About Me
My name is David Tully and I am a Libraries Fellow at North Carolina State University Libraries.
I am leading a strategic project which places the University Libraries at the center of the University’s effort to support vulnerable students. As such, I help lead Libraries' efforts to gather together existing threads regarding programs and initiatives, and develop new ones which go to the heart of supporting student affordability, digital equity and student success.
As part of that initiative I am working closely with colleagues to explore and develop the place of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Pedagogy at NC State.
Why did I create the Open Cafe?
I developed the Open Cafe Express event series in 2021 as a new, low-stakes, way of sharing and advocating for open interventions within courses as one way of tackling the growing problem of runaway textbook costs on college campuses becoming a major impediment to student success.
College textbook prices have more than doubled in the last fifteen years according to the Consumer Price Index, rising at four times the cost of inflation, creating an unequal playing field within our classrooms. The cost of books and supplies is not the highest cost our students face but research shows that access, or lack thereof, does have a unique impact upon student success.
The global pandemic has further underscored some existing fault lines of inequity within higher education. Prior to the pandemic lower-income students were already less likely than their peers to purchase or rent their course materials and this issue has been further exacerbated by the far-reaching economic and social effects of COVID-19.
The pandemic has also further highlighted existing problems around access to course materials as well as digital access with some students lacking access to reliable internet and learning technologies. These aforementioned issues hold students back from fully participating in class and ultimately affects their pursuit of a college degree.
One potential method to combat this has been through faculty adopting OER into their courses in place of commercial textbooks. OER are zero-cost, educational materials, which are freely available to anybody to access, therefore eliminating the cost barrier which many students otherwise face.
What's more, OER has a Creative Commons license, which often gives instructional faculty freedoms not found in a commercial textbook such as improving, remixing, and reusing texts. This type of customization can lead to transformative changes in how they deliver their teaching and learning, therefore further benefiting their student audience.
The Open Cafe Express series also served as the capstone project for my participation in SPARC's Open Education Leadership Program.
How should somebody use the Open Cafe?
Think of the Open Cafe as like a buffet line. You can pick and choose topics of interest as you go or you can sample everything if you want to. You do not need to access the sessions in the order that they're listed, though I do recommend viewing the "Discovering OER" and "Evaluating OER Quality" sessions if you are a complete beginner to the topic.
Our audience is broad. Whether you're a faculty member interested in learning more about OER or Open Pedagogy, a Librarian interested in learning more to apply this knowledge to your own work, an administrator seeking to understand the potential impact of OER, or a student looking at new ways to advocate for affordable books and supplies, there is something here for everybody.
I've included our session slides and the sources which were cited in the sessions as you're welcome to use or build upon the materials which were used during our sessions. Perhaps you want to do your own version of the Cafe, or maybe you just want to put together a one-shot session using various pieces of the Cafe's resources. In either, or other scenarios, you're welcome to do that. We have licensed all of our materials as CC-BY which means that we only ask for attribution acknowledgement if you use part of our videos or slides.