Open Educational Resources Pep Talk

The following is the text of a TED TALK style presentation I'm doing on Open Educational Resources. It's not everything I could say, but my time is limited. My own research showed a discrepancy between OER learning outcomes at an access institution and an R1 (I published it in an academic book), which I ascribe to less student preparedness and their difficulty navigating digital texts cognitively.   I have a rockstar PowerPoint to go with this (you probably didn't get my irony there.) 

Every year our college has a BOLD TALKS session by faculty. This is mine.

Free money! Sounds good, right? But is there really such a thing as free money? Despite what some politicians would like us to believer, we know that free money is an oxymoron. However, what if you could receive a stipend of 2-5,000 dollars for changing the way you teach one of your courses?

The University System of Georgia realizes that to motivate faculty to adopt open educational resources and textbooks, they have to sweeten the pot. Therefore, since 2014 the System has offered Affordable Learning Georgia Textbook Transformation Grants to faculty for just this purpose. So far it’s been a huge success.  In the next few minutes I’m going to show the System’s commitment to open educational resources adoption and creation, explain what open educational resources are about, and how you and your students can benefit from them. For the sake of time, I’ll use the acronym OER.

But before that, a caveat and disclaimer. I’m the Campus Champion for OERs, and the main author of a pretty popular OER on public speaking. In fact, here’s our most recent download “geography.” I’ve been the recipient of one large grant and the recipient of two mini-grants to revise the text significantly, create ancillaries, and fund a website, all of course with colleagues in the Communication discipline. So, I’m an interested cheerleader for the program. However, I research, publish, and present on this subject and know the downsides of OERs and the rhetoric around them, which I’ll get to later. That said, I trust that your presence here you have a passing interest in the OER movement in Higher Education because it truly is a movement and that it might motivate you to pursue OERs for your own teaching.

First, the USG’s commitment to and involvement in OERs. Georgia is a leader in adoption and advocacy for OERs, and it’s highly successful Textbook Transformation Grants program shows it. To February 2020, 5.6 Million has been awarded to 401 Textbook Transformation projects in its public colleges and universities.  Sixty-nine million has been “saved” in textbook costs for students. Now, I realize that’s probably evangelistically speaking, because that number tracks how many students were enrolled in the respective courses times the cost of the previously used publishers’ textbooks, which we all know can be quite expensive.  Even if we halve that to about 35 Million, we’re looking at about a 6:1 ration of savings to students compared to output on the grants. The Strategic Plan for the USG includes a place for these grants to continue.

What about Dalton State? That’s one of the reasons I’m here. We have been awarded almost $192,000, with a savings of 3,864,000 and change to 23,492 students. These represent the School of Education, Calculus, Introduction to Biology, Microbiology, A&P, Fundamentals of Speech, Learning Support English, History, Sociology, Psychology, and American Government. Let me add that some instructors use OERs without the grants. Also keep in mind that a project might involves 2-8 faculty, so I do not have exact numbers on how many faculty on campus use OERs. Whereas two years ago Dalton State was 4^th in the state on these metrics, we’ve slipped a bit although we are in the top half in all of them and sixth in students affected and seventh in student savings. I’d like to bring our status up. I review grant applications, and I know we can do better than some of them I’ve read.

Now that we’ve got the numbers out of the way, let’s look at what OERS really are. Here’s a definition because we’re academics and need to start with definitions and citations:

But what OERS ARE NOT by definition is:

*Free books. While most are free or low cost, free is not the universal description. What they are is accessible. If a book is printed, free goes out the window.

*Public domain, although public domain works are a subset  of OPEN education resources. OERS are normally under Creative Commons licensing. I don’t have time today to fully cover what Creative Commons licensing is—it and copyright are huge topics—but let’s just say it’s an alternative licensing system for published works that provides for differing levels of sharing, editing, remixing, and distribution without specific permission that normal copyright requires.

For example, our speech textbook is    , which means users can take it and rewrite, add, edit, etc. any part, but they have to give us credit and they can’t make money from it.  There are five other versions of these Creative Commons licenses. Reputable studies show that higher education faculty are pretty uninformed about Creative Commons licenses and OERs in general, at about a 50% level.

OERs are usually not printed, that is, they are digital. This is why they are accessible and low cost, but as a disclaimer, their being digital is also a reason why they are not the best for all students. If students can get a printed copy at a very low price, that is probably best. Digital reading is simply a different animal from print-reading, another topic we don’t have time for today, but one which, honestly, is my biggest concern about OERs, especially at Dalton State and other access institutions.

So we have seen the prevalence of OERs in USG institutions and what defines them, so let’s answer the big questions—what about the free money? The USG essentially offer three levels of grant, although I’ve seen variations in these:

$29,800 – For creation of materials for a major, multi-section transformation that would affect a large number of students in required classes in the general ed curriculum or large major.

$10,800 – For smaller but significant transformation for upper division students in a major that has expensive textbooks. 

$4,800 – these are minigrants for creating ancillaries for a currently available OER. For example, Kim Correll and Chad Daniel were awarded a mini-grant to create materials for an open textbook on theatre appreciation.

Of course, nothing is that easy, so here are the sticking points:

*There’s an application process.

*There’s a reporting process.

*There’s an orientation/training meeting after reward of the grants (I think they are going to online attendance) but not for the mini-grants (those are the easiest to get and complete).

*Recipients are limited to 5,000 for the first two categories and 2,000 for the minigrants (so team projects are preferred)

*The moneys are awarded in halves; recipients get one payment at the beginning of the project and the other at the end.

*You have two semesters to do the work.

*Your work is publicly available in perpetuity through GALILEO, and it might be shared on other websites.

In our case, we wrote a 400-page textbooks. And to be honest, it became a life problem. It’s now in its fourth edition, which means it took us four tries and four years, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, to get it right and where we wanted it. Therefore, I’m not particularly an advocate of writing your own textbook from scratch. Our situation was exacerbated by the death of the team lead, Kris Barton, who really was the instigator of our writing the book. I sit in Kris’ old office and want to ask him questions some times and say, “See what you started!” I’m immensely proud of the book, but I don’t recommend what we did. There are other and probably better ways to adopt OERs.

The first is

• OpenStax. These full textbooks are written and vetted by faculty from respected institutions all over the country. Many of you should look at what OpenStax has to offer in business, social sciences, math, and hard sciences. Many of our faculty use them.
• Looking for available online, digital textbooks on other open resources sites: University of Minnesota, GALILEO, and Merlot.
• Creating a compilation of digital teaching, exercises, and learning object that replace a tradition textbook. This is what Molly Zhou and David Brown did for two project for education majors. And shout out to them—their work is far more downloaded and popular than our book is; they have done students in the developing world an invaluable service. I could say that about many colleagues here because of what they created through the grants.

In the spirit of transparency, I have to address the downsides of OERS. Like changing to any new textbook, it’s work, more work than the grant really pays for. Some of them don’t have adequate ancillaries. And that brings us to the big questions: Do they meet the learning outcomes as well as traditional books?

That one is tricky. The USG’s research says that the faculty reports on changes in learning outcomes is neutral to positive, with some examples of negative movement.  I have spent a good bit of time reading the research on the effectiveness of OERs. The early articles were of the “Oh, yes, they’re as good or better” variety. The students have the books the first day! They have a better attitude due to not paying $300 for the books! (And yes, they do—the research is solid there—the students love them because of the cost savings, and pretty solid that DWFI rates are better with OER-based classes.) Recent research has been a little more realistic and questioned some of the methodologies, but the consensus is they are as good as publishers’ books.

In my mind, there are too many mitigating factors to make a blanket statement on them.

*the instructor, a big one. How does the faculty member use the book? Is it a matter of self-selection, where the more motivated and student-oriented faculty use the OERs out of altruism?

*the students’ level of preparedness

*the ancillaries

*the context

There is a lot more I could say about this subject; I’m presenting at UGA on what the numbers here say, and our results have not been as outstanding as at some places. I attribute that to the level of preparedness of our students, who have, for example, average SAT scores 322 points lower than UGA. I’ve spent these minutes with the hope that everyone in this room is more informed about OERs, the movement and the University System’s commitment to them. The next round of grants is due April 6. Dr. Hicks has to approve the application and needs it two weeks ahead of that deadline. If you want my help with the application, just shoot me an email. OERs can be a pieces of the student success puzzle in terms of improving access to vital learning materials and just maybe a source of free money for you.