iDevelop – NSCC’s Faculty Professional Development eNewsletter (3/2/2020)

Welcome to iDevelop, a weekly eNewsletter providing faculty with information about professional development opportunities at NSCC. The intent of this eNewsletter is to spotlight the various professional development events for faculty in one convenient location as well as share best practices, resources and tips related to the teaching practice. iDevelop is being brought to you by the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation (CTLI).
  

20 Minute Online Professional Development
The Monday Morning Mentor series will be available over the spring semester to bring you professional development in twenty minute snippets. The topic for the week of March 2nd is How Can Change Management Principles Help New Educational Programs Succeed? The presentation is available Monday at 10:00am and is accessible through Sunday of that week. For information on accessing the presentation and supplemental materials, please view the Bulletin or the email version of iDevelop.

More information about this session (including description, topics, and learning goals) is available at https://www.magnapubs.com/online/mentor/how-can-change-management-principles-help-new-educational-programs-succeed-15252-1.html. The complete spring 2020 schedule of Monday Morning Mentor sessions is available at http://nscclets.blogspot.com/2019/12/20-minute-mentor-online-faculty.html.

Looking for transcripts of past Monday Morning Mentor sessions? Please email ctli@northshore.edu with the session title and we can provide you with the transcript and supplementary materials.  
  
Other Professional Development Opportunities - Happy Open Education Week!
All week, during Open Education Week, there will be a variety of webinars offered to learn more about open educational resources. A full calendar of events for Open Education Week is available at https://www.openeducationweek.org/. 

To celebrate Open Education Week, CCCOER will host three webinars. For more detailed descriptions and speaker information, please visit https://www.cccoer.org/webinar/march-2-6-open-education-week-2020-oeweek-webinars/. 

• Beginning to Open Up: Ideas for Colleges Early in their OER Journey on Tuesday, March 3rd at 3:00pm EST. "When starting out using OER at your college/institution, it can seem like everyone else is much further along with us OER, and there aren’t any resources for those just starting out. Join us to hear from a panel of educators from smaller colleges and colleges that are new to OER as they discuss how they got started, recent accomplishments, things they would do over, what they wish they knew when starting out, and future plans." Registration URL: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/vpUrd-uhrTkuO9xAMJbL6Qw4jSRjEHMXtA 
• Regional Leadership in Open Education (RLOE) on Wednesday, March 4th at 3:00pm EST. "Launched by CCCOER in fall 2019, the Regional Leadership for Open Education (RLOE) initiative was inspired by the need for leaders to work together and share solutions for issues impacting OER adoption at diverse, multi-institution systems. Many open education leaders face similar issues of advocacy and implementation beyond their home institution and wish for the opportunity to craft common solutions and eliminate duplication of efforts. Leaders from colleges, universities, library consortia, and government agencies were invited to participate in four workgroups to discuss and build solutions. Each workgroup has developed a focus project for pursuing in 2020 and will share early efforts and invite community feedback." Registration URL: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/uJMrf-GsqTwjBBnljuk_EBeSsikzoyVsHw  
• Students and OER Advocacy on Thursday, March 5th at 3:00pm EST. 
  "Open Education Resources (OER) remove cost barriers and provide a better learning experience for students who are unable to afford the required commercial textbooks. Student OER advocates directly understand these benefits and can effectively articulate them to their peers as well as to faculty, administrators, and policymakers. Come and meet two Student OER Advocates who have also lead the development of an OER Toolkit for students throughout California higher education systems to share guidelines and best practices for advocating for OER adoption on their own campuses. We’ll also hear from the Director of Affordable Textbooks at US Pirgs on concrete next steps for students to take action." Registration URL: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/v5EqdOGrrzMjlpApcZItOy2hW1CHHAL3ig

Also, the State University of New York (SUNY) will host and showcase several presentations from our SUNY campuses in celebration of Open Education Week, March 2-6, 2020. Presentations are focused around open pedagogy, open educational resources, open textbooks, and open access. Details can be found here: http://bit.ly/SUNYOEW2020.

      
Interesting Resources

• NSCC Open Educational Resources, https://library.northshore.edu/friendly.php?s=open 
• Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Images + Data into the Public Domain CC0, https://creativecommons.org/2020/02/27/smithsonian-releases-2-8-million-images-data-into-the-public-domain-using-cc0/
• OER at Scale: The Academic and Economic Outcomes of Achieving  the Dream’s OER Degree, https://www.achievingthedream.org/resource/17993/oer-at-scale-the-academic-and-economic-outcomes-of-achieving-the-dream-s-oer-degree-initiative

Share Your Teaching Resources and Professional Development OpportunitiesIf you have any teaching resources that you would like to share with other NSCC faculty or know of any other professional development opportunities that NSCC faculty might be interested in, please feel free to send them to ctli@northshore.edu and we will share them in the upcoming issues of iDevelop.

We hope you have enjoyed this weekly eNewsletter and would love your input. Please let us know if you have any feedback on the format, content, and resources or if there is anything else you would like to see in the eNewsletter.

Thank you,
CTLI

iDevelop – NSCC’s Faculty Professional Development eNewsletter (2/3/2020)

Welcome to iDevelop, a weekly eNewsletter providing faculty with information about professional development opportunities at NSCC. The intent of this eNewsletter is to spotlight the various professional development events for faculty in one convenient location as well as share best practices, resources and tips related to the teaching practice. iDevelop is being brought to you by the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation (CTLI).
  

20 Minute Online Professional Development
The spring Monday Morning Mentor series, professional development in twenty-minute snippets, kicks off today with this week’s topic, How Can Online Instructors Better Manage Their Workload? The presentation is available Monday at 10:00am and is accessible through Sunday of that week. For information on accessing the presentation and supplemental materials, please view the Bulletin or the email version of iDevelop.

More information about this session (including description, topics, and learning goals) is available at https://www.magnapubs.com/online/mentor/how-can-online-instructors-better-manage-their-workload-15277-1.html. The complete spring 2020 schedule of Monday Morning Mentor sessions is available at http://nscclets.blogspot.com/2019/12/20-minute-mentor-online-faculty.html.

Looking for transcripts of past Monday Morning Mentor sessions? Please email ctli@northshore.edu with the session title and we can provide you with the transcript and supplementary materials.  
  
Upcoming Webinars of Interest

• Attributions, Authoring, Platforms [CCCOER Webinar] on Wednesday, February 12, 2020 from 3:00pm-4:00pm.“Remixing openly licensed materials from different sources is a hallmark of OER but can make for complicated attributions. The webinar will start with best practices for attribution of curated openly-licensed works. Three faculty will then share their experiences authoring and providing attributions of remixed OER in the Pressbooks and Libretexts platforms.” Register at: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/upcvd-ChrjkreDxqh3CiW1SDzua_J11EvA 
    

Share Your Teaching Resources and Professional Development OpportunitiesIf you have any teaching resources that you would like to share with other NSCC faculty or know of any other professional development opportunities that NSCC faculty might be interested in, please feel free to send them to ctli@northshore.edu and we will share them in the upcoming issues of iDevelop.

We hope you have enjoyed this weekly eNewsletter and would love your input. Please let us know if you have any feedback on the format, content, and resources or if there is anything else you would like to see in the eNewsletter.

Thank you,
CTLI

iDevelop – NSCC’s Faculty Professional Development eNewsletter (10/28/2019)

Welcome to iDevelop, a weekly eNewsletter providing faculty with information about professional development opportunities at NSCC. The intent of this eNewsletter is to spotlight the various professional development events for faculty in one convenient location as well as share best practices, resources and tips related to the teaching practice. iDevelop is being brought to you by the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation (CTLI).
  

20 Minute Online Professional Development
The topic for the week of October 28th is How Can I Manage the Disconnect Between Faculty and Student Perceptions of Rigor to Increase Learning? The presentation is available Monday at 10:00am and is accessible through Sunday of that week. For information on accessing the presentation and supplemental materials, please view the Bulletin or the email version of iDevelop.

More information about this session (including description, topics, and learning goals) is available at https://www.magnapubs.com/online/mentor/manage-the-disconnect-between-faculty-and-student-perceptions-of-rigor-14954-1.html.

Looking for transcripts of past Monday Morning Mentor sessions? Please email ctli@northshore.edu with the session title and we can provide you with the transcript and supplementary materials.  
  
 Other Professional Development Opportunities

• (LS)^2 Fall 2019 Lecture. This semester’s Liberal Studies Lecture Series is “An Artist and a Philosopher Go to the Doctor” and will take place on Wednesday, November 6th from 12:30-1:45 in Danvers, MS119. Join Bonnie Ashmore, full time faculty in the Fine Arts/Visual Studies program, and her colleague, Dr. Dien Ho, as they discuss the intersection of medicine and the humanities and specifically how it impacted their collaboration in creating the cover for Dr. Ho’s book. For more information, see the flyer at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B78eXBKxK6wWS0xjTkZuUVdtOE43c2k3WFpSdHBBNm9QZEhv/view.
• Affordable Textbooks Awareness Panel. The SGA and MASSPIRG Students are working together this semester to make college more accessible to students. Join us on Wednesday, November 6th from 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm in Danvers, MS 106B to learn more about the movement. You will hear testimonials from NSCC students and from faculty who have made the switch from traditional textbooks to free or cheaper options. Following the testimonials will be a discussion, we want to hear from you and hope to answer your questions and hear your ideas. Join us to learn more! Refreshments will be provided. 
• Faculty Conversations: Small Teaching Online. This fall, the CTLI will host informal faculty conversations around making small changes in your teaching practice that can increase student engagement and learning. The third meeting will be Thursday, November 14th from 2:30pm to 3:30pm. Please save the date in your calendar. An email with additional information about the November session will be sent out in early November.
      

Resources

• Increase Student Learning in Only 3 Seconds, https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-teaching-strategies/student-learning-in-3-seconds/ 
• How a University Took on the Textbook Industry, https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-10-24-how-a-university-took-on-the-textbook-industry 
• EDU100: Top 100 Tools for Higher Education 2019, https://www.toptools4learning.com/edu100/ 
• Instructional Design Basics, https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/course-design-ideas/instructional-design-2/   
     

Share Your Teaching Resources and Professional Development OpportunitiesIf you have any teaching resources that you would like to share with other NSCC faculty or know of any other professional development opportunities that NSCC faculty might be interested in, please feel free to send them to ctli@northshore.edu and we will share them in the upcoming issues of iDevelop.

We hope you have enjoyed this weekly eNewsletter and would love your input. Please let us know if you have any feedback on the format, content, and resources or if there is anything else you would like to see in the eNewsletter.

Thank you,
CTLI

iDevelop – NSCC’s Faculty Professional Development eNewsletter (9/17/2018)

Welcome to iDevelop, a weekly eNewsletter providing faculty with information about professional development opportunities at NSCC. The intent of this eNewsletter is to spotlight the various professional development events for faculty in one convenient location as well as share best practices, resources and tips related to the teaching practice. iDevelop is being brought to you by the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation (CTLI).
  

20 Minute Online Professional Development
The Monday Morning Mentor series will be available over the fall semester to bring you professional development in twenty minute snippets. The topic for the week of September 17th is How Will OER Benefit the 21st Century Student? The presentation is available Monday at 10:00am and is accessible through Sunday of that week. For information on accessing the presentation and supplemental materials, please view the Bulletin or the email version of iDevelop.

More information about this session (including description, topics, and learning goals) is available at https://www.magnapubs.com/online/mentor/how-will-OER-benefit-the-21st-century-student-15037-1.html. The complete fall schedule of Monday Morning Mentor sessions is available at http://nscclets.blogspot.com/2018/08/20-minute-mentor-online-faculty.html. 

Looking for transcripts of past Monday Morning Mentor sessions? Please email ctli@northshore.edu with the session title and we can provide you with the transcript and supplementary materials.   

Other Professional Development Opportunities

• Read the Learning, Education, Technology and Support (LETS) Blog at http://nscclets.blogspot.com/. CTLI’s goal with this blog is to provide an informative and useful resource for faculty and staff by highlighting events, spotlighting projects, and presenting current information around instructional technology while also providing a growing pool of resources, recommendations, tools, and materials for teaching and learning purposes.
• "Like" the North Shore Community College Instructional Technology and Design Page on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/myNSCC.acadtech. On the Instructional Technology and Design Facebook page, CTLI’s ITD team provides information about upcoming professional development opportunities, links to interesting articles on integrating technology into the teaching and learning environment, and presents tips on using the various instructional technology resources.

Upcoming Webinars of Interest

• Collaborative Platforms for Open Content Development on Wednesday, September 19th at 2:00pm EST. "As more colleges are promoting the adoption of OER to expand access and improve completion rates, collaborative platforms for publishing open content are becoming more critical.  Faculty, librarians, and instructional designers are often working in teams to curate, adapt, and format openly licensed content for entire courses. Join us for this free and open webinar to hear from several stakeholders (including colleagues from a MA community college) who have adopted collaborative platforms to streamline the process from course outline to delivery of fully OER courses and open textbooks." For more details and registration information, visit CCCOER’s website at: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/0ffb82fed654be79dc2040ba88984b7b?

Resources

• NSCC Open Educational Resources LibGuide
  https://library.northshore.edu/open
• OER: Bigger Than Affordability
  https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/views/2017/11/01/oer-catalyst-national-conversation-about-public-higher-education 
• Open Pedagogy Notebook: Sharing Practices, Building Community
  http://openpedagogy.org/ 
• OER Training Guide
  http://pressbooks.oer.hawaii.edu/oertraining2018/ 
• OASIS (new search tool for OER sources)
  https://oasis.geneseo.edu/
     

Share Your Teaching Resources and Professional Development Opportunities
If you have any teaching resources that you would like to share with other NSCC faculty or know of any other professional development opportunities that NSCC faculty might be interested in, please feel free to send them to ctli@northshore.edu and we will share them in the upcoming issues of iDevelop.

We hope you have enjoyed this weekly eNewsletter and would love your input. Please let us know if you have any feedback on the format, content, and resources or if there is anything else you would like to see in the eNewsletter.

Thank you,
Center for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation

MA CC Go Open Grant Opportunity - Third Round of OER Proposals

A third round of the MA Go Open OER Grant Program has been announced. All NSCC part-time and full-time faculty are invited to apply for grants to support Open Educational Resources (OER) in their courses. Faculty who receive a grant in Round 3 will join their colleagues from across the state who have been awarded Round 1 and Round 2 grants to save Massachusetts Community College students close to $1 million in the next academic year.

[Public Domain image]

In Round 3, as in earlier Rounds, proposal funds will range from $300 to $2,500 with options to adopt, adapt or build course “textbooks”.

Interested in Applying for a Grant?

Visit the MA CC Go Open Call for Proposals site for more details on applying for a grant - including levels of adoption, courses eligible for this funding, faculty planning worksheet and online application. The second round of applications are due April 30th. Projects will need to be completed by September 1st. Note: While your course needs to be on the list to be eligible, it does not have to be listed at your particular college for you to apply with it.

This is an amazing opportunity to customize your course and make the materials your students NEED to be successful in your course available to them for free and we hope you will consider submitting an application.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, please email Larry Davis at ldavis@northshore.edu or Andrea Milligan at amilliga@northshore.edu.

MA CC Go Open Grant Opportunity - Second Round of OER Proposals

A second round of the MA Go Open OER Grant Program has been announced. All NSCC part-time and full-time faculty are invited to apply for grants to support Open Educational Resources (OER) in their courses. Faculty who receive a grant in Round 2 will join their colleagues from across the state who have been awarded Round 1 grants to save Massachusetts Community College students close to $1 million in the next academic year.

[Public Domain image]

In Round 2, as in Round 1, proposal funds will range from $300 to $2,500 with options to adopt, adapt or build course “textbooks”.

Interested in Applying for a Grant?

Visit the MA CC Go Open Call for Proposals site for more details on applying for a grant - including levels of adoption, courses eligible for this funding, faculty planning worksheet and online application. The second round of applications are due December 10th. Note: While your course needs to be on the list to be eligible, it does not have to be listed at your particular college for you to apply with it.

This is an amazing opportunity to customize your course and make the materials your students NEED to be successful in your course available to them for free and we hope you will consider submitting an application.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, please email Larry Davis at ldavis@northshore.edu or Andrea Milligan at amilliga@northshore.edu.

MA CC Go Open Grant Opportunity

This fall, North Shore Community College (NSCC) faculty will have the opportunity to apply for an Open Educational Resources (OER) grant sponsored by the Massachusetts Community Colleges Open Education Council. NSCC has been at the forefront of OER education, specifically through Academic Technology grants that have allowed faculty to develop courses with open content that have saved students over $60,000 in textbook costs. In addition, OER courses developed at NSCC have brought the best free content from the web directly into the classroom. This grant will make available more funding for courses in STEM programs and for prerequisite courses that support these programs.

More specific information regarding the grant and how to apply can be found in the links below.

[Public Domain image]

Have you heard about Open Educational Resources? 

• They are free, openly licensed teaching materials that can be used in lieu of your traditional college textbooks.
• They allow every student in your course access to all the course reading on the first day of your class.
• They allow you to customize your text based on your teaching style, the needs of your specific course, your course learning outcomes and more.
• They allow you to control when the material needs updating and what should be updated.
• Did you read the part where we said the materials are FREE for your students? 

Interested? Great- we have an exciting opportunity for you!

The newly formed Massachusetts Community Colleges Open Education Council, led by Northern Essex Community College (NECC) with membership from every MA community college, is seeking proposals to fund MA CC faculty work on OER projects. With proposal funds ranging from $300 - $2,500; options to adopt, adapt or build course “textbooks”; and support from the statewide council and local OER coordinator(s), this is an amazing opportunity to customize your course and make the materials your students NEED to be successful in your course available to them for free.

Not sure? Check out this video​ from NECC faculty on why they moved to OER for their course(s). In the last two academic years, these faculty and many others have participated in the Adopt Open project at NECC, which has resulted in a student savings of $450,000 in textbooks.

Visit the MA Community Colleges Statewide Initiative site to learn more about the Statewide CC OER Initiative. Then visit the MA CC Go Open Call for Proposals site for more details on applying for a grant - including levels of adoption, courses eligible for this funding, faculty planning worksheet, online application, and more. The first round of applications will be due October 1st. Note: While your course needs to be on the list to be eligible, it does not have to be listed at your particular college for you to apply with it.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, please email Larry Davis at ldavis@northshore.edu or Andrea Milligan at amilliga@northshore.edu.

The Open Textbook Initiative at North Shore Community College

How We Got to Open Educational Resources (OER)

In fall 2013, a discussion about OER started during a meeting of the Educational Technology Innovation Group, a collection of faculty, staff and administration that meets once or twice a semester to discuss, support, problem-solve, and share some of the great things that our faculty are doing here at NSCC. From this initial discussion, Christine Goodchild (Coordinator of Public Services, NSCC Library), Andrea Milligan (Director of Instructional Technology and Design), Larry Davis (Department of History), and I began brainstorming what could be done to support the OER movement here at NSCC. After all, we were blown away by the staggering numbers we had seen surrounding the cost of textbooks for community college students ($120 per course on average; amounting to about $2,500 at the end of two years).

With the support of Karen Pangallo (Director, NSCC Library) and Michael Badolato (Dean, Academic and Faculty Support), our team explored how we could help faculty navigate OER content. Soon, Torrey Dukes (Reference Librarian, Lynn) and Dava Davanis (Coordinator Public Services, Lynn Library) joined us and we developed a LibGuide to OER. This resource continues to grow and morph, providing some great repositories of content that faculty can use for their courses in lieu of textbooks, assignments, video content, and other learning objects. 

While finishing up the first phase of the LibGuide, we heard about the Vision Project Innovation Grant call for proposals. We decided that, while the LibGuide is essential for helping faculty find OER materials, we needed to do something more palpable to help support faculty as they moved into incorporating OER. We submitted a proposal and eventually received a grant to help fund a Faculty Technology Summer Institute on OER. The Institute was a great success with some forty faculty and staff attending the Keynote Address by Nicole Allen from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). 

Thirty two faculty attended the rest of the Summer Institute and nine faculty applied for a mini-grant from our Innovation Grant to replace a textbook with open and affordable content for their courses.  This fall, we had an additional five faculty apply for Technology Across the Curriculum Grants to also adopt, adapt, or build content for their courses and save students significant costs.  One faculty member has already launched a course with OER materials, while many of our faculty are preparing to launch their first course this fall.

Collaborating with OER

In looking at the OER movement, we realized the best strategy to pursue would be an affordability strategy. This means that when we work with faculty, we do not solely focus on OER repositories to find content, but we also rely upon the great material from the various library subscriptions. We also consider if it is possible for the student purchase to be significantly reduced somehow by mixing OER content, library resources, and a significantly cheaper book purchase than previously considered (e.g. going from $150 to $15).  
 

 

The collaborative process has been rewarding for faculty and staff.  Each faculty member has been paired with an instructional designer and a librarian. The three meet regularly to find, develop and implement content for the course in a variety of ways. Some faculty have been using the substantial resources provided by the library such as their article databases, Films-On-Demand, or their great collection of digital books in ebrary. Other faculty are delving head first into completely OER content and finding free textbooks or other instructional content that they can plug into their courses for each relevant topic covered in the course. And some faculty are creating open content and contributing to the further availability of open educational resources. 

Faculty are quite energized about using OER in their courses. They are finding that using OER can change how they approach their content and students’ learning.  Several have offered the following thoughts about their experience:

Irene Fernandez

“I’m excited that I can contribute to making knowledge accessible to students. They benefit from my OER project every semester.” 

Nathan Chio

“I'm very excited about implementing OER into my African American History course. With the wealth of historical documents pertaining to African American history freely available online and in the public domain, I believe that I'll not only be able to save my students a significant amount of money but also will actually be able to offer them a better, more intellectually enriching history course.”

Anne Sears

“Working with the OTI (Open Textbook Initiative) team this year helped me think through the issues, understand fair use rules and locate rich teaching materials. I’ve put together a set of foundation readings and videos and will be able to expand case study readings and videos each semester. My students will appreciate current examples connected to specific lesson plans available in Blackboard.”

Recent Developments

These are some other developments with the OER movement at NSCC in the last few months. 

In fall 2014, Michael Badolato and Karen Pangallo launched the OER Working Group as a means of sustaining the Open Educational Resources movement at North Shore Community College.  While the Open Textbook Initiative focuses on helping faculty locate, assess, and implement OER into their courses, the OER Working Group will work on larger institutional issues regarding OER such as working with the bookstore to find printing solutions and offering tablets or with the Registrar to get special designations for OER courses. 

Professor Larry Davis was granted a sabbatical so that he could focus on working on several OER projects (mentioned elsewhere in this publication). 

Irene Fernandez and I are working on her OER textbook that she made for her sabbatical project to turn it into a physical book that can be sold in the bookstore as an alternative for students who want a physical text. 

In the spring, our team served on a panel with UMASS Amherst and the Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium at UMASS Boston’s OpenEd Forum, an all-day forum dedicated to exploring and supporting OER movements in New England. We had an opportunity to discuss some of the great OER projects and our excitement about implementing OER at North Shore Community College.

If you are interested in learning more about or pursuing OER materials for your courses, please do not hesitate to contact us at itd@northshore.edu or library@northshore.edu. 

This article was originally published in The EdTech Edge, the newsletter of the Technology Across the Curriculum Committee.  The full issue can be found here.

Let’s Be Open: Answering the Big 5 Questions About Open Content for Your Classroom

The average community college student spends over $1200 annually on classroom textbooks. That means that students who complete their learning in two years will have spent close to a single-semester’s worth of their money on textbooks.  Nearly two-thirds of students at some point have not bought a textbook because of the cost (and that too has taken a toll on most of their performances within those courses). Though many of us are not aware of the specific numbers, we implicitly know and witness the result of expensive textbooks in our classes. 

For many instructors, textbooks (and their often steep prices) are a necessary evil.  Some will find ways of lessening the burden put on students by having copies available in the library for in-library use or allowing students to purchase earlier (and therefore, cheaper) editions.  But in a given course section, we’re still likely generating hundreds if not thousands of dollars profit for publishers at our students’ expense. 

But does it have to be this way?  What if the course resources and materials can be made entirely free or significantly cheap enough so that no student is making a choice between books and life expenses?  This possibility is not the future.  It is now and it’s time we take advantage of it. 

Image of OER logo
Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OER_Logo.svg

What are Open Educational Resources?

Open Education Resources (OER) are media-rich online repositories with content that faculty can use for free for their courses.  This includes but is not limited to:  textbooks, short-reads, videos, sound recordings, assignment guidelines, course notes, and even entire course packages.  The purpose of these repositories is to make materials available for all students and faculty on all subjects so that we spend less time on “reinventing the wheel” of course content and more time on engaging with our students around the course content.  Many of them are in the public domain or have what is called a Creative Commons license. Here are few examples.

• Open Education Resources Commons
• Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources
• Archive.org - Open Educational Resources

 

What about access?

An immediate question of access arises with OER as they are internet based, and not all students have access to a computer (though in a 2012 NSCC technology study did show that 86% of students have laptops--to say nothing of any other devices). But let’s look at the logistics of this concern.

If a student does not have the $120 for the textbook, there is a good chance that he/she gets zero access.  In that scenario, if the argument is that one can put the book on reserve at the library for the student to use--the same argument holds true for access for OER.  Since our libraries have public-use computers, OER in this comparison is more accessible, because the student can access the online material from both campus libraries or any library that allows computer access (which is many, if not all, on the North Shore).

But if it is important to have the physical copy, many places offering free textbooks online, such as OpenStax, provide the student an opportunity to purchase a cheap print-copy of the book for $30.  For many textbooks in the math and sciences that can mean over $100 savings.

Finally, there is no delay in access with OER.  Students can access all of the content as soon as the course starts.  Instructors no longer need worry about issues of financial aid delays, late shipping by the publishers, or other issues that regularly interfere with the course lift-off. 

What about stability?

The belief that the internet is more unstable than the textbook industry might need some reconsidering.  Firstly, it should be acknowledged that textbook publishing has its own instabilities including the ability to cease publishing the book being used or to publish newer editions that may be inferior, pricier, or change things up enough to have to revise the course layout.

Secondly, even if the textbook arrives in the bookstore, many students may still have to leap through hoops to get their financial aid to cover the books (or even not have enough to cover it).  The instability of those first few weeks leaves many faculty skipping or delaying the use of course content.

Thirdly, OER content is often capable of being downloaded, edited, and inserted directly into a course shell.  This means that their stability is much more assured than the textbook.  If this is a significant concern, then one should make sure to make flexibility to download a criteria for selecting OER materials.  Though in truth, this isn’t really much of a concern any more since content available in one OER repository is often duplicated into another--that is, there are back-ups of back-ups across the Internet.

Finally, again, the content is present and ready to go from the start of the semester.  Many of us have been caught in the situation where we don’t find out until too late that the textbook we want wasn’t ordered or not enough were ordered and are left scrambling to cobble together the rest of the semester.  OER materials are available at the start and throughout the semester.

Image CC:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/6554315179/

What about quality?

Some perceive OER as lower quality because they are free.  Of course, psychological studies have shown that price influences perception.  That $200 biology textbook must be awesome whereas that free biology textbook must be a poor comparison.  Saying that there are a lot of poor selections in the OER somehow implies that this isn’t the case with textbooks, but of course, we know that’s not true.  We can look to James Loewen’s famous book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong and other similar research as a reminder of that.

Will there be poor OER material out there?  Absolutely.  However, there will also be really great content.  By using and promoting OER material, instructors will play an important role in helping colleagues sift out the good from the bad--just like they do already with textbooks.

However, OER also has the potential to deliver better content in three capacities.

• Updating content:  Updating content in OER materials is much easier than in a textbook and the beauty is that updated content will not require another new (and costly) edition.
• Customizing content:  Add, edit, or delete the OER resource so that it fits exactly how you want to use the material.
• Shifting content:  Why stick with just one OER object?  Instructors can weave together the perfect course materials from numerous sources, rather than a one-size fits all source.

 

What about time?

Converting to using OER materials will take time.  There’s no question about it.  But it is time well spent, not only for your students, but for the college and academia in general.  Also, it doesn’t mean, however, that one must reinvent all of one’s courses in a single semester, but develop a strategy for how to do so in the long run.  Start with replacing one item in one course and slowly grow from there.  Faculty can also work with Instructional Technology and Design as well as the library who support such projects and will be releasing a LibGuide shortly on OER for faculty.  It will take time, but so do these things:

Finding new texts for a course (because the book went out of print).

• Dealing with new editions of the same textbook you’re using and updating course references to the textbook.
• Delays in teaching and learning because students don’t have access to the textbook.  
• Answering questions about whether different versions of the textbook are acceptable.

Moreover, these things happen time and again, year after year.

Making students pay for any content beyond the course itself is the college’s means of externalizing costs at the expense of our students, and we do so for the profit of book publishers.   The final analysis is that using open educational resources not only empowers you as the instructor, it provides better access and fewer challenges to our students.  OER also fulfills the community college’s vision for civic responsibility by using, sharing, and even developing open educational resources for the public’s benefit.

This article was originally published in The EdTech Edge.  Please check it out to see other great articles about instructional technology at North Shore Community College.