Skip to main content

Sustaining an OER Initiative

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 instructor does not decide for themselves which textbook to use. This is not to say that instructors do not have academic freedom as it pertains to the resources they use in their courses.  Though the resources that are used across multiple sections will be common and decided on at the department level, each instructor can make the changes they wish to it.

Also, up to this point we have partnered with the College of Business and the College of Arts and Sciences to provide awards to instructors in their departments in addition to the awards provided to them by OU Libraries.  So far, relationships with these departments have had to be updated each grant cycle and details of the partnership have been renegotiated just as frequently. -not sustainable.  Something I would like to see happen regarding the sustainability of the OER efforts on my campus is the transition of funds primarily being awarded by the Libraries to primarily being provided by academic departments until OER has become the norm and is built into the responsibilities of all instructors. -ultimate sustainability.  To begin working on these long term relationships we have considered asking for matching funds in the award letters sent to the deans of all the colleges whose instructors are receiving awards from the Libraries.  After a year or two of this, one could hope that the colleges will see the value in taking on responsibility for awarding the OER-related efforts of their faculty without monetary awards from the Libraries.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Introduction to OER

The term "Open Educational Resources" or OER describe educational materials that include but are not limited to textbooks, videos, quizzes, articles, and websites that provide others the permission to exercise the "five Rs" of the Open Content Definition put forth by David Wiley. The five Rs themselves are ways in which OER can be used that separate them from traditional educational resources. The most trivial argument to be made in favor or OER is that they are free of cost. -freely accessible to everyone; all students and instructors regardless of geography. Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage) Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video) Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language) Remix - the right to combine the original or rev...
1 comment
Read more

Considerations for Creating OER

Before creating OER, first consider a few things. The specifics of open licenses vary but in general all OER are created in the spirit of reuse. As such, users of OER must be afforded two things in order to make full use of them. -they need the ability and the permission to exercise the 5 Rs. First, the 5 Rs themselves: Retain -   the right to   make, own, and control . . . Reuse -   the right to   use content . . . Revise -   the right to   adapt, adjust, modify, or alter . . . Remix -   the right to   . . . make something new Redistribute -   the right to   share copies . . . of OER. These points are addressed by the license applied to a work. The license should be of the "open" variety, Creative Commons licenses, and others such as the GNU Free Documentation License address the 5 Rs. Though these are common and practical, neither of these examples are as open as no license at all -putting your work in the Public Domain. On...
Post a Comment
Read more

Capstone Project Proposal

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more