Navigating OER: The Library’s Role in Bringing OER to Campus

Abstract

In 2014, three librarians at the University of San Diego came together to explore open educational resources (OER). Coming from both technical services and digital collections, we were well-versed in the economic challenges facing today’s libraries. In order to formulate the approach that would work best for our campus, we first had to educate ourselves on the past, present, and possible future of the Open Access movement. While traditionally Open Access has focused on serials, OER offer the opportunity to expand its benefits to other formats. This article examines opportunities and tensions surrounding OER, as well as highlighting major players on the OER landscape. Our efforts began with a focus group for faculty to assess their own knowledge of and opinions on OER. After establishing a stipend budget, we sent out a call for proposals to faculty who were interested in participating in the Copley OER Initiative.

Keywords:

• Open Access
• open educational resources
• repositories
• textbooks

DEFINITIONS AND HISTORY OF THE OER MOVEMENT

Open educational resources (OER) are pedagogical materials that are free of charge and openly licensed in such a way that they can be accessed, re-used, and distributed widely by educators, learners, and the general public. OER include everything from entire courses to syllabi, from assignments and assessments to whole textbooks, and various types of media. The OER movement began globally at a 2002 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) forum (the Forum on the Impact of Open Courseware for Higher Education in Developing Countries) convened on the topic. The intent of this gathering was “to develop together a universal educational resource available for the whole of humanity.”¹ This meeting coined the term “open educational resource” and shaped one of the first definitions: “technology-enabled, open provision of educational resources for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes.”² Since then, OER have proliferated, and the last several years have seen growing interest among a variety of educational institutions in the United States.

BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES

The most frequently discussed benefit of OER is their low cost. Belliston discusses the advantages textbook publishers have had for decades: they exist in a closed market, and they are accountable to professors, who frequently get complimentary copies of texts, rather than to students, who have to pay for them.³ In 2005, the United States Government Accountability Office estimated that textbook prices had increased at twice the rate of annual inflation over the past twenty years, and that the average full-time college student was spending nearly $900 annually on textbooks.⁴ Belliston refers to the cost of textbooks as a “significant barrier” to students “that keep(s) some enrolled students from being able to continue their studies and some potential students from enrolling in the first place.”⁵

The Student Public Interest Research Groups (Student PIRGs), found that although this cost can be reduced by 34% annually through a combination of rentals, e-textbooks, and e-reader textbooks, these options are not preferred by all students. The same survey also found, for example, that 75% of students prefer print over digital textbooks.⁶ Their results seemed to show, however, that open textbooks could reduce the average amount spent per year by 80%, a dramatic decrease in costs for students while still allowing for print textbooks.

Of course, “open” does not just mean “free.” For instructors, another significant advantage to OER is the ability to pick and choose the pieces of each resource they want to use. Their modular nature allows instructors to use only relevant components and customize materials for more specific topics and audiences.⁷ It is a similar process to the customized textbooks traditional publishers offer but with greater flexibility and at a much lower cost. Furthermore, since most of these resources are under a Creative Commons or similar license, instructors are not only allowed to modify the content, they are even permitted to republish their modifications online, allowing others to use the new material as well.⁸ These licenses often come with some restrictions, requiring attribution to the original creator of the resource, for example, but at present, the lack of standards in licenses is one of the challenges these resources face, as discussed later in this article.

OER have also been suggested as a potential way to “bridge the gap” between formal and non-formal education, allowing educational institutions to reach socially excluded groups at little cost to the learner.⁹ Willems and Bossu concluded that, although language, localization, and technology barriers currently limit the spread of OER globally, locally, OER can be a way for educational institutions to engage with their communities—note the popularity of MIT OpenCourseWare.¹⁰

As with any innovation, OER face a number of challenges. For university faculty, the most pressing of these is the question of quality. They come at this issue from two angles: looking for resources for instruction and seeking a place to publish their own work.¹¹ Of course, instructors want high-quality material for use in teaching. Low cost and flexibility are nice, but they are not worth sacrificing the authority professors are used to getting from traditional resources. Furthermore, as the number of OER and open repositories increase, sifting through them for high quality material becomes increasingly daunting. Secondly, for many university professors, their positions depend on publishing, and where they publish matters. The goal has traditionally been peer-reviewed journals and well-known publishers. Until Open Access repositories offer a similar level of prestige, convincing faculty to publish in them will be a challenge. Fortunately, some of today’s repositories are beginning to incorporate ranking systems. These will need to become more common for OER to be widely accepted in academia.

Because OER are relatively new, there are no agreed upon intellectual property or technical standards for them.¹² While many OER use Creative Commons licenses, this is not true for all of them, and even within Creative Commons there are a variety of rights that can be reserved or given away. Some repositories make licensing information very clear, but many do not. With the variety of licenses that are currently used, instructors have to carefully check each resource before they can do anything with them. Similarly, there is no standard for what formats are used for resources. Combining sections of two books, even when the licenses allow it, is more difficult when one is a Word document and the other is a Portable Document Format (PDF) file. For busy university faculty, this extra hurdle may be the reason they decide not to use OER.

Finally, preservation of open educational resources is a significant challenge due to the short lifespan of the repositories in which they are typically housed. In 2009, Norm Friesen compiled a list of eleven open repositories that had been discontinued over the previous ten years.¹³ Outside of two government-funded projects, the average lifetime of these repositories was less than three years. This is not unexpected; these repositories are generally provided free-of-charge, costs covered by the host institution. The result of this, however, is uncertainty about the future of access to most OER. Preservation is an area for libraries to take a look at where they can help, but right now the burden is on creators of OER to create backups of their work and on users of OER to be sure that they have copies of materials they may want to use in the future.

MAJOR INITIATIVES

OpenCourseWare (OCW) was proposed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) faculty in 1999. Abelson describes it as “a visionary commitment by the Institute to publish the materials from all MIT undergraduate and graduate subjects freely and openly on the Web for permanent worldwide use.”¹⁴ MIT OCW offers lecture notes, assignments, reading material, and syllabi for 2,250 courses throughout all academic units.

Atenas and Havemann describe how OER repositories excel in supporting “educators in searching for content in a structured way, sharing their own resources, reusing existing materials.”¹⁵ It is advantageous that instructors and students be capable of managing information resources, but the number of open repositories available online can be discouraging. Several open repositories started in hopes of being a one-stop shop for most educators and learners. OER Commons’ main goal is that individuals will be able to “find Open Educational Resources through a single point of access.”¹⁶ OpenStax CNX was launched in 2012 as a “digital ecosystem” that provides an online space for scholars to share and adapt open licensed materials that are then chunked into modules.¹⁷

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) was launched in 1997 by California State University Center for Distributed Learning, offering free access to the public. An individual can create a free account and search through thousands of free open courses and resources that are added by members and reviewed by MERLOT. Cechinel and Sanchez-Alonso explain that “the case of MERLOT is particularly unusual in the sense that ratings are gathered from two well-defined and distinct groups, public and experts.”¹⁸ Further, MERLOT retains the metadata of the resources on their site and indicates if the material being reviewed is copyrighted. OpenStax created OpenStaxCollege to focus on textbooks.¹⁹ The open textbooks offered on OpenStaxCollege are peer-reviewed and easily accessible. The site offers institutions the ability to adopt a textbook so faculty may customize the text to their course syllabi and the option to download an open textbook for free or pay a minimal cost for a print copy via Amazon. Other open textbook examples include College Open Textbooks, Open Textbook Library, and Textbook Media.

COPLEY LIBRARY’S OER INITIATIVE

In fall of 2014, we decided to launch an initiative to gauge faculty interest in OER and promote their use in instruction at University of San Diego (USD). After studying OER ourselves and making plans, we launched the initiative the following spring. We had a three-step plan:

1. A short online survey, sent to all USD faculty, intended to give us an idea of how much they already knew and what their perceptions were about OER.

2. A workshop we would offer to present some basic information about OER and give some tips on beginning to use them in classes.

3. A focus group, participants for which would be pulled from survey respondents and workshop attendees, intended to help us understand if faculty seemed interested in using OER in their classes and what challenges they saw.

Unfortunately, we received only one response to our survey. While our workshop had six attendees, none were full-time faculty. We repeated the workshop and had one faculty attendee. Meanwhile, we received no interest in our focus group. The closest to a success we had that semester was an invitation to repeat our workshop at the Summer Innovation Institute, hosted by our institution’s Information Technology Services department. Our lack of success can be credited to a few factors, the most notable of which is our poor timing. For various reasons, we launched our online poll shortly before spring break and held our workshop the week after spring break. This proved to be a terrible time to attempt to get the attention of university faculty.

Since we had several failed attempts at engaging faculty in signing up for our focus group, we thought of an approach that would certainly draw faculty in: providing a financial incentive. A number of other universities had been successful in encouraging use of OER by awarding stipends to faculty members who participated in their OER initiatives or used open resources in courses. After we discussed our idea with the Dean of the University Library, the Dean met with the Provost and presented our OER initiative. The Provost agreed to provide us $4,000 to use for the 2015–2016 school year. We decided to award $1,000 each to four teaching faculty members. Before sending out a call for proposals, we created a publicly accessible web-based subject guide to provide an introduction to the topic and give faculty an idea of the kinds of OER available. We issued a call for proposals requesting that faculty give us information about the resource(s) they planned to replace, the estimated cost per student, and any ideas they had on the specifics of replacing the textbook or resource with open alternatives.

The library would provide expertise on OER and attempt to lessen the challenges of working with these materials. For example, librarians would be available to clarify copyright and licensing for materials, or provide some guidance on where and how to find appropriate open resources in the vast sea of available material. Knowing that faculty would come from different units and departments on campus, it was critical that we speak to the liaison librarians to ensure they were educated about the initiative. At the end of the semester following their use of OER, the participating teaching faculty members would be required to submit a report describing their experiences working with OER and assessments of these resources’ efficacy.

Teaching faculty who submitted applications came from various disciplines (communication studies, nursing, mathematics, and philosophy) and were interested in using OER in a variety of courses and contexts. For example, one professor was interested in replacing a general overview textbook with more specific and targeted readings for an upper division course to make time for community service learning assignments outside the classroom.

THE FUTURE OF OER AT USD AND BEYOND

Next steps for the project involve meeting with the selected faculty to give them an overview of the project, provide them introductory information about OER in general, and point to some places that they might begin searches based on content of their courses and their aims for the resources. We hope to use these conversations in the spirit of our original goals: to inform faculty members about OER and to understand their perceptions of them. By understanding and addressing their concerns, we hope to encourage broader use of OER on our campus.

Helping our efforts will be the fact that more broadly, OER continue to develop in directions that make them easier to find and use. Several recent efforts have sought to expand peer review processes for OER; these include the Open Textbook Library, a project with players ranging from founder University of Minnesota to Purdue University, Oregon State, and a number of others, which pays faculty to review textbooks. The University of British Columbia has a similar effort underway.²⁰

Increasingly, individual institutions, private funders, and government provide incentives to create and use OER. A number of U.S. states have started grant programs to support the development of OER, and proposed legislation in the U.S. Senate, the Affordable College Textbook Act, would found a grant program to support development of OER in universities. More and bigger efforts to partner and organize by individual institutions with similar goals and initiatives also help simplify the conversation surrounding OER and demystify the variety and quantity of resources available to instructors. One such effort is the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, with a membership of over 250 colleges. Adopters of OER will continue to study the efficacy of implementing them.²¹ Studying the impact of OER will help to ensure that these resources are at least comparable with, and in some cases superior to, traditional resources.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julia I. Hess

Julia I. Hess is Collection Services and Metadata Librarian, University of San Diego, San Diego, California.

Alejandra J. Nann

Alejandra J. Nann is Electronic Resources and Serials Librarian, University of San Diego, San Diego, California.

Kelly E. Riddle

Kelly E. Riddle is Digital Initiatives Librarian, University of San Diego, San Diego, California.

Notes

¹ UNESCO, “UNESCO Promotes New Initiative for Free Educational Resources on the Internet,”United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Paris, France), July 8, 2002, http://www.unesco.org/education/news_en/080702_free_edu_ress.shtml (accessed April 1, 2015).

² Ibid.

³ Jeffrey C. Belliston, “Open Educational Resources: Creating the Instruction Commons,” College and Research Library News 70, no. 5 (2009).

⁴ Government Accountability Office, College Enhanced Offerings Appear to Drive Recent Price Increases, GAO Publication No. 05-806 (Washington, DC, 2005), http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05806.pdf (accessed March 8, 2015).

⁵ Bellison, “Open Educational Resources,” 284.

⁶ Nicole Allen, “A Cover to Cover Solution: How Open Textbooks are the Path to Textbook Affordability” (report for the Student PIRGs, Student PIRGS, 2010), http://www.studentpirgs.org/sites/student/files/reports/A-Cover-To-Cover-Solution_4.pdf (accessed April 1, 2015).

⁷ Tom Adamich, “Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Metadata: The Future of Textbook Access and Usability,” Technicalities 31, no. 1 (2011): 10–13.

⁸ Bellison, “Open Educational Resources.”

⁹ Carina Bossu, David Bull, and Mark Brown, “Opening Up Down Under: the Role of Open Educational Resources in Promoting Social Inclusion in Australia,” Distance Education 33, no. 2 (2012): 151. doi:10.1080/01587919.2012.692050 (accessed October 15, 2014).

¹⁰ Julie Willems and Carina Bossu, “Equity Considerations for Open Educational Resources in the Globalization of Education,” Distance Education 33, no. 2 (2012): 185–199.

¹¹ Marilyn S. Billings, Sarah C. Hutton, Jay Schafer, Charles M. Schweik, and Matt Sheridan, “Open Educational Resources as Learning Materials: Prospects and Strategies for University Libraries,” Research Library Issues: A Quarterly Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC, no. 280 (September 2012).

¹² Bellison, “Open Educational Resources.”

¹³ Norm Friesen, “Open Educational Resources: New Possibilities for Change and Sustainability,” International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 10, no. 5 (2009), http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/664 (accessed December 8, 2014).

¹⁴ Hal Abelson, “The Creation of OpenCourseWare at MIT,” Journal of Science Education & Technology 17, no. 2 (2008): 164.

¹⁵ J. Atenas and Leo Havemann, “Quality Assurance in the Open: An Evaluation of OER Repositories,” INNOQUAL—International Journal for Innovation and Quality in Learning 1, no. 2 (2013): 24, http://papers.efquel.org/index.php/innoqual/article/view/30/12 (accessed April 1, 2015).

¹⁶ Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, “OER Commons,” https://www.oercommons.org/about (accessed March 29, 2015).

¹⁷ “OpenStax CNX,” OpenStax CNX, http://cnx.org/ (accessed April 1, 2015).

¹⁸ Cristian Cechinel and Salvador Sanchez-Alonso, “Analyzing Associations between the Different Ratings Dimensions of the MERLOT Repository,” Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning & Learning Objects 7 (2011): 2.

¹⁹ “OpenStax College,” OpenStax College, https://openstaxcollege.org/ (accessed April 1, 2015).

²⁰ American Council on Education, “Open Textbooks: The Current State of Play” (issue brief, Lumina Foundation, 2015), http://www.luminafoundation.org/resources/open-textbooks (accessed March 28, 2015).

²¹ Open Education Group, “The Review Project,”http://openedgroup.org/review (accessed March 29, 2015).