Cody Taylor: SPARC OER Leadership Program

As my capstone project in the SPARC Leadership Program I will pursue the conversion of a class that spans multiple sections, taught by several instructors from assigning a costly resource to using OER. I understand that textbooks used in this type of class are picked not by individual instructors rather by a decision-making entity like a department chair or a committee. Through an iterative, systematic approach I hope to convince this entity to switch from using costly traditional resources to OER for use in classes taking place in 2019. Relationship building and needs assessments will be performed in the first half of 2018. Maintaining those relationships, the remainder of 2018 will consist of work done to modify or supplement an existing resource to fit the needs of the body of instructors who will be using it. It is worth mentioning that I do plan on targeting Calculus classes. At this stage I have Calculus in mind because of the existing relationship the OER team of which I am a ...

The OER initiative of OU Libraries is entering its fifth year and up to this point it has only awarded individual instructors for adopting OER.  One thing that we have realized is that these instructors do not teach the classes they received awards for every time those courses are offered.  This is problematic given that the goal of the Libraries' initiative is to save students money.  In order to maximize the award amounts offered by the Libraries it is important to us that the resources adopted as part of our program are used as frequently as possible.  The project I have proposed as part of the SPARC Leadership Program is to attempt to convince the Mathematics department at my campus to switch from costly resources to OER to be used in the Calculus sequence.  It would seem as if the textbook used in the Calculus sequence is decided at the department level.  This is the type of structure that makes most sense to encourage the use of OER in given that each...