Let’s Get Technical — OER Program at Middle Tennessee State University through a Tennessee Board of Regents Grant By Suzanne Mangrum (Acquisitions Librarian, Middle Tennessee State University) <suzanne.mangrum@mtsu.edu> Column Editors: Kyle Banerjee (Sr. Implementation Consultant, FOLIO Services) <kbanerjee@ebsco.com> www.ebsco.com www.folio.org and Susan J. Martin (Chair, Collection Development and Management, Associate Professor, Middle Tennessee State University) <Susan.Martin@mtsu.edu>
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pen Educational Resources (OER) have gained popularity in the last decade due to the increased focus on the retention and graduation rates in universities in the U.S. Our university sought to explore Open Educational Resources to support student success by removing cost barriers to course materials as part of our Quest for Student Success 2025 Campus Plan. I joined a group of people from across campus in early 2019 to explore OER initiatives at other schools and pursue grant opportunities. After two unsuccessful applications, we were awarded a grant from the Tennessee Board of Regents in the amount of $100,000. This article briefly explores how we organized and supported this program with some thoughts on future actions. Our grant team consists of The Vice Provost of Academic Affairs, two teaching faculty members, two Instructional Designers, and one librarian. We also recruited an advisory committee with members from each college, particularly college leaders. This group helps us develop a broad-based understanding of opportunities and threats and disseminate information across campus.
A full version of our grant is on our website, https://www. mtsu.edu/oer/. Our project outcomes are as follows:
For Faculty: • A deeper understanding of how OER can address the challenges that face underrepresented students • Broader awareness of OER • A recognition that equity in OER requires the engagement of underrepresented faculty • The adoption, adaptation, and creation of OER for MTSU classes to provide a more equitable educational environment • Engagement of underrepresented faculty to vet, adapt, and produce OER
For Students: • Spend less money on textbooks and required course materials • Have first-day access to course materials • Experience increased course completion, persistence, and course grades • Perform better in gateway courses and those with high D-F-W rates Although students are the primary beneficiaries of OER in the classroom, the effort to get there is laid on faculty. As this audience knows well, publishing is not free, and the amount of work placed on faculty and support structures is significant. Therefore, the majority of our grant was used to provide minigrants to faculty to convert traditional curriculum to OER. Our
42 Against the Grain / June 2022
grant funding structure is as follows: • Small-Scale Alteration. Projects involve learning material revision projects for a single course. Typical projects result in replacing an existing costly textbook, lab manual, or electronic homework/test platform with an OER alternative of similar quality. ° Minimum Award: $500. Maximum Award: $2,000. ° $500 maximum per team member • Medium-Scale Conversion. Projects result in OER adoption by multiple instructors and include replacing all or nearly all student learning material in a course with OER. ° Minimum Award: $1,000. Maximum Award: $5,000. ° $1,000 maximum per team member. • Large-Scale Transformation. Projects result in the adoption, adaptation, or creation of OER materials for gateway courses that affect many students annually. These projects include creating faculty development materials and should also result in courses that can be easily adapted for online delivery. ° Minimum Award: $3,000. Maximum Award: $7,500 ° $1,500 maximum per team member We were awarded the grant on December 18, 2020, with a deadline to complete our program by December 31, 2021. It was known from the outset that it would be necessary to request a no-cost extension of one semester. This allowed us time to market, educate, and recruit faculty to apply for the grant in the spring of 2021, use the summer of 2021 to convert courses to OER, pilot new OER courses in the Fall of 2021, and finally work on assessment and reporting in the Spring of 2022. Since we did not have time to host year-long faculty learning communities, we decided to do a series of workshops in the spring of 2021. We began to advertise our grant and workshop series through campus and local news outlets. The workshops began in February of 2021 and were designed to take faculty through the process of OER discovery to find reliable OER for their curriculum as well as the process of adapting and creating OER. We also wanted to market and educate the faculty on the specifics of the mini-grants. Our workshop series covered the following information. These workshops, as well as others, are posted on our website. • OER basics — facts and fallacies • Exploring the process of finding and then adopting, adapting, or creating OER • A discussion on how OER leads to positive changes in the classroom by allowing the practice of open pedagogy and vetting OER for specific courses
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