Final Presentation Write-Up: Examining Recent OER Outreach Initiatives Across Institutions
For my final presentation, I decided to focus on providing a survey of recent (within the past five years) OER outreach initiatives at a variety of institutions, in an effort to parse the myriad differing factors that go into the creation of such initiatives, and to identify some common trends in the decision-making processes underpinning them. In particular, I wanted to gauge how these kinds of initiatives vary from institution to institution: what differing challenges do librarians (and their collaborators) face at, say, an R1 research university as opposed to a small liberal arts college? What exactly did these institutions wish to emphasize about OERs in their respective initiatives, and what forms of outreach did they decide to center in their work? What did their results look like—in particular, how did they choose to assess the success of their initiatives—and what major takeaways or lessons did they derive from their experiences? For the purposes of answering this final question in particular, I decided to focus on reports on OER initiatives specifically authored by the librarians engaged in the initiatives themselves (ranging in level of formality), as I felt that doing so would enable me not just to ascertain a general overview of what was done in each initiative, but also to get an understanding of how these librarians’ attitudes towards OERs might vary from institution to institution. Keeping in mind the time limit on our presentations, I am focusing on three initiatives undertaken, respectively, by the University of Texas at Austin, Ripon College in Wisconsin, and a collaborative effort undertaken by four universities funded by the Duke Endowment (Duke University, Furman University, Davidson College, and Johnson C. Smith University). These three initiatives cover a wide swath of institutions, including a large public research university, a large private university, multiple small liberal arts colleges, and an HBCU. Were I to take a more detailed look into OER outreach initiatives at higher education institutions in the future, I might expand this investigation into looking also at community colleges, or I might focus on discipline-specific OER outreach efforts.[1]
This write-up follows a similar structure to my presentation, albeit with more details included, such as a direct quotes from the reports. In the first section, I provide an overview of each initiative that covers the following areas:
· Context surrounding the institution, including size, educational focus, and pre-existing support for OERs or open education more broadly
· Library staff and others (if applicable) involved in planning the initiative
· The stated purpose or goal of the initiative(s)
· The details of the initiative(s) undertaken (i.e., what was done?)
· Assessment details
· Ultimate lessons/takeaways
· Miscellaneous noteworthy features
In the second section, I briefly outline the key differences from initiative to initiative (most of which, as one might guess, hinge on larger, institutional differences) as well as note interesting commonalities that span all three of these OER outreach initiatives. In providing this close reading of these initiative reports, I hope to make clear some key expectations a particular institution should have in mind when planning an OER outreach initiative of its own, as well as distinguish what trends in these kinds of institutions are—and are not—dependent on the type of institution undertaking them.
I. Overview of each initiative report
A. University of Texas at Austin (2020) – Colleen Lyon, Gina Bastone, and Sarah Brandt[2]
1. Institutional context: “UT-Austin is a research-intensive university, and many of the strategic initiatives on campus are focused on research endeavors. UT has 3,722 total faculty, with 1,858 tenured or tenure-track, and 1,854 nontenure-track. We have 51,050 students, 10,933 of whom are graduate students.” In addition to this basic overview of the university, the report’s authors also make clear that, prior to the undertaking of this initiative, there was a significant degree of existing support for open education broadly at the university, if not for OERs specifically across campus:
Within the library, we have a scholarly communication librarian with open education as one of her areas of responsibility. Our liaison librarians do not have open education as part of their job descriptions, but many open education activities are related to their jobs, including scholarly communication and instructional support. The Libraries’ vice provost and director has a special interest in the open agenda and has provided enthusiastic support and encouragement for our efforts and works hard to educate and inform administrators at UT. UT is also home to a national foreign language resource center, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL), which creates and maintains OER about language learning…there isn’t a campus-wide initiative to increase OER adoption. Tenure-track faculty are not necessarily opposed to OER and more affordable options for students, but since they have so many different priorities (securing grant funding, research and publishing, teaching, service) it can be difficult for them to find the time needed to totally convert courses to OER. Tenure and promotion still heavily prioritize traditional publishing and grant funding.
2. Library staff involved in planning:
· Colleen Lyon, head of scholarly communication
· Gina Bastone, humanities librarian for English Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies
· Sarah Brandt, librarian for first-year programs
3. Stated purpose/goal: “increas[ing] awareness of open educational resources (OER) on our campus.”
4. Details of initiative(s) undertaken:
· Development of working group to oversee other deliverables of the initiative (involving librarians and faculty)
· Discussions about OERs between working group and student government representatives
· Five on-campus workshops primarily targeting faculty, library staff, and graduate students (small in size in order to allow for “hands-on work and personal attention”)
· Fundraising for an OER librarian position
5. Assessment details
· Recorded number of workshop participants (120)
· Surveys from workshops, in which participants rated their own knowledge level and level of comfort explaining OERs to others
· Recorded success in receiving grant to fund a five-year OER librarian position
6. Ultimate lessons/takeaways: “With the success of our workshop series, work with student government, and other initiatives, we are well positioned for future efforts around awareness and adoption of OER”
7. Miscellaneous noteworthy features:
· significant pre-existing support for open initiatives, especially as it relates to their affordability; support of library administration
· emphasis on appealing to faculty specifically is not as strong as in other initiatives; rather, campus community as a whole is prioritized, with the report emphasizing the library's work with student government representatives just as much as it does work with faculty, if not more so
· Existing institutional interest in inclusive access
· Workshops involved showcasing faculty who already employed OERs in their instruction
B. Ripon College (2021) – Karlyn Schumacher
1. Institutional context: “Ripon College is located in eastern Wisconsin, with approximately 800 undergraduates, 52 full-time and 20 part-time faculty, and 82 full-time and 20 part-time staff. Ripon is known for its personalized approach to liberal arts education and takes pride in its support of first-generation students, 48% of its student population in 2018…The library’s small size—2 full-time librarians, 1 full-time staff member, and a plethora of student assistants—means that we all wear many hats… It was difficult to imagine what an OER initiative could look like at a place as small as Ripon, with very few library staff, no center for teaching and learning, and no instructional designers to speak of. A handful of Ripon faculty already used OER in their courses, but no support or initiatives existed on a larger scale.”
2. Library staff involved in planning: Karlyn Schumacher, access services librarian (“I knew that I was limited to a budget of $0, no additional staff, and little time outside of my primary job duties to focus on OER advocacy”)
3. Stated purpose/goal: “advocat[ing] for OER on my campus as just one person…consist[ing] of small actions taken whenever possible and in an admittedly haphazard fashion”
4. Details of initiative(s) undertaken:
· Creation of OER research guide
· Email campaigns
· “Created an impact tracking spreadsheet”
· Giving library talks
· “Created a video featuring faculty experiences with OER, and assisted faculty in finding OER and affordable educational resources (AER) for their courses”
· “Embedd[ing] OER in our LMS [library mission statement]”
· “Highlighting the benefits of OER for all students, but especially for Pell-eligible students, first-generation students, and those from racial and ethnic minority groups”
· Surveyed students about textbook affordability in order to “contextualize the need for OER and [give] our faculty a glimpse of the financial strain and stress that textbook costs place on all of our students.”
5. Assessment details: “In the Spring 2021 semester, 12 Ripon College faculty members used OER, library ebooks, and similar affordable materials in their courses, with an estimated maximum savings of $23,605.54. The number of faculty who plan to use OER and AER in their Fall 2021 courses has grown to 15. Many students and faculty who used OER this year speak positively about their experiences with these resources, which gives me hope that interest and adoption will continue to grow.”
6. Ultimate lessons/takeaways:
· “For others employed at extremely small institutions, be realistic about what could work with the resources you have… As much as I wanted to create campus-wide OER initiatives right away, I recognized the constraints surrounding me and that I would have to set my sights on smaller goals to make an impact.”
· “Think about steps you can take at your institution to promote OER that do not feel like huge asks for faculty and be realistic about probable levels of faculty time and involvement as you plan your OER efforts.”
7. Miscellaneous noteworthy features:
· Focus on challenges faced by liberal arts college libraries in terms of OER outreach, including few resources on which to base efforts, as well as some advantages (“It has been challenging to connect with faculty due to the pandemic, but Ripon’s small size and personal atmosphere make it a little easier to connect and collaborate, even now”)
· Focus on developing OER outreach as a way to advance social equity at an institution
C. Collaborative initiative undertaken by Duke Endowment-funded institutional libraries (2016-2017) – report compiled by participating librarians at Furman University[3]
1. Institutional context: Somewhat uniquely, this initiative was undertaken collaboratively by four universities, all with different research needs and differing levels of pre-existing open education support:
· Duke University, an R1 private research university
· Davidson College, a private liberal arts college
· Furman University, a private liberal arts university
· Johnson C. Smith University, a private HBCU
2. Library staff involved in planning: Various librarians across all four campuses; at Duke, the effort was led by Haley Walton, librarian for open scholarship, and Kim Duckett, head of Research & Instructional Services
3. Stated purpose/goal: Several, as quoted from the report:
· Increasing knowledge of OER among librarians.
· Increasing awareness of OER among faculty on campus.
· Assessing campus knowledge and climate regarding Open Access and OER.
· Informing the development of future and/or expanded OER initiatives supported by the libraries.
· Connecting librarians at different institutions with a shared interest in supporting Open Access and OER.
· Collection and analysis of OER information from several institutions to identify larger trends and interest in higher education.
· Maximizing resource utility by pooling training and funding across institutions, while still facilitating a program that best suited the needs of each individual campus.
4. Details of initiative(s) undertaken:
· Librarians “organized a Train the Trainer Workshop, where an OER expert [William Cross, Director of the Copyright and Digital Scholarship Center at NCSU] educated the librarians on the benefits and limitations of open resources, offered hands-on experience with locating and evaluating OER, provided tips for engaging faculty, and facilitated a brainstorming session on implementing a successful faculty OER review program… Two librarians from each institution attended the workshop, which was held in the James B. Duke Memorial Library of Johnson C. Smith University.”
· Implementation of the “Faculty Review Program”:
o At all institutions, participating faculty would:
§ “Attend a workshop or one-on-one consultation with a librarian”
§ “Sign a consent form to participate”
§ “Complete a written review” of one or more OERs of their choosing, relating to their discipline
§ “Submit personal information” to become eligible to receive a $250 stipend
§ “Complete a follow-up survey”
· Promotion of the Review Program varied from institution to institution depending on existing support/awareness of OER, and the popularity of workshops vs. one-on-one librarian meetings varied from institution to institution, too
5. Assessment details:
· - “Across all 4 institutions, 28 faculty members completed 37 professional reviews of OER. Johnson C. Smith and Furman had robust faculty response, with 11 and 10 faculty participants, respectively. Duke and Davidson had fewer responses, with 3 and 4 faculty participants, respectively, on each campus. All faculty ranks were represented across all four campuses… with Assistant Professor and Instructor being the most common. The participants also represented a wide variety of disciplines and departments… though the social sciences dominated. Also of note: ten of the participants taught in non-traditional undergraduate programs. Introductory level material and textbooks were the most popular content levels and format, but there was actually a good bit of variety in both of these areas”
· - “Faculty participants were also asked how they might use the resource, with the ability to choose more than one option. Participants indicated that they would not use the resource at all in its current form with only four OER. The majority indicated that they would use it as supplementary material and several indicated that they would replace their textbook with the resource… When they were asked about changes to the resources, suggestions ranged from updating and expanding content coverage to supplemental resources such as bibliographies, timelines, and glossaries. With these changes, only two resources were still listed as not having a potential use for the faculty member.”
· - “As of June 2017, 23 of the 28 faculty participants representing all four institutions had completed a program feedback survey… There was a significant difference in the pre-program knowledge ranking (M=2.22, SD=1.04) and the post-program knowledge ranking (M=4.04, SD=0.77); t(22)=-7.59, p=0.01). There was also a significant difference in the pre-program experience ranking (M=2.09, SD=1.04) and the post-program experience ranking (M=3.91, SD=0.79); t(22)=-6.72, p=0.01). This supports a finding that the program met its stated goals of increasing OER knowledge and experience on the campuses… Interestingly, while faculty ranked their own OER knowledge before the program fairly low (Average rank=2.2; 1=None, 5=Expert), they perceived the knowledge amongst their colleagues as moderate (Average rank=3.2; 1=None, 5=Expert). Faculty participants also indicated that they were more likely than not to adopt the OER they reviewed for the program (Average rank=3.6; 1=Not at all, 5=Guaranteed) and to consider OER in future course development/revision (Average rank=4.4; 1=Not at all, 5=Guaranteed). The most consistent challenge to adopting OER was time and discovering appropriate resources. The program itself was well received, with faculty ranking indicating general satisfaction with the Review Form and the entire Faculty Review Program. The most common suggestion for improving the program was to increase recruitment of participants.”
· - The report also notes some specific incidents of greater engagement with OERs among certain individual faculty members involved in the initiative
6. Ultimate lessons/takeaways: The report generally finds that the major goals of the initiative were met, with one exception:
When they first proposed this project, the TDEL librarians envisioned it as a first step in building future OER programs to support faculty adoption. In their proposal they wrote: “[This program] will help build the infrastructure and knowledge base needed for successful long-term OER adoption on all four campuses.”… Unfortunately, at the end of the TDEL Program, it became clear that a majority of the institutions have neither the staff resources nor the time to develop formal OER initiatives at their libraries. There are several factors involved in this decision including staff turnover, changes in staff responsibilities, shifting priorities, and new/unexpected responsibilities. These factors coupled with the fact that scholarly communication is not the primary nor even the secondary job responsibility for any of the TDEL librarians, made it difficult to plan and manage future OER programs.
7. Miscellaneous noteworthy features:
· Advocated collaboration in OER outreach across multiple institutions of different types
· Offered monetary stipend to participants
· By virtue of being a collaborative initiative, highlighted the differing OER needs faced by different institutions within the report
II. Discussion
These three initiatives, with their differing aims related to OER outreach, as well as their setting at different institutions, naturally reveal the wide breadth of contemporary OER outreach initiatives at colleges and universities in the United States. As is made plain in the above comparison, especially between the University of Texas at Austin initiative and the Ripon College initiative, the most major differences between these efforts have much to do with the size of the institution (including the size of the library) and the level of existing support for open education (not necessarily for OERs specifically, however). The initiative organized at UT-Austin was much more robust (and more formalized) in terms of its organizational plan, implementation, and level of participation, while the Ripon College initiative was much smaller in terms of scale, and its implementation, to borrow the words of Schumacher, more “haphazard.” Still, the fact that both of these initiatives report a degree of success in increasing awareness and interest in OERs at their respective institutions would indicate that their differing choices and levels of formality were appropriate for their differing settings. Indeed, that the most significant differences between the two relate primarily to scale seems to show that the actual overarching methods and priorities for OER outreach actually tend to be quite similar across institutions; it simply appears that their implementation has to necessarily vary based on the size of the institution and the resources available to it (the number available library staff appears especially crucial). This conclusion is borne out by the collaborative Duke Endowment initiative, which generally considered itself a success despite applying the same philosophy and method of OER outreach across four very different campuses; while this initiative acknowledged the great differences in size and educational priorities between these universities, it found, seemingly successfully, that it needed only to account for these differences in mostly superficial ways (promotion of the initiative, and the workshop/one-on-one participation distinctions).
Indeed, the overarching similarities that exist between these three very different initiatives can likely tell us a great deal about what is assumed to be important, and what is generally prioritized, in contemporary OER outreach initiatives. For one, initiatives appear to mostly prioritize increasing awareness and interest in OERs, rather than, say, achieving concrete, quantitative increases in OER use or creation by institutional faculty and staff. While successfully increasing interest and awareness will likely lead to higher levels of OER use and creation on a particular campus—and some of the quantitative results of these initiatives explicitly indicate this—it is telling that the architects of these initiatives generally appear to find the specific goal of simply raising awareness or interest to be more attainable or workable. Assuming that the general interest level in OERs continues to rise, it would be interesting to see if this pattern of prioritizing awareness shifts to a pattern of prioritizing concrete levels of use and creation.
One other commonality worth commenting upon is the emphasis on reaching faculty that is present across all three initiatives. While two of these initiatives (UT-Austin and the Duke Endowment) do mention a need to increase awareness of OERs among other community members at their institutions, namely students and library staff, all three studies generally assume that the primary focus of outreach should be on faculty and their level of interest in OERs. It seems reasonable that this would be the case, given that most of the primary benefits of OER use—that it cuts costs and lessens the financial burden on students—hinges upon faculty including them in their teaching, but nonetheless, given that all three initiatives remark upon the generally low levels of OER awareness among all community members at their respective institutions, I find it worth mentioning that the importance of faculty awareness specifically is so heavily emphasized.
In all, there is much to be learned from examining the differences and similarities between OER outreach initiatives at different institutions. As mentioned, this write-up only scratches the surface of the subject by only looking at three of these initiatives, but even so, it becomes clear immediately upon studying these reports that there are some clear patterns in OER outreach, even across institutions of differing size and educational objectives.
References
The Duke Endowment Libraries (TDEL) Collaborative Project Final Report (July 2017). Internal report circulated among the libraries of Duke University, Davidson College, Furman University, and Johnson C. Smith University. Retrieved December 8, 2021. Copy available upon request.
Lyon, C., Bastone, G., & Brandt, S. (2020). Opening up to OER: Creating Open Education Awareness on a large campus. College & Research Libraries News, 81(6). Retrieved December 8, 2021, from https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/24482/32321
Schumacher, K. (2021, October 6). Starting From Scratch: OER at a Small Liberal Arts College. OER & Beyond. Retrieved December 8, 2021, from https://oerandbeyond.org/starting-from-scratch-oer-at-a-small-liberal-arts-college/
[1] In fact, my original intended focus for this presentation was to be on humanities-specific OER outreach efforts. Ultimately, however, I felt I could draw richer conclusions for the sake of this presentation from looking at broader outreach initiatives.
[2] All of the information and quotations compiled here, unless otherwise specified, are derived from the initiative report itself (see references section for full citation)
[3] Unlike the other two reports discussed here, the final report for this initiative is not publicly available. I obtained the text of the report from Kim Duckett and Haley Walton, the Duke librarians involved in the initiative, through my internship. The report does not list authors, but I was told by Duckett and Walton that it was authored by the participating librarians at Furman University. I can provide a copy of the report if you would like verification of these quotations.