OER Fellowship, Year 1 2024-2025

South Plains College OER Initiative: Your Participation Needed for a Transformative Education Experience

South Plains College (SPC) is excited to advance our Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative to make education more accessible, adaptable, and affordable for all students. OER – free, openly licensed educational materials like textbooks, videos, and assessments – are increasingly valuable in our efforts to support student success, reduce costs, and foster a collaborative learning environment. Below, we explain how OER benefits each of our stakeholders and how you can help us build a vibrant OER program at SPC, drawing on real-life SPC faculty and student experiences, survey insights, and state and national references.

For Department Chairs and College Deans

Communication Method: Regular meetings, email updates, faculty development sessions, and success highlights.

What is OER?
OER are educational resources that are free to use, modify, and share. They include digital and print textbooks, assignments, labs, and other tools. With OER, faculty can customize resources to their course needs, maintaining quality while reducing costs.

Benefits of OER at SPC:

• Reducing Financial Burdens: Students across Texas save an average of 60-70% in courses using OER. At SPC, pilot courses have shown the same impact, removing financial barriers that often lead students to delay course enrollment or drop classes.
• Support for Faculty Innovation: With input from Dean Alan Worley and Dr. Joshua Keneda, who implemented OER for his math courses, we’ve seen courses tailored to current and specific needs. Dr. Keneda, for instance, used freely available online math exercises, receiving 100% positive feedback on Rate My Professor.
• Improving Student Access and Retention: National studies indicate that students in OER courses have higher retention rates. Our pilot OER classes at SPC show that students appreciate the affordability and accessibility, with many highlighting in surveys that they can "focus more on learning without worrying about paying for materials."

Your Role:
Encourage faculty in your department to explore OER and our Open Roads Course, identify pilot opportunities, and promote SPC's workshops on OER integration. By fostering an OER-friendly department, you’re supporting increased student enrollment and retention, meeting critical student needs, and setting SPC apart as an accessible, high-quality education provider.

For Faculty

Communication Method: Department workshops, emails, faculty success stories, and individual consultations.

What is OER?
Open Educational Resources are customizable, free resources like textbooks, videos, or lab exercises available to everyone. By integrating OER, faculty can enrich courses, avoid out-of-date materials, and adapt resources directly to SPC’s course goals.

Benefits of OER for SPC Faculty and Students:

• Enhanced Teaching Flexibility: Faculty using OER can adjust course materials to fit class requirements, a major plus in fields like Technical Studies and STEM, where content evolves quickly. For instance, faculty in the Welding and Culinary departments noted that students benefit from interactive, adaptable OER that complements hands-on instruction.
• Improved Student Engagement: SPC students using OER have voiced appreciation for easily accessible materials from day one, with 85% of surveyed students reporting feeling "less stress about learning costs." Faculty reports show that students’ ability to study sooner and avoid material delays positively impacts grades and participation.
• Collaborative and Professional Development: OER encourages collaboration and connection with educators locally and nationally. SPC’s OER contributors, such as the Welding department and Dr. Keneda, have become part of a growing network of educators committed to advancing affordable education.

Your Role:
We invite you to participate in our OER course on Blackboard or explore creating an OER course. We offer dedicated support in identifying resources, adapting materials, and integrating them into your curriculum. Faculty champions in departments across all departments have already demonstrated the value of OER in addressing diverse student needs. Your efforts will set a powerful example at SPC and beyond, joining a movement recognized and valued at the state and national levels.

For Students

Communication Method: Announcements, emails, social media, campus events, and peer-to-peer communication.

What is OER?
OER means free and accessible materials, like textbooks and videos, that are available to every student from the start of the course. With OER, there’s no need to worry about paying for high-priced textbooks – instead, you get quality content at no additional cost.

Benefits of OER for Students at SPC:

• Savings that Matter: A recent SPC survey found that 92% of students would support more OER options. When surveyed, 78% of SPC students said OER resources have positively impacted their learning experience, particularly those who have to work or face financial hardships.
• Access from Day One: SPC students in OER courses can access learning materials on the first day, reducing stress and ensuring everyone is ready to learn together. Surveys consistently show that SPC students prefer OER for the instant access and savings.
• More Engaging Content: OER content is often interactive, multimedia-based, and directly aligned with course objectives. This means a more engaging learning experience and the flexibility to learn in ways that fit your style.

Your Role:
Your feedback matters! Participate in feedback sessions and surveys to help us understand what works and what could be improved with OER. By supporting OER, you’re helping us create a college environment focused on access, affordability, and success for every student at SPC.

State and National Support for OER at SPC

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) has shown that OER is critical to student success across public institutions, recommending expanded OER programs in state colleges. Nationally, studies from the Achieving the Dream network highlight that students in OER courses not only perform well but feel supported in their educational goals. SPC’s commitment to OER aligns us with these state and national trends, advancing our mission to create a learning-centered community.

Next Steps & Ways to Get Involved

1. Attend an OER Information Session: Learn how to use, adapt, and create OER at SPC.
2. Pilot an OER Course: Faculty and departments can participate in our pilot program and join a peer-support network.
3. Student Feedback: Join focus groups and provide feedback on the effectiveness of OER courses.

Together, let’s make SPC a leader in affordable and innovative education. Your participation is vital in creating a college where resources are accessible and tailored to our students’ success.

Thank you,
Heather Medley
Instructional Designer
South Plains College

Personally, I have a variety of email templates depending on the content similar to what has been shared already, but I've found that having material to pull from to answer the immediate questions with resources has been useful, too. This allows me to customize my response to their specific experience, entrance point to open, and more. This is some of the content that I currently keep track of: 

Open Education Stakeholder Highlights - This is a place to keep the most relevant highlights of Open Education based on stakeholder group. 

There are two other components of our communication around open. The first is the incorporation of Open Education in the University Libraries for New Faculty and Graduate Students pressbook. In this space we offer introductory language to Open Education and tie those concepts directly to areas of interest for faculty and graduates students. Second, we also launched an updated and customized version of One Minute to Open, a direct to email marketing campaign that was the SPARC Open Education Leadership Capstone for the Director of Learning Engagement, Jess Williams. More information on her work, and a link to the community resource can be found here. We are currently focusing on faculty with this campaign, and it launched on Monday!

For the Texas Open Pedagogy Core Elements course, I would focus my communication and outreach on faculty audiences. My communication methods would include targeted emails and partnering with the Faculty Engagement and Development office to host workshops and presentations. Individual consultations with faculty might also be a great place to promote this learning opportunity.

In my communication with faculty, I would focus on:

• Impacts on student success and engagement in the course
• Opportunities to engage students in a new type of learning
• Professional development opportunities for the faculty member
• Engaging curriculum that is culturally relevant, supports social justice

I would ask faculty to contribute their time to take the modules and provide feedback on what was helpful, if/how they plan to apply the principles in their classes, and what other resources would be helpful to them.

Austin Community College Faculty: Support needed for creation, adoption and maintenance of existing OER.

Understanding the resistance to volunteering for OER initiatives and adopting OER because of the time constraints, the following points will be used to resonate with ACC faculty:

• OERs offer the opportunity to supplement existing content where it is lacking or outdated;
• OER opens the door for academic freedom as faculty are free to be creative in their use and adoption
• Faculty will have an opportunity to play an active role in impacting student success and retention rates
• Faculty will enjoy a better first-day experience when students have access to course materials at the start of a course
• Faculty can be actively involved in contributing to the college's Theory of Change by addressing two specific pillars: enroll full-time and meet basic needs
• Faculty can gain an understanding of licensing, copyright, and publishing models of digital materials

Austin Community College VC of Instruction: Faculty support for providing release time, stipends, etc. for faculty to actively participate in OER initiatives.

• Faculty need time for collaboration within their own department and with other colleges and universities. This will allow the project to benefit from more authors contributing different perspectives
• The institution has the opportunity to position itself as a leader in OER given the movement to increase OER adoption at the state and national level
• Faculty will enjoy the added benefit of adding to the body of knowledge on licensing, copyright, and publishing models of digital materials

Initial thoughts:

My audience will be faculty who have used OER and interested in community adaption or creation of OER. Reach them through email.

This semester (at Laredo College) we launched an OER Fellowship for 10 faculty within the First Year Cohort. The aim of this initiative is to use a recently obtained grant to incentize faculty to create new high quality resources that mirror and exceed the quality previously supplied from traditional publishers. Moreover, one of my own goals here to produce OER Champions/Heroes that will help us continue to scale OER within our institution in the years ahead. 

Note: I am still working on my OER project, so this communication language will likely change in the future.

For now I am thinking of partnering with library staff, instructional designers, and/or administrators to help determine which initiatives, strategies, and tactics are most likely to prove effective in their promotion of OER awareness, adoption, and creation. We may synthesize existing research, supported by a targeted survey of faculty/OER librarians, and more detailed follow-up interviews. The desired end product is a research-supported, actionable guide / handbook that various campus stakeholders could follow to increase their work's efficiency in supporting OER adoption.

Specific to this prompt, I’ll focus only on getting the support of campus administrators and other non-library staff.

Who are you going to reach out to? Administrators on my campus (Student Success VP / Digital Learning Director / CETL Director)

How will you reach out to them? I will begin with an email requesting a short meeting to get people on board, followed by a more detailed email with specific requests for support.

What are you going to communicate?
* The benefits and value add to them
•    Raise the profile of UT Tyler in the open education space
•    Make a measurable impact on OER adoption at UT Tyler, by researching, measuring, and augmenting existing OER advocacy efforts

* What are you asking them to contribute?
•    Support in setting up campus-wide meetings / programing to help gather our data
•    Getting the word out about our surveys / meetings / interviews through sending campus-wide emails
•    If they have the time and expertise, lending their own ideas for the direction of the surveys/meetings and other project components
•    Possibly also funding for presenters to share their research at the Open Education 2025 in Denver (submissions due April 2025) or similar

Target: Teaching Faculty

Method: Email 

What: Dear Faculty, as experts in your field, I would like to know what you would like to see in a new textbook. What is working for you in the textbooks you currently use? What would like to see more of? What is not working? What do you wish could be included or added to a textbook to make it more helpful to your students and to you as the instructor? What features would help you consider adopting this textbook in your classroom?

Benefits: By answering the questions, you have an opportunity to provide relevant and experience-based information that will help shape the future of new textbooks in the field. No textbook has it all or is perfect, but we can try to improve. Your voice is important in this process. What can we do to make our textbooks more relevant, engaging, and pain free for you and your students?

How You Can Help: Please complete this short survey so your voice is heard! 

As others have mentioned, we have a variety of communication templates that we use at UTSA in partnership with our campus partners (too many to share here!), and we use these templates to communicate about a variety of OER-related topics.

We have a communication director in our library that partners with us when crafting messages to share on a larger scale, but I have the freedom as OER Coordinator to craft my own messages to faculty that are smaller and more targeted in scope and to create guides for faculty on finding OER and on OER transparency. More recently, we have been partnering with communication directors in the Provosts on a number of OER-related programs and events in the last year, including our Faculty Recognition Event and the more recent announcement of the university-wide OER task force.

More recently, we have been communicating with students and faculty about our DOERS3 grant, so I have included a sample message as the last item in the table below. I will share more examples of our DOERS3 templates and assessment tools in my final capstone project.