https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4771-9779
ABSTRACT
In 2018, the Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE) kicked off a statewide program to increase awareness and adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) at colleges and universities. Spurred by the efforts of ACHE, the University of North Alabama committed to OER and textbook affordability programs and included OER adoption as a key aspiration in their 2019–2024 strategic plan, Roaring with Excellence. With support from the president and provost of the university, Collier Library adopted strategic purchasing initiatives, including database purchases to support specific courses as well as purchasing reserve copies of textbooks for high-enrollment, required classes. In addition, the scholarly communications librarian became a founding member of the OER working group on campus. This group’s mission is to direct efforts for increasing faculty awareness and adoption of OER. This presentation will discuss the structure of each of these programs from initial idea to implementation. Included will be discussions of assessment of faculty and student awareness, development of an OER stipend program, starting a textbook purchasing program, promotion of efforts, funding, and future goals.
Introduction
The University of North Alabama (UNA) is a mid-sized, regional state university located in Florence, Alabama. Annual enrollment at the university is at an all-time high, at just over 8,000 students in the fall of 2019. At the time of this presentation, the university was a master’s-granting institution, but will be adding two doctoral programs in the next two academic years. I began working there in 2017 as the scholarly communications and instructional services librarian, and my job comprises a multitude of responsibilities including overseeing UNA’s Scholarly Repository, liaison work with multiple departments, first-year information literacy instruction, copyright questions, and, most recently, the roll-out of a comprehensive open education resources (OER) program on campus.
The Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE) partnered with the Alabama Community College System (ACCS) to scaffold a state-wide OER initiative following the example used by Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG).Footnote1 They began this effort by hosting a series of regional OER meetings. UNA administrators and some librarians came back from our local meeting with plans to begin the push for OER on our campus. The first step was to apply for an ACHE/ACCS grant to pilot OER in a required, high-enrollment, general education class. I partnered with faculty in the College of Education on the successful grant application for a Human Growth and Development course.
While we were working on the grant, the administration wrote OER into the 2019–2024 campus-wide strategic plan, Roaring With Excellence, which includes the aspiration to “Adopt, implement, and utilize Open Educational Resources (OER) in half of all academic programs.”Footnote2 To achieve that level of implementation, the provost asked the director of educational technology services (ETS) and the cataloging librarian to explore how to best implement OER on our campus. I met with them and we became an ad hoc working group. In July of 2018, the ad hoc working group met for the first time and we decided that we needed to develop a faculty survey to gauge interest and awareness of OER. Our ad hoc group was formalized by the University President Dr. Kenneth Kitts, via Shared Governance in December 2019, and by May 2020 we had formally launched a stipend program for faculty adoption of new OER with funding from the provost’s office.
The library was also taking strides to build and promote a textbook affordability initiative (TAI) in tandem with campus-wide OER efforts. Collier Library had just appointed a new interim university librarian (UL), and he began working to expand our textbook purchasing program for course reserves and to focus on strategic purchasing of electronic resources. Because of the synchronous push for OER from multiple divisions, both the campus-wide OER program and Collier Library’s TAI program rapidly evolved.
Importance of OER and TAI on college campuses
When universities talk about promoting goals of access, inclusion, and equity, textbook affordability should be a major part of the discussion. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) the cost of textbooks has increased 88% since 2006.Footnote3 In 2015, an NBC news piece used the BLS stats to report how the inflation rate of textbooks was over three times the standard inflation rate and noted that textbooks, since 1977, had increased 1,041%.Footnote4 So what happens when costs are so high? According to the Florida 2018 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey, 64.2% of students are not purchasing their required textbooks for class.Footnote5
In addition to the continuing increase in textbook costs, students now also have to contend with so-called inclusive access products. Of the big three textbook publishers, Pearson controls about 40% of the market, Cengage has a 24% share, and McGraw-Hill controls about 21%.Footnote6 Because these products are completely digital it removes cost-saving measures that many students employ such as purchasing a used book at a discounted price, opting for a textbook rental, or reselling the book at the end of the semester. With the inclusive access model, students have zero ownership of the material; once the semester is over, so is their access to that platform. The only ones benefitting from inclusive access models are the publishers themselves, as Daniel Williamson from OpenStax points out: “because each student who enrolls in a course automatically purchases their products, publishers get a 100% sell-through rate with inclusive access … publishers are starting to roll out digital first programs that will make print books even harder to access and more expensive through rental-only policies.”Footnote7 Because of the extreme inflation rate and the push for expensive digital platforms, it is incumbent upon us to curate and promote course materials that are accessible and affordable for all of our students.
Textbook affordability program
Collier Library’s TAI program is built around three main components: course reserves, e-resources, and supporting OER. The UL first developed the program when he started as our interim and has expanded the program since being appointed as the permanent UL. The overall goal for the program is to leverage as much library funding to purchase resources and tools that can reduce total textbook costs for students. This section will cover course reserves and e-resources, the OER component will be fully covered in the next section. The library fully supports librarian involvement in OER promotion and curation and has supported all of my efforts as part of the working group and as the scholarly communications librarian to build a sustainable OER program on campus.
Course reserves
The first component of the TAI is the expansion of course reserves at Collier Library. We began a comprehensive textbook purchasing program, initially using a course materials list provided by our campus bookstore. This list was checked against enrollment lists, and any classes that had high enrollment or multiple class sections were flagged. Those flagged entries were then checked against the books we already had reserve holdings for and any materials we already had on reserve were removed from the list. The remaining textbooks and course materials, if available, were then purchased and placed on reserve.
In the past year, there have been two changes to the way this operates; first, we now get the textbook list directly from the academic departments each March and October, at the same time they are supplying them to the bookstore. Additionally, the liaison librarians reach out to their departments to request input on additional materials that may need to be put on reserve and to ask if they have departmental copies that can be given to the library for the reserve shelf.
In both phases of the program to date, the liaison librarians communicate to their departments what materials are on reserve at the library. We also request they relay that information to students on their syllabus, in the learning management system, and in class. We want to make sure that students are aware of any high-cost materials we can provide for them. Now that the program is well-established, the next phase is to begin assessment of usage and cost-savings for students.
E-resources and streaming media
The second component of the TAI is strategic purchasing and promotion of our e-resources in place of traditional course materials. Collier Library started with the purchase and promotion of the database Visible Body.Footnote8 This database has been adopted in place of expensive course materials in multiple departments including kinesiology, nursing, and biology. We expanded the targeted database purchasing recently with the acquisition of Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive to support our new Black Studies minor at UNA.Footnote9 We now are looking at ways we can leverage our Flipster subscription in various courses on campus and have had the first adoption from our creative writing faculty.Footnote10
Collier Library is also allocating funds for the purchase of e-books, journal subscriptions and streaming media for faculty who want to utilize them in their courses leveraging fair use guidelines. One example is our Intermediate Spanish with Literature course which took short stories and poems from over ten sources, some electronic, and used them to build assignments for the students after their traditional textbook went out of print. We are currently helping a history faculty member build a course using chapters and journal articles from over twenty different electronic sources for her class in the fall.
Streaming media became a critical purchase when our university shut down due to COVID-19. We had a number of classes, including American Sign Language, Introduction to Global Studies, and Film Authors that required students watch films which we primarily had on reserve in the library. We utilized a variety of streaming options to obtain as many films as possible as quickly as possible so that the courses could proceed as listed in the syllabus without the students having to rent or buy the films themselves.
Campus OER initiative
In late 2018, the three person OER working group created and sent out a faculty survey in order to gauge interest and awareness of OER. We used the results of this survey to plan various campus initiatives designed to increase awareness and integration of OER. The survey showed that while faculty were generally aware of course material costs and some faculty were using OER in their courses, there was a general lack of awareness of OER, including how to find them and how to evaluate the quality.Footnote11 We knew we needed to increase awareness among faculty and identify both faculty and student advocates for OER, and we needed to build a sustainable program to encourage faculty to adopt, adapt, or create OER by providing funds to compensate them for the work this change would involve.
Workshops and education
The working group began promoting awareness of OER by hosting a series of educational events for teaching and library faculty. Those events included an OER education session and a workshop for faculty with Will Cross from North Carolina State University (NSCU). The library also was a successful applicant for the subsidized Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Scholarly Communication Roadshow. We hosted the ACRL program on campus for all library faculty and instructional designers from UNA, librarians from other Alabama institutions, as well as librarians from Mississippi and Tennessee.
In addition to generalized instruction for faculty, the working group members sought opportunities to increase their own knowledge. I attended the Library Copyright Institute at NCSU, and I am currently enrolled in the Open Textbook Network OER certification program. The director of ETS attended the Open Education Southern Symposium, and all three of the initial working group members attended OpenEd 2019 to present our findings from the faculty survey and to attend sessions to increase our knowledge of the OER landscape.
Expansion of working group
When the working group was formalized by the university president through Shared Governance, the three original members of the group discussed the need to add members to the group in order to represent more campus communities. First, the cataloging librarian rolled off of the group, leaving myself as the only librarian representative. The director of ETS remained in the working group and we added a tenured faculty member who had worked on the ACHE OER grant program with me, a non-tenure track instructional faculty member, a staff member from our student engagement division who works with our campus food pantry, and an undergraduate student. The student was a sophomore who is fairly representative of our student body. He is a commuter student who is from the local area, and he depends on scholarships to help fund his education. He also is a senator on the Student Government Association (SGA), so is able to lobby students for more vocal engagement in OER.
Through the efforts of our student working group representative, I was invited to speak at an SGA meeting in October of 2019. The SGA was already working on OER-related items, such as the SGA president signing the petition opposing the Cengage and McGraw-Hill merger. After meeting with the assembly and discussing campus goals and aspirations for OER, the SGA drafted and passed a resolution to support the working groups’ campus efforts and to assist the working group in a future student assessment survey.
Provost Stipend Program
In May 2020, the working group formally launched the Provost Stipend Program. This program was patterned after similar programs in the United States, including the ALG program and programs like Open Washington and PDXOpen, among others. Some programs use grant terminology, but we chose to call it a stipend to match similar faculty programs on campus and avoid any confusion with outside OER grant programs like the one from ACHE.Footnote12
To participate in the stipend program, faculty members must first complete a Canvas course titled Basics of OER: Understanding, Finding, and Evaluating Materials. I built this course by adapting openly licensed materials from ALG and Open Washington as well as incorporating other materials that are specific for our campus. I also was able to include open-licensed videos from Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani at Kwantlen Polytechnic University that provide brief but engaging introductions to the concepts of OER.Footnote13
Once faculty have successfully completed the self-paced course, they are welcome to submit a proposal, which the committee will evaluate on a variety of metrics including amount of work involved in converting the course to OER (is it adopt/adapt/create), cost savings per student, per semester, and per academic year, and overall impact in their discipline. Once the proposal has been evaluated, we propose a funding amount, which, if acceptable to the faculty member, results in a signed agreement with specific benchmarks and deadlines for development of the OER. This agreement is signed by a member of the working group, the faculty member, their department chair, their dean, and the provost. Funding is generally made in installments as benchmarks are met during the process with the final installment being paid once the conversion to OER is complete and the faculty member is ready to begin teaching with the materials.
As of July 2020, just three months into the stipend program, we have funded eleven projects, some which launched this summer and some which will not launch for at least another year. We currently have four more projects under consideration. Our program has a rolling submission, so we have no concrete deadline for applications and faculty can submit more than one application for any given semester. We are unsure of how COVID-19 may impact future funding of proposals, but currently we have been able to fund the majority of submissions.
Future directions
The key to a sustainable program is to know what is working and what is not – and if it is not working to course correct and adapt your program. The key to this knowledge is robust assessment. Our current plans include Collier Library assessing student use of course reserves and cost of materials, an assessment of student attitudes similar to the Florida survey and an assessment of both student and faculty perceptions of the OER that has been implemented in the stipend program.Footnote14
As part of the agreement for funding, faculty will share qualitative assessments of materials and how effective they feel they were in their class. They will also share quantitative data including student satisfaction with course materials, which is reported on end-of-term student course evaluations, and overall student performance in the class as measured by end anonymized final grades. This student data will be compared with data from semesters where high-cost materials were used, if available.
Further, we want to work with university administration to start marking courses in the online course catalog to indicate those that use OER. This way students will be aware, before they register, which classes have low- or no-cost course materials versus those which may require expensive textbooks. We also are looking to have OER development formalized as part of the promotion and tenure guidelines on our campus. For faculty, the incentive of credit for promotion and tenure can be as appealing as a monetary incentive.
Other ideas we would like to develop as the program grows include developing an awards program for faculty adopters, awarding stipends for faculty reviewing OER, and publishing original OER via our campus repository. We are just beginning our TAI and OER programs at the University of North Alabama, but we are incredibly excited about this investment in our students and look forward to continuing to expand the program.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jennifer L. Pate
Jennifer L. Pate is the Open Education Resources (OER) and Scholarly Communications Librarian, University of North Alabama, Florence, Alabama.
Notes
1. “About Us,” Affordable Learning Georgia, https://www.affordablelearninggeorgia.org/about/about_us (accessed July 31, 2020).
2. “University of North Alabama Strategic Plan 2019–2024 ‘Roaring With Excellence’,” University of North Alabama, https://www.una.edu/strategic-plan/ (accessed July 31, 2020).
3. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, “College Tuition and Fees Increase 63% Since January 2006,” The Economics Daily, August 30, 2016, https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/college-tuition-and-fees-increase-63-percent-since-january-2006.htm (accessed July 31, 2020).
4. Ben Popken, “College Textbook Prices Have Risen 1,041% Since 1977,” NBC News, August 6, 2015, https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/freshman-year/college-textbook-prices-have-risen-812-percent-1978-n399926 (accessed July 31, 2020).
5. “2018 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey: Executive Summary,” Florida Virtual Campus Office of Distance Learning and Student Services, December 20, 2018, https://dlss.flvc.org/documents/210036/1314923/2018+Student+Textbook+and+Course+Materials+Survey+-+Executive+Summary.pdf/3c0970b0-ea4b-9407-7119-0477f7290a8b (accessed July 31, 2020).
6. Naomi S. Baron, “Opinion: 2 Reasons Beyond Prices That This Merger of Textbook Publishers Should Worry Every College Student,” MarketWatch, September 20, 2019, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/2-reasons-beyond-prices-that-this-merger-of-textbook-publishers-should-worry-every-college-student-2019-09-20 (accessed July 31, 2020).
7. Daniel Williamson, “Giving Inclusive Access a Second Look,” OpenStax Blog, July 25, 2019, https://openstax.org/blog/giving-inclusive-access-second-look (accessed July 31, 2020).
8. “Visible Body,” https://www.visiblebody.com/.
9. “Slavery and Anit-Slavery: A Transnational Archive,” https://www.gale.com/primary-sources/slavery-and-anti-slavery.
10. Flipster, https://flipster.ebsco.com/.
11. Jennifer Pate, Darlene Townsend, and John McGee, “Coordinating OER Efforts Across a Mid-Sized College Campus,” International Journal of Open Educational Resources 2, no. 1 (Fall 2019/Winter 2020): 209–26, https://www.ijoer.org/coordinating-oer-efforts-across-a-mid-sized-college-campus-doi10-18278-ijoer-2-1-13/ (accessed July 31, 2020).
12. “Tutorial 1: Finding Free and Open Resources,” Affordable Learning Georgia, https://www.affordablelearninggeorgia.org/help/finding-1 (accessed July 31, 2020); “Learn OER,” Open Washington, https://www.openwa.org/ (accessed July 31, 2020); and “PDXOpen: Open Educational Resources,” Portland State University Library, https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/pdxopen/ (accessed July 31, 2020).
13. Rajiv Jhangiani, “Introduction to Open Education,” KPU Open Education, https://www.kpu.ca/open (accessed July 31, 2020).
14. “2018 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey,” Florida Virtual Campus Office of Distance Learning and Student Services, March 8, 2019, https://dlss.flvc.org/documents/210036/1314923/2018+Student+Textbook+and+Course+Materials+Survey+-+Executive+Summary.pdf/3c0970b0-ea4b-9407-7119-0477f7290a8b (accessed July 31, 2020).