Open Education Resources at RISD
Marketing plan for the Fleet Library to promote open education resources to RISD professors.
Where We Are: RISD’s Current OER Promotion:
To this point, RISD has shown moderate engagement in supporting faculty use of OER. RISD is a participant in the Rhode Island Office of Innovation’s Open Textbook Initiative (OTI), a five year program begun in 2016 that aims to gather OER participation in higher-ed institutions such that Rhode Island students save a total of $5 million in textbook expenses (Fleet Library, 2021; RIOI). RISD’s Fleet Library has also created a subject guide introduction to OER for supporting faculty in their instructional use of OER. This guide offers an introductory definition of OER, information about the Open Movement and open licensing, as well as links to OER search tools, OER creation informational guides, and a prompt to contact a designated research and instruction librarian if interested in developing OER (Fleet Library, 2021). RISD does not have an official OER policy, an OER repository of their own, or integration of OER into the RISD repository.
Where We Want to Go: OER Promotion Focus:
RISD’s promotion of OER to this point has largely focused on integrating externally created OER (OER created by non-RISD faculty) into RISD faculty’s instruction, versus supporting RISD faculty’s own creation of OER. The former is understandably a precursor to the later. Using externally-created OER in their classes allows faculty to grow familiar and comfortable with what OER include, how OER are shared, conventions of authorship in OER, and how OER can be used and individually adapted in courses. With increased familiarity and trust of OER quality and conventions, we hope RISD faculty will feel comfortable moving into the next step of creating their own OER. Moving forward with OER, Fleet Library will thus focus OER promotion efforts on helping RISD faculty take this step of creating their own OER content.
OER Promotion Projects
We recognize that some faculty concerns about creating OER may include caution around materials licensing and permission parameters, lack of financial and/or academic status compensation for creating OER, time cost, and OER resulting in their replacement by unspecialized instructors (Mossley, 2013). Relatedly, faculty buy-in to incorporating OER is encouraged through clear communication about OER standards, administrative support, financial incentive, support in scaffolding OER development to existing workflows, public recognition, and continued education about OER broadly. We have identified the following as OER promotion projects that will both alleviate faculty hesitation around creating OER and amplify benefits for faculty creating OER:
Establish clear, institution-specific OER standards through creation of a written RISD OER policy: Faculty buy-in to creating OER is hampered by the lack of an explicit RISD OER policy indicating RISD’s stance on open teaching resource sharing. Such a policy would particularly detail the institution’s legal relationship to faculty’s teaching materials and, hopefully, alleviate faculty concerns around whether they are within their contracts to create and share OER.
Goal criteria: This goal will be met when an official copy of the OER policy is uploaded to the Fleet Library website, included under the OER subject guide, and emailed to department administration for dissemination to faculty. Further, the Fleet Library will host a webinar on the new policy, to be recorded and shared under an FAQs section of the OER policy webpage.
Supported by: This policy will be created with support from RISD’s two research and instruction librarians (one of whom is also RISD’s OTI representative), the Dean of Libraries, departmental deans, and relevant library-external administration.
Gain OER buy-in from academic department administration through one-on-one informational meetings with department heads: Many faculty will be hard pressed to create OER unless they know such work will be supported by their department heads. Administrative support of OER begins with administration understanding how OER can be a selling point for the university. Talking points with administration may include OER as a form of publicity for the university, support in teaching students a marketable skill of collaborative knowledge building, a step to improved course satisfaction and improved university rankings, and a way to create higher retention rates (potential students will be able to preview classes before enrolling) (THEA, 2014).
Goal assessment: Informal qualitative data from those conducting the informational meetings will be useful in considering the success of this initiative, but the true test is in whether the department heads enact any changes in attitude or policies following the meeting. Those leading conversations with department heads may ask for specific action items from the department head (e.g. send email to faculty about support of OER); in this case, initiative success could be measure by how many of the action items the department head completes, how many departments complete any action items, etc. Alternatively, faculty may be surveyed at the start and end of the semester on their perceptions of OER support.
Supported by: This initiative will be led by the subject liaisons, who will meet with their subjects’ department heads.
Offer faculty financial incentive to create OER, provided through library research micro-grants: The library will use a percentage of the funds normally allocated to purchasing reserve copies of textbooks for a research micro-grant fund. This fund will offer honorariums to instructors opting to create or curate OER for their courses in lieu of asking students to purchase textbooks.
Goal assessment: We will assess faculty engagement with this initiative through number of applications submitted to the grant, departmental distribution of those applications, as well as frequency of queries about the grant as recorded by subject liaisons, reference librarians, and research and instruction librarians.
Supported by: This fund will be officially implemented by the Dean of Libraries and spearheaded by the subject liaisons, who will be responsible for publicizing the fund to their relevant departments’ faculty.
Guide faculty in scaffolding creation of OER to existing workflows through a semester-long library workshop series: A primary concern of faculty about creating OER is the added time cost on their already busy schedules. This is quite a valid hesitation, but one we hope may be lessened by demonstrating ways in which creating OER is more of a pivot of professors’ current instructional practices and less a reinventing the wheel. Fleet Library will offer three workshops over the course of the semester on ways in which creating OER may be scaffolded into professors’ teaching workflows. We hope the workshops may additionally promote OER creating through connecting instructors with other faculty interested in OER.
Goal Assessment: Success of this series will be measured by workshop sign-up, workshop attendance, and departmental distribution of both.
Supported by: Workshops will be led by the research and instruction librarians.
Provide faculty creating OER with public recognition through bi-weekly features on library website and in library newsletter: While a modest compensation, offering a selection of RISD faculty creating OER a spotlight via the library website and newsletter does create some publicity for the faculty that might then be shared with colleagues and administration. In the longer term, we hope to additionally create a RISD OER repository to offer a central location for people seeking OER created by RISD faculty.
Goal Assessment: We would be less focused here on readership of the OER spotlights than on the faculty’s experiences of having that spotlight. Assessment of this project would thus be through qualitative feedback from the faculty featured, either through a survey or a brief email correspondence.
Supported by: These features would be created by library staff assistants, and would be an excellent learning opportunity for library student workers looking to learn more about interviewing, writing, and OER.
Further Steps:
To continue promoting OER visibility, credibility, and dissemination, OER (broadly as a topic and specific resources) will continue to be incorporated where possible into library reference transactions and library classroom instruction sessions. Increased appearances of OER in resource recommendations to professors and in resources used by students in papers turned in to faculty will increase faculty’s familiarity with OER.
Additionally, it will be useful to assess the overall success of these goal projects cumulatively. Faculty may be surveyed on their use of OER in their courses and their own creation of OER (results compared to survey administered at beginning of semester). Quantitative data may be gathered on number of professors creating OER, time spent creating teaching resources, number of OER assigned in course reading list, requests for library course reserve textbooks, and departmental breakdowns of the above.
References
Fleet Library. (2021, April 1). Open Educational Resources (OER). Research Guides at Rhode
Island School of Design. https://risd.libguides.com/c.php?g=741319&p=5851118
The Higher Education Academy. (2014). Open Education Resources: An Introduction for
Managers and Policy Makers.
Mossley, D. (2013). Open Educational Resources and Open Education. The Higher Education
Academy.
Rhode Island Office of Innovation. (n.d.). Open Textbook Initiative. Rhode Island Office of
Innovation. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from
https://www.innovate.ri.gov/open-textbooks
I have neither given nor received aid while working on this assignment. I have completed the graded portion BEFORE looking at anyone else's work on this assignment. Signed Emilie Menzel