggestions on things to do for librarian/faculty partnerships:
    • Subject liaison librarians have been great reaching out to faculty
    • Be proactive, follow up with faculty proposing new courses & letting them know what OER options available in that subject
    • “pure OER” (everything is creative commons) and “low cost” no more than $10 version, with things from library databases included, etc.
  • Suggestions on developing a campus open access policy:
    • don’t need to focus on publishing in Open Access journals
    • policy does not say who owns copyright of faculty-created work
    • policy went through academic senate; encourages faculty to assign creative commons but does not specify beyond that (faculty think that faculty retain copyright but the ?college admin? think that the college retains copyright)
    • policy influenced by Fulton Montgomery college (maybe a SUNY?)
    • policy is visible on their libguide /oer
  • Establishing faculty workshops:
    • what’s worked at MCC is partnering with individual departments rather than offering campus-wide workshops; more tailored, also doesn’t feel like library is selling the faculy things
    • another campus had successful once a year workshop, outline is available online, faculty get compensation, 1 of 3 hours is break-out sessions with the subject liaison so there’s hands-on time to search by discipline; often started with Open Stax or Open Textbook library, then other tools to find content
    • OER Roadshow that they take to departments, they have a 3 minute video, plus video from new college president who talks about his science OER contributions Orange Grove repository, student testimonials, I think also have instructional designer there?
    • they’ve been addressing issues with bookstore & content issues
    • another has a daylong teaching * learning initiative with 10 minute quick things, the library used their 10 minutes to talk up OER to faculty & whet their appetite
    • January & June would offer introductory OER workshops; now regular workshops throughout semester
    • hand-on is one of most important things; have librarians there to help faculty evaluate results
    • SUNY Geneso’s OASIS search tool

Questions and Answers #

  • Good mic use for q & a, explain how to turn mic off of being on mute

Q: Florida situation of no subject liaisons, many faculty interested in OER and very scattered requests. Any advice?

A: Yes! If you can find faculty champions who have good experience, then try to have them get
A: Talk to director & let them know that faculty are so interested, see if things can be adjusted to meet the need

Q: Any information on how to find a lists of what textbooks different textbooks have adopted. Do these exist?

A: SPARK is compiling a lot of info… not sure if there’s a textbook list, but they might be a place to start since they’re collecting a lot of data
A: Open Textbook network keeps track
A: Open Textbook Library includes faculty reviews * other info about adopters
A: Open Stax might, Lumen Learning has partnership and lets people see within
A: Digital Commons platforms for repository makes that visible, bepress has information
A: CCC OER has listserv & an index

Q: zero cost & now trying to do OER; grant tied to LibraTexts

A: Math department is into LibraTexts, it’s actively being developed; Delmar Larsen will be developing it out in next 2 years

Q: At many libraries, OER support is either new or at a new level. How support librarians adding this to workload?

A: Lucky because have SUNY money, provide professional development to staff; workload has become more than anticipated & trying to figure out how to shift responsibilities as useful
A: Consider comparing impact of OER to some potentially less impactful things you’re currently doing to see what might be most overall impactful, whether could let go of some less impactful things

Q: (I missed this question)

A: look for regional support, across different institutional types (work with Ithaca College & St. John Fisher in their region)
A: SUNY OER services also very supportive, developed online courses through creative commons

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