Open Educational Resources Initiatives at the University of Wisconsin – Superior

By Travis Mann (Librarian, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research) <mann@upjohn.org> and Emily Moran (Instructional Designer, University of Wisconsin-Superior) <emoran4@uwsuper.edu> and Stephanie Warden (Associate Director/Information Literacy Librarian, Jim Dan Hill Library, University of Wisconsin –Superior) <swarden1@uwsuper.edu>

The OER Committee within the Center for Learning, Innovation, and Collaboration (CLIC) at the Jim Dan Hill Library at the University of Wisconsin – Superior started in 2020 with scant resources in an environment that was not familiar with open educational resources. There had been attempts to promote the use and creation of these resources, but those efforts were largely ad hoc and had very little opportunity for collaboration between the CLIC and university faculty and staff. It quickly became evident that one-off workshops were not going to move the needle on the adoption and creation of OER. Things changed, however, when the library and former Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) merged in July 2020. Suddenly their faculty development funding and additional three staff members were available to focus on and create many dynamic opportunities for the creation and adoption of OER. Instead of just presenting lectures to a glass-eyed audience, we could create more authentic opportunities for participants to engage with the committee and each other, deepening their understanding and commitment to using open materials. The committee began our efforts with a sum of $7,000 to start with.

Our approach to programming for faculty and staff is to be practical and adaptable. Our goal is for participants to engage at the point at which they are most comfortable and continue honing their skills and gaining the confidence to create or adopt an OER. The programs are constructed to give entry points to learners of various expertise with OER, so they can choose to engage in activities that are ideal for beginners or for more advanced users/creators of OER. These activities were designed by the committee, and many made use of existing activities that were given an OER flavor.

One such activity, the Superior Learning Experience (SLE), is an example of an existing activity repurposed for OER. This activity is a six-week cohort of five instructors from any discipline during which monetarily incentivized participants learn about a topic and incorporate that information into a course during the following academic year. One member of our committee led a cohort focused on adopting OER during the summer of 2021 and a second cohort focused on developing an Open Pedagogy assignment during the summer of 2022. The cohort experience creates a networking opportunity between people doing instruction at the university and people who are experts in the areas of open scholarship. It also allows people to learn together and from each other, sharing concrete, real-world examples of how it can work in the field. This compensated experience often draws in new instructors and leads them to continue pursuing open educational practices.

Another instructor-focused activity that we offer is the OER Intensive Workshop. This is a compensated opportunity for participants to learn the basics about open resources, Creative Commons, and other pertinent topics. Participants are also asked to submit a review of an open textbook through the Open Education Network. This serves as an entry point for faculty and staff to learn about OER and is flexible so that participants with experience using OER can skip the basics. It gives them experience reviewing an open textbook and the opportunity to interact with open textbooks and their ancillary materials in general, which helps to address the negative stereotypes surrounding OER, such as that they are low quality. Almost half of the attendees ended up using the book they reviewed as part of the program in their classes after participating. This is, of course, no small thing, considering that for many this is their first time or one of their first times dabbling in the world of OER. In addition, this cohort program provides more networking opportunities both within and outside of the cohort. For example, one year, an instructor connected with the author of a textbook they reviewed and partnered with them on a project.

Our OER Mini-Grant Program is a compensated opportunity for instructors to explore creating or adopting textbooks that they may not otherwise explore. Faculty and staff can apply for grants including adoption, creation, and departmental, and the grants range in value from $600 to $2,000, depending on the type. Recipients are expected to meet one-on-one with librarians, who are Creative Commons certified, as they work on their projects. This program has had the biggest impact on student savings, with approximately $12,000 saved for students across classes including Appreciation and History of Music (MUS U660-101), Methods: Agency, Comm, and Macro (SWK 366)/Macro Skills (PLI 366), Reading Academic Texts (ESL 131), and Chemistry of Everyday Phenomena (CHEM 102) in 2022-23. The committee also projects a savings of $40,000 in the 2023-24 school year with the addition of classes including Introduction to Contemporary Math (MATH 112), Behavior Analysis Intervention (SPED 760), Interpersonal Communication (COMM 211), Teach Elementary/ Middle School Math II (MTHED 323), and Human Structure and Function (HLTH 264/265). In addition to the obvious benefits to the students, this activity increases instructor confidence in their own subject matter expertise and allows instructors to engage authentically with the course materials.

OER Panel Discussions hosted annually by members of the committee during Open Education Week are great opportunities for participants of our programs to detail their experiences, advocate for open textbooks, and educate their peers who may wish to learn more about OER from a trusted, local source. This event is held in the library in front of live and virtual audiences and is recorded and hosted on the library’s YouTube channel. This means participants get to showcase their real world experiences and work for themselves, the administration, and the public. Participants are generally chosen based on their participation in our other OER events, such as the Superior Learning Experience or, more often, the OER mini-grant program.

Our student-centered events are not quite as robust as our instructor-centered ones (yet), but we still endeavor to make connections with students at every opportunity. Two such opportunities occur during Open Education Week and Open Access Week. During these times, we ask students to engage with whiteboards by asking them questions such as, “How much did you spend on textbooks last semester?” which gives us anecdotal data to share with our stakeholders. These are great opportunities to strike up conversations with students that allow us to educate them on OER and learn more context for surprising data. For example, when students say they spent $0 on textbooks, this may mean they didn’t purchase the textbook due to financial hardship, they opted to not purchase the textbook because it is not used enough throughout the course to make it worth their while, or they indeed had $0 cost for the course materials because the instructors use open resources or do not require textbooks. These conversations have the added benefit of fostering collaborations with student groups, such as the student government association.

We also try to ensure that the approaches that we take to advocate for OER are centered in the reality of the students who we serve. As a result, we promote a yearly, anonymous, Qualtrics survey through a global announcement in our Learning Management System to gather information about the relationships students have with course materials. This Affordable Textbook Survey allows us to learn much about student attitudes and dispositions toward textbooks and the specific campus culture surrounding their use. It gives us valuable insight into how students are getting around textbook costs, such as by sharing, pirating, or otherwise not purchasing materials and allows us to use that data in our advocacy efforts with instructors. We also gather insight about how the cost of textbooks affects students’ academic and social lives, allowing us to focus our efforts on student quality of life as we have an institutional focus on culture of care.

Our efforts also extend to building bridges with campus administration. For example, when the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) 2022-23 Institute on OER was announced, our team was asked by our Dean of Academic Affairs to apply with a group of faculty and staff from one academic department at our institution. This was a challenging but informative project, as many of the participants were selected not necessarily because of an interest in OER, but because they were asked to do this project by a person of authority. While some were already OER advocates, some were deeply attached to paid resources for various reasons. Even so, it gave us the opportunity to work with a specific program to meet their goals and serve as a proof of concept to administration. This resulted in a departmental template that could be adapted for any department who wished to get started with OER, though it has seen limited use and success. If we were to apply to this institute again, we would be more proactive in asserting ourselves as the people with expertise who should shape the pathway forward, as well as the makeup of the team, and we would be far more expansive with our efforts and not focus on one department.

Another point of contact with administration was the writing of a 2022 OER Report for our Provost. Our committee was asked to write a short update about our progress with OER on campus. This report focused on successes and data to support the efficacy of our efforts and highlighted the background of OER efforts on campus. It included recommendations for future directions and was presented to the provost by the committee. At this meeting, the provost requested additional information from us, including highlights from the report, a three-, five-, and ten-year plan for OER on campus, and contextualizing data such as student voices and information from institutional research regarding OER. This report was only written for the Provost of our institution and, as a result, it was not shared widely. The action plans contained therein did not meet with resistance, however, so we have begun our work on our long-term goals. The committee has already made significant progress on one item, paving the way for instructors to label their classes Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) and Low Textbook Cost (LTC) in the class schedule.

Our efforts are diverse and reflect the many stakeholders who are affected by the use of OER on campus. By ensuring that our work touches instructors, students, and administration, we hope to ensure that our labors bear fruit and are inclusive to the groups who are impacted by OER use. We are persistent and consistent with our efforts and, though some endeavors are more challenging than others, we do not allow our perceived failures to derail our long-term goal of creating a campus in which open and affordable course materials are the norm, not a delightful surprise.

Another instructor-focused activity that we offer is the OER Intensive Workshop. This is a compensated opportunity for participants to learn the basics about open resources, Creative Commons, and other pertinent topics. Participants are also asked to submit a review of an open textbook through the Open Education Network. This serves as an entry point for faculty and staff to learn about OER and is flexible so that participants with experience using OER can skip the basics. It gives them experience reviewing an open textbook and the opportunity to interact with open textbooks and their ancillary materials in general, which helps to address the negative stereotypes surrounding OER, such as that they are low quality. Almost half of the attendees ended up using the book they reviewed as part of the program in their classes after participating. This is, of course, no small thing, considering that for many this is their first time or one of their first times dabbling in the world of OER. In addition, this cohort program provides more networking opportunities both within and outside of the cohort. For example, one year, an instructor connected with the author of a textbook they reviewed and partnered with them on a project.

Our OER Mini-Grant Program is a compensated opportunity for instructors to explore creating or adopting textbooks that they may not otherwise explore. Faculty and staff can apply for grants including adoption, creation, and departmental, and the grants range in value from $600 to $2,000, depending on the type. Recipients are expected to meet one-on-one with librarians, who are Creative Commons certified, as they work on their projects. This program has had the biggest impact on student savings, with approximately $12,000 saved for students across classes including Appreciation and History of Music (MUS U660-101), Methods: Agency, Comm, and Macro (SWK 366)/Macro Skills (PLI 366), Reading Academic Texts (ESL 131), and Chemistry of Everyday Phenomena (CHEM 102) in 2022-23. The committee also projects a savings of $40,000 in the 2023-24 school year with the addition of classes including Introduction to Contemporary Math (MATH 112), Behavior Analysis Intervention (SPED 760), Interpersonal Communication (COMM 211), Teach Elementary/ Middle School Math II (MTHED 323), and Human Structure and Function (HLTH 264/265). In addition to the obvious benefits to the students, this activity increases instructor confidence in their own subject matter expertise and allows instructors to engage authentically with the course materials.

OER Panel Discussions hosted annually by members of the committee during Open Education Week are great opportunities for participants of our programs to detail their experiences, advocate for open textbooks, and educate their peers who may wish to learn more about OER from a trusted, local source. This event is held in the library in front of live and virtual audiences and is recorded and hosted on the library’s YouTube channel. This means participants get to showcase their real world experiences and work for themselves, the administration, and the public. Participants are generally chosen based on their participation in our other OER events, such as the Superior Learning Experience or, more often, the OER mini-grant program.

Our student-centered events are not quite as robust as our instructor-centered ones (yet), but we still endeavor to make connections with students at every opportunity. Two such opportunities occur during Open Education Week and Open Access Week. During these times, we ask students to engage with whiteboards by asking them questions such as, “How much did you spend on textbooks last semester?” which gives us anecdotal data to share with our stakeholders. These are great opportunities to strike up conversations with students that allow us to educate them on OER and learn more context for surprising data. For example, when students say they spent $0 on textbooks, this may mean they didn’t purchase the textbook due to financial hardship, they opted to not purchase the textbook because it is not used enough throughout the course to make it worth their while, or they indeed had $0 cost for the course materials because the instructors use open resources or do not require textbooks. These conversations have the added benefit of fostering collaborations with student groups, such as the student government association.

We also try to ensure that the approaches that we take to advocate for OER are centered in the reality of the students who we serve. As a result, we promote a yearly, anonymous, Qualtrics survey through a global announcement in our Learning Management System to gather information about the relationships students have with course materials. This Affordable Textbook Survey allows us to learn much about student attitudes and dispositions toward textbooks and the specific campus culture surrounding their use. It gives us valuable insight into how students are getting around textbook costs, such as by sharing, pirating, or otherwise not purchasing materials and allows us to use that data in our advocacy efforts with instructors. We also gather insight about how the cost of textbooks affects students’ academic and social lives, allowing us to focus our efforts on student quality of life as we have an institutional focus on culture of care.

Our efforts also extend to building bridges with campus administration. For example, when the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) 2022-23 Institute on OER was announced, our team was asked by our Dean of Academic Affairs to apply with a group of faculty and staff from one academic department at our institution. This was a challenging but informative project, as many of the participants were selected not necessarily because of an interest in OER, but because they were asked to do this project by a person of authority. While some were already OER advocates, some were deeply attached to paid resources for various reasons. Even so, it gave us the opportunity to work with a specific program to meet their goals and serve as a proof of concept to administration. This resulted in a departmental template that could be adapted for any department who wished to get started with OER, though it has seen limited use and success. If we were to apply to this institute again, we would be more proactive in asserting ourselves as the people with expertise who should shape the pathway forward, as well as the makeup of the team, and we would be far more expansive with our efforts and not focus on one department.

Another point of contact with administration was the writing of a 2022 OER Report for our Provost. Our committee was asked to write a short update about our progress with OER on campus. This report focused on successes and data to support the efficacy of our efforts and highlighted the background of OER efforts on campus. It included recommendations for future directions and was presented to the provost by the committee. At this meeting, the provost requested additional information from us, including highlights from the report, a three-, five-, and ten-year plan for OER on campus, and contextualizing data such as student voices and information from institutional research regarding OER. This report was only written for the Provost of our institution and, as a result, it was not shared widely. The action plans contained therein did not meet with resistance, however, so we have begun our work on our long-term goals. The committee has already made significant progress on one item, paving the way for instructors to label their classes Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) and Low Textbook Cost (LTC) in the class schedule.

Our efforts are diverse and reflect the many stakeholders who are affected by the use of OER on campus. By ensuring that our work touches instructors, students, and administration, we hope to ensure that our labors bear fruit and are inclusive to the groups who are impacted by OER use. We are persistent and consistent with our efforts and, though some endeavors are more challenging than others, we do not allow our perceived failures to derail our long-term goal of creating a campus in which open and affordable course materials are the norm, not a delightful surprise.