This document provides actionable goals for developing a sustainable open educational resources (OER) initiative at Trinity College. Open educational resources are teaching, learning, and research resources that are free of cost, access, and permission barriers because they reside in the public domain or have open licenses.
The barriers to student success created by rising textbook costs have been increasingly viewed as a problem in higher education that would benefit from a solution in the form of open education. At the state level, this is evidenced by Connecticut becoming one of 20 states to join the U.S. Department of Education’s #GoOpen initiative to support the use of OER in a K-12 setting, and the recent passage of a broad budget bill (HB 7424) that created the Connecticut OER Coordinating Council, which is tasked with encouraging college faculty to develop and adopt OER.
Much of the push for OER in higher education has centered on public institutions but private colleges and universities like Trinity College are not immune to the barriers presented by rising textbook costs. Indeed, the call for an OER initiative at Trinity has come largely from our students, thus demonstrating that we are not exempt from concerns about textbook affordability.
Historically, Trinity’s student population has been predominantly affluent, but this is gradually changing. In recent years, as a part of its new Summit strategic plan and equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives, the college has made a concerted effort to recruit a more socially and economically diverse student body and to foster an inclusive community. In 2013, for example, Trinity joined 10 other colleges and universities in signing on to the Say Yes to Education Compact to signify its commitment to making a Trinity education accessible and affordable to all. As a result of these efforts, the most recent class of Trinity students is the most diverse in our institution’s history with higher percentages of international students, first generation students, transfer and non-traditional aged students, low-income students, and students of color than ever before.
The Summit strategic plan identifies goals, objectives, and strategic initiatives designed to ensure that we support all our students once they arrive on campus. Our OER initiative advances the college's efforts to enhance student access, equity, and opportunity by reducing the financial barriers that keep some of our students from accessing the full Trinity educational experience. The pandemic and the resulting move to online learning has magnified and deepened existing inequalities in access to education, which includes access to course materials, and heightened the importance of OER in reducing these barriers to student success. Beyond issues of access and equity, OER enabled open pedagogy allows faculty to engage in the kinds of innovative pedagogical practices promoted in our campus strategic plan.
In collaboration with The Office of the Dean of Faculty and the StudentPIRG, the Trinity College library established a mini grant to encourage faculty adoption of OER. Faculty receive a $500 stipend to identify and review OER and an additional $1,000 if they adopt and incorporate OER into a course. This action plan builds on these efforts by offering additional strategies for increasing awareness, engagement, and use of OER on our campus.
The action plan includes SMART goals, a program timeline, a budget, an outreach and communication plan, an evaluation and assessment plan with key metrics for measuring success, and an environmental scan in the form of a SWOT analysis. The various components of this plan are built around four strategic priorities:
Determine where we are in terms of need, perception, and use of OER
Identify model programs for benchmarking and developing external partnerships
Develop a communication and marketing strategy to raise awareness and align OER with broader campus initiatives around student success and equity, diversity, and inclusion
Develop a sustainable OER initiative by building institutional support
Implementation of the goals identified in this plan will help to move our burgeoning OER initiative into a campus wide, sustainable OER program that advances the strategic plan of the college by supporting student success, equitable access to education, and innovative pedagogical practices.