How to talk to your provost about OER

How to talk to your provost about OER

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  HOW TO TALK TOYOUR PROVOST ABOUT OER DR. ROBIN DEROSA, ENGLISH & INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES DR. SCOTT ROBISON, LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES & ONLINE EDUCATION; CENTER FOR EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING AND LEARNING PLYMOUTH STATE UNIVERSITY, NH (USA)
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  OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES OER areteaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge. Hewlett Foundation: http://www.hewlett.org/programs/education/open-
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  WHY OER ATOUR UNIVERSITY? • Save students money; • Increase student success and retention; • Increase enrollments; • Enhance pedagogy; • Enhance your public mission; • Achieve long-range cost savings in open access; • Capture First-Mover Advantage.
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  SAVE STUDENTS MONEY •Students spend on average $1,200 a year on textbooks (U.S. Public Interest Research Group, survey of 156 campuses in 33 states) • That’s equal to about 12% of our in-state tuition! • Since 1978, college textbook costs have increased 812%. To put that in context, it means that textbook prices have increased at 3.2 times the rate of inflation. (Mark J Perry, AEIdeas. http://www.aei.org) • Used/rentals/ebooks don’t solve the problem. Used textbooks are undermined by new editions, rentals create a system where we remove books from student hands. Many ebooks have expiration dates and print limits.
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  SAVE STUDENTS MONEY http://www.studentpirgs.org/sites/student/files/reports/The %20Billion%20Dollar%20Solution.pdf Averagesavings per student, per course with OER is $128.00. Savings generated are often up to 6 times the amount invested.
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  INCREASE STUDENT SUCCESS &RETENTION • 60% of students report not purchasing a required textbook because of cost, and 23% regularly go without books due to cost • 50% of students report taking fewer courses due to textbook costs • 14% have dropped a course and 10% have withdrawn from a course due to textbook costs 2012 Survey of 22,000 students, Florida Virtual Campus, comprised of the 12 universities and 28 colleges in the Florida state system.
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  INCREASE STUDENT SUCCESS &RETENTION • Houston Community College. The introduction of an open textbook was correlated with an increase in class grade point average, an increase of the average score on the departmental final examination, and a lower course withdrawal rate. (2011, 690 students, http://www.johnhiltoniii.org/) • Mercy College. In a basic math course, OER- and non-OER sections were compared. Pass rates were 8.54% higher in OER sections. Similarly, students who were enrolled in OER versions of a critical reading course performed better than their peers who enrolled in the same course using non- OER materials. (2012, 695 students, http://www.educause.edu/)
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  INCREASE ENROLLMENTS WITH GOOD PRESS TidewaterCommunity College: The Z Degree • Tidewater Z-courses have drop rates that are 6% lower than other courses. (Lumen Learning) • In 2013 Tidewater reported a 90.4% retention rate for students in the Z degree. • They shaved 25% from the cost of degree, and saved $128,000 in the first year of the program. • Tidewater has received statewide and national press, and is now a leader in Open Education. (US News & World Report, Huff Post, Time, NBC, Hewlett Foundation, and many local VA newspapers) http://www.scribd.com/doc/256155220/Z-Degree-Report- 2015-Tidewater-Community-College#scribd
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  INCREASE ENROLLMENTS BY APPEALINGTO STUDENTS • The Nebraska Book Company, which runs more than 200 college bookstores nationwide, did a survey in 2014 and found that nearly half of students (49%) were actually willing to choose one university over another if free textbooks were provided all four years. • The survey showed that college students currently worry more about how they will afford required college textbooks than they do about paying the cost of tuition. http://www.20mm.org/articles/neebo-survey-finds-college- students-worry-textbook-costs-college-tuition-spring-
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  ENHANCE PEDAGOGY • Currentpedagogical informed practice is experiential, engaged, collaborative, and service- oriented. • Open pedagogy is a student-centered model…with teeth: • Emphasizes transdisciplinary links to the wider public (students become world-builders); • Emphasizes students as producers rather than students as consumers of knowledge (students are asked to contribute to course design/outcomes and to revision of materials); • Emphasizes collaboration between faculty and students (expertise is shared, real-world problems are explored together).
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  OER CAN HELPMAKE THE CASE FOR STATE APPROPRIATIONS OpenEd encourages academia to work in conjunction with contextual communities, and demonstrates how the university can control costs for students. • Our university claims to offer benefit to the public. Open pedagogy will support the transdisciplinary initiatives we have in place. • Our university claims to be working to lower costs for students and doing our part to control the budget. OER initiatives concretely show us doing both.
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  LONG RANGE COST SAVINGS Savingstudents money directly using OER is only the beginning. Our university pays hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for access to databases and periodicals. Some single journals cost thousands of dollars to access. How could we reallocate those funds? We can develop institutional policies to: • Encourage the use of OER in courses; • Value open-access publications in P&T processes; • Funnel money away from paywalls and toward the dissemination of research.
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  “FIRST-MOVER ADVANTAGE” • Bybeing one of the first to innovate, we have a disproportionate advantage over our actual and potential competitors (timely marketing). • Once first-mover advantage is gone, it is gone, and no amount of resources will get it back. • We have no more than 3 years (at most) to capitalize on the first-mover advantage. After that, we (and everyone else) will be forced to play catch-up. • First mover advantage is not just about getting there first: speed is necessary for success, but not sufficient; a range of supporting components are needed to ensure success.
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  • Working withteaching centers and learning technology personnel; • Coordinating with sister campuses in a university system; • Involving the community (access/pedagogy); • Working with grant offices on funding sources; • Building structural relationships with related offices; • Working with First-Year Experience directors and other program chairs; • Working with departments to build Z-degrees, and encouraging single-class conversions. COMPONENTS OF AN OER IMPLEMENTATION • OER Initiatives to convert courses; • Institutional policy on OER and OA; • Student involvement to drive faculty buy-in; • Working with Advancement on marketing and leveraging the press; • Working with IT on infrastructure; • Working with Bookstore on new models (print on demand, etc); • Working with Institutional Research to track results;
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  LAYING OUT NEEDS •Release time • Seed money for incentives • Articulated institutional commitment • Time in front of faculty • Etc.
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  This work islicensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.