OER Fellowship, Year 1 2024-2025

This is well received and noted. Work begins! 

Thank you.

OER Goals & Purpose: Why are you doing this OER Project and what are you hoping to accomplish? 

I want to make OER integration as easy as possible for as many people as possible as quickly as possible! I’m hoping to expand the on the work I’ve done with the Open Resource Catalog (a place to look for places to look for OER) and the Texas Core to Open work I did last year to align TXST Common Core Courses to their TCCNS and a variety of open and open adjacent resources. I’m currently debating between: 

•  Adding some alignments for more high enrollment, high Drop/Withdraw/Fail courses, and high impact courses 

• Develop TEA and THECB alignments for bridging the K12 to Higher Education content 

• Adding an ‘OER Operationalization’ section that includes things like templates for outreach, email campaigns, and letters of support for faculty and staff that can be included promotion packets  

Audience: Who are you designing this OER Project for and what are their needs and preferences? 

I am developing this OER Project for librarians, faculty, and staff supporting OER, though it could be used by students to supplement their course materials. I’ll likely need to do more research, but the needs I have seen/heard that I am attempting to address is a faculty or staff interest in OER (though no time to find it on their own) and experiences where librarians often curate content as consultations, or individual emails.  

OER Goals & Purpose: Why are you doing this OER Project and what are you hoping to accomplish?

South Plains College is taking action to increase the use of Open Educational Resources (OER), starting with dual credit courses, as required by Texas House Bill 8 (2023). This initiative aims to cut student costs and promote learning equity. We're focusing on three key areas: a training course, a community of practice, and data collection to measure impact.

Audience: Who are you designing this OER Project for and what are their needs and preferences?

We are creating surveys for students and faculty to help focus our efforts but initial faculty groups will include Dual Credit and High Impact courses.

OER Goals & Purpose: Why are you doing this OER Project and what are you hoping to accomplish?

This OER project is designed to address the needs identified by faculty in the department and college wide who struggle to find quality resources for adoption. Our department lacks the time and physical bandwidth to create resources, edit existing resources, and/or create qualtiy ancillary material. This project will begin the process of creating set standards for OER resources in the department and increase faculty adoption rates. The goal is for these standards to be adopted across the college.

Audience: Who are you designing this OER Project for and what are their needs and preferences?

The objectives will be aligned with those of our department (i.e., course description, learning objectives, etc.) however, the goal is widespread use. In order for this to happen the resource must meet the needs of a diverse audience (both faculty and students), and be in an easily sharable format. 

OER Goals & Purpose: Why are you doing this OER Project and what are you hoping to accomplish?

One aspect about OER that I really like is that it taps into faculty expertise. Content experts in various disciplines who are also involved in teaching have the potential to create a very relevant textbook. I would like to learn more about this process. 

Audience: Who are you designing this OER Project for and what are their needs and preferences?

I am still thinking about this, but students are a primary focus area—creating materials they will find useful and based on the questions and issues they raise in class. As I read the research reports, I'm also becoming aware of the challenges we face in terms of admin level support for OER in meaningful ways and providing incentives to create and retain OER.

OER Goals & Purpose: Why are you doing this OER Project and what are you hoping to accomplish?

I want to create an OER champions strategy document that will lead to developing OER champions as change agents to eventually empower faculty members to lead the adoption, promotion, and integration of Open Educational Resources (OERs) within an institution. The primary goal of such an initiative would be sustainable open education to enhance teaching and learning practices and create a supportive culture around open education. The champions would serve as role models and mentors to improve the quality of teaching and learning by utilizing freely accessible, customizable, and up-to-date resources.

Audience: Who are you designing this OER Project for and what are their needs and preferences?

The primary audience for this project includes faculty members, librarians, instructional designers, administrators, and students.

Faculty:

Need - professional development, technical support, resources, incentives, and collaboration.

Preferences - User-friendly platforms, evidence of effectiveness, peer support, clear OER guidelines

Librarians:

Need - Require training, resource management tools, collaboration, funding, and assessment tools

Preference - clear roles, professional growth, recognition

Instructional Designers:

Need - Integration strategies, technical training, collaboration, resource development tools

Preference - Flexible design models, access to high-quality resources, supportive community

Students:

Need - affordable resources, accessible formats, quality content, ease of use, engaging materials

Preference - Customization options, integrated learning tools through the LMS, feedback mechanisms, community support

Administrators:

Need - cost-benefit analysis, policy development, strategic planning, compliance

Preference - Clear metrics for quality assurance, scalability, risk management, success stories

I see this project in phases. Phase I is to develop a strategy document and phase II will be to implement by now having the champions on board later on.

OER Goals & Purpose: Why are you doing this OER Project and what are you hoping to accomplish?

The Texas Core Elements course is an essential training resource for our Texas faculty, librarians, and staff to learn the basics around OER and related topics, including open pedagogy. However, the breadth of the modules does not allow as much opportunity for depth. I would like to create a course focused specifically on open pedagogy that could be used by our faculty here at University of Houston and beyond to learn about the various aspects of this teaching approach, including background, various ways to incorporate open pedagogy into teaching, assessment, and so forth.

Audience: Who are you designing this OER Project for and what are their needs and preferences?

I am designing this project for faculty who may have limited time to complete various reading assignments, but who may benefit from a modular course format. This would also enable our various institutions to consider offering professional development stipends for this type of course also, particularly those who already offer stipends for completing the Texas Core Elements course. There are a variety of other resources in different formats that can help me pull this together (e.g., the Open Pedagogy Project Roadmap, the Open Pedagogy Toolkit, etc.). I would also like to include a module on Open for Inclusive Excellence, the adaptation of the Open for Antiracism curriculum.

OER Goals & Purpose: Why are you doing this OER Project and what are you hoping to accomplish?

As a mid-career faculty member, I am eager to further expand my professional contributions beyond the silos of my discipline and my local institution. I would like to help encourage current and future pre-tenure faculty across Texas to become deeply involved with the adoption and creation of OER without jeopardizing their progress toward tenure and promotion. In particular, I would like to see all Texas higher education institutions recognize the creation of teaching materials (and OER in particular) as integral to teaching and research requirements. Specifically, I envision a survey of existing institutional T&P policies regarding teaching materials / OER, and/or a separate survey of current faculty and administrator attitudes toward the creation of teaching materials, OER, T&P policies, and the scholarship of teaching and learning as a legitimate area of scholarly research. (Some of this research / draft language may already exist!)

Audience: Who are you designing this OER Project for and what are their needs and preferences?

My audience is pre-tenure faculty, decision-making administrators, and any other staff with significant input on campus T&P policies, throughout Texas. These constituents value clarity, predictibility, flexibility, and easy adoption of policies.

I'm interested in developing sustainable frameworks for continued growth in OER creation and adoption by exploring/researching the potential for expanding OER creation models to include self-publishing and more OER Publishers providing content selection/creation peer review; editorial, design and production support; as well as OER curating, marketing and distribution while still empowering authors, and maintaining creative freedom and "ownership" for authors.

The audience for this project would be higher education administrators, faculty, librarians, and instructional designers. Administrators would gain knowledge regarding the opportunities and challenges for collaborating to establish or support an institutional, system-wide, or regional OER publishing organization. Faculty who are apprehensive about the work involved with creating and self-publishing OER can learn about the option of creating OER through an OER publisher. An additional benefit for faculty is the opportunity to build their academic reputation by authoring OER or serving as reviewers and editors for a recognized institutional/system OER publisher.  

Capstone Project brainstorming: In our group discussion, share your initial thoughts around your goals, purpose, and audience.

Goals 

• Share a toolkit for assessing textbook & OER awareness at Texas campuses

Purpose

• Assess student awareness and experiences with textbooks & OER

• Assess faculty awareness and experiences with textbooks & OER

Audience

Librarians, Student Success Administrators, Digital Learning Administrators, other campus staff 

Initial Thoughts

UTSA received a $10,000 grant to promote faculty and student awareness and experiences with open educational resources (OER) and textbooks in 2022. 

The Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success (DOERS3) Collaborative, a group of 30 public higher education systems, including the University of Texas System, awarded the grant to UTSA.

In 2023, the Division of Student Success, UTSA Libraries, and Academic Innovation identified gaps in its OER program using the DOERS3 Equity Through OER Rubric.In 2024, UTSA began implementing its DOERS3 action plan with student surveys administered through tabling and through Canvas, the LMS. 

The goal of this self-evaluation is to increase student awareness and engagement with OER, to further encourage the use of these resources among faculty and to identify additional best practices for implementing OER across the campus.

Our goal is to share the actual survey(s), interview questions, and structure for the focus groups so that other institutions can also assess textbook and OER awareness, with a special focus on institutions that are either implementing or looking to improve course markings and advance OER adoption.