Open Education 2017

In Louisiana, OERs have recently become a strategy used by the state legislature to address the rising cost of higher education. This process began with advocacy work led by LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network, the statewide consortium, and directed at the Board of Regents, the governmental body charged with planning, coordinating, and budgeting public higher education in the state. The Regents provided funds to LOUIS that have allowed the consortium to build capacity and infrastructure needed to support the development of OERs in the state.



LOUIS used funds to launch scalable programs and easily adaptable solutions. Using a train-the-trainer model, they quickly built capacity at universities and colleges in the state. Then, they created a structure to provide funds and support for individual academic libraries to begin developing the OER culture locally. Local institutions were able to apply this model to the degree to which they had the capacity and interest to support it. The legislature-to-library-consortium-to-university model has allowed multiple stakeholders take ownership of an element of the project and apply leadership at their level while working towards a shared success in the state.

Humboldt State University has developed several strategies to transform courses and promote the adoption of affordable & OERs. Humboldt State University eLearning and Library strategies for California State University Course Transformation and CSU Affordable Learning Solutions are undergoing a design change that coincides with the opening of a new Center for Teaching & Learning. Disparate experiences, skills, and initiatives are coming together to form a holistic strategy in a collaborative faculty development center. Hear what works, what we have learned so far, and how this effort is designed to improve student success. As we open a new Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) these strategies are being integrated and the key participants co-located. How is the CTL related to our Scholars Lab, Digital Media Lab, and HSU Press? How are faculty development efforts being integrated and open pedagogical practices shared and modeled? The panelists each have a unique perspective on the strategies implemented. They will explain the shape and impact of services under rapid evolution to meet the needs to improve student success and curricular innovations. Examples shared include useful approaches to faculty development including; Consultations between faculty, librarians, and instructional designers, Faculty led luncheons, Open Access publishing, Workshops for individual faculty and whole departments both in-person and online, and HSU's Unconference. Also discussed is the integration of strategies to address the challenge of instructional material accessibility.

This presenter will share the process that Central Lakes College has used to overcome many of the barriers associated with OER adoption, course redesign, and the authoring of new OER materials through faculty participation in OER Learning Circles and faculty access to a D2L Brightspace support course room. The presenter will outline the process she used to create and facilitate collaborative interdisciplinary faculty Learning Circles. She will provide suggestions for creating a D2L Brightspace support course room structured with weekly journal activities, weekly work plan update activities, optional weekly discussion activities, a repository of OER websites, websites and materials dedicated to ADA compliance, and support links and templates for writing and aligning assessments with learning objectives. She will share examples of the simple templates that she has created to guide faculty through the review, course redesign, and authoring pathways.

In 2015 the Alberta Government provided funding for Open Educational Resource projects within the province in reaction to a growing global movement towards open and free educational materials to displace the publishing industry stranglehold on education. Our proposal was awarded funds in large part due to the fundamental collaborative component of the project which reached well beyond the borders of the University. In the world that is heading to more borders, more segregation, and more siloing, our project undertook to build relationships and break down the barriers that prevent large scale collaborative activities in the humanities.

During 18 months, our Spanish OER project engaged six universities, over 100 professors, graduate students, undergraduates, and members of the community to create, edit, and digitize a textbook for the 1st semester of Spanish at the post-secondary level.

The presentation will describe the logic behind the project, the scope of collaboration, and how it opened up the role of content expert, editor, professor, tutor, and student. We will discuss the rationale and successes of technological innovation and integration in the textbook and during the joint effort of creating resources. We examine these processes through the lens of collaborative creation, collaborative teaching, and collaborative learning, which are the essential elements of this project.

The Open Educational Resources Universitas (OERu) is an international network of +30 tertiary institutions from six world regions that have created a parallel universe to improve higher education accessibility. Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) partnered with the OERu to help manifest its commitments to Quality, Relevance, and Reputation. The OERu-KPU open marriage is in its 4th year and has produced the WikiEducator-based, open online course: Introduction to Psychology. This presentation will explain the nature of this partnership with special reference to the role of faculty, administrators, and learning technologists. Interestingly, the same faculty who developed KPU's OERu course also created an OERu-Thompson Rivers University course on Research Methods. Is it time we acknowledge that openness promotes academic non-monogamy?

The presenter will describe his process to create HIS 274 —– The Holocaust as an interactive course utilizing public domain documents. At PCC, the Instructional Designer serves as a project manager for a course development team that includes a digital librarian, a web developer, a media specialist, and a subject matter expert. The presenter will share how this team worked together to curate a collection of appropriate materials, drawing largely from public domain documents. He will also discuss how the team exploited various course management tools in an effort to offer students unique and interactive ways to engage with the content. The designer's use of the widget tool with java-scripting, the glossary tool, interactive timelines created with Articulate Storyline, and a Lightbox Gallery scrolling tool created with Fancybox (a JQuery tool) will be featured.

Approximately 75% of California State University, Dominguez Hills' undergraduate students receive financial need grants or scholarship aid. Our campus was the first CSU to create an integrated Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) program. Our active AL$ initiative has run for 7 years and includes approximately 400 faculty (about 50% of our full and part time teaching faculty) offering library, OER or bookstore alternatives. Our number of OER faculty champions is growing with participation in the COOL4Ed Faculty Showcase sharing, California's AB 798 College Textbook Affordability Act program, and the CSU Course Redesign with Technology grant initiative. Increasingly, additional faculty express their interest in OER print textbook replacements, but many of them need help in locating appropriate OER for their classes.

AL$ is administered by the Library in partnership with the Academic Technology Department, Bookstore, and Faculty Development Center. Collaboration among these units to adopt affordable resources for our students has been strong, combining with each branch's unique services, tools, information, and structure to implement a campus-wide effort. We will share how each unit partners and contributes to the adoption and use of OERs, how adopted OERs are made accessible through multiple points of access and LMS design, as well as instruction and professional development efforts, our challenges, and the new initiatives that we will use to expand the awareness and use of OERs on campus. We will discuss our joint roles in implementing California's SB 1359 (notifying students in the course schedule of courses using all free all-digital materials), as well as a project to make our OERs discoverable in our new 23-campus unified library services and discovery platform so that we not only share our OER resources beyond the individual classroom but also across our campuses.