Open Education 2017

Minnesota State, a public system of 7 universities and 30 colleges serving nearly 400,000 students, has partnered with the Open Textbook Network (OTN) since 2014 to deliver training to nearly 300 faculty to OTN and the need, purpose, and possibilities of OER use in the classroom. Many of these faculty have gone on to peer review one or more texts housed in the Open Textbook Library. While there is still need for these basics, there is also growing interest in aiding faculty to move beyond reviewing existing OERs to adopting, redesigning courses, and even authoring their own open texts. To encourage faculty to adopt and embrace OERs in classroom instruction and design, to consider authoring texts, and to think more broadly about engaging in open education practices, the Minnesota State system has begun to coordinate and expand faculty development efforts and supports. In this session, campus faculty and system office presenters will highlight past and current efforts and successes in raising awareness and encouraging adoption, course re-design, and authoring of OERs. We'll share data collected from faculty about interests and needed supports and how this data has informed next steps in effective faculty development. Specifically, we will highlight ongoing and future plans to meet the needs of faculty across the system, including coordination of systemwide communications and scaling up of a successful campus-based initiative for our large, diverse, and complex system. Time will be included for discussion for all of us to learn and share faculty development successes from our many contexts, and participants will leave with ideas and tools for themselves and their faculty.

Adopting OERs widely would help reduce the cost of attendance, while improving the quality of the educational experience students have by bringing better materials and digital literacy skill-building into every OER course. But getting faculty interested in adopting OERs can be challenging. Some fear the unknown, some are afraid of extra work, some are general technophobes, and some just need guidance to begin their own OER journey. This presentation will cover the work of the KCC OER Initiative, which began as an idea and runs on a shoestring budget, at Kingsborough Community College, an urban community college in the City University of New York. To increase adoption of OERs on campus, while maintaining the utmost respect for academic freedom and compassion for our more technologically challenged colleagues, we have focused on making the financial case to faculty and pointing out that as faculty, we all do the work of course design already. The presentation will also cover the different ways the Initiative tries to provide support to interested faculty to make it as easy as possible to open up to OERs using the SAMR approach, including OER Office Hours, Lib Guides, and grant and workshop opportunities. Finally, we are working on building a community and culture of open education. In tracing the OER Initiative at Kingsborough, this presentation will provide how-to resources for a variety of academic disciplines using the SAMR model, with examples of how OERs can be implemented with minimal initial efforts to improve teaching and learning and student engagement, while saving money.

Openly sharing learning resources to create pathways for hope and opportunity is growing ever more important as ideological and physical borders become increasingly less porous. With materials from over 2,000 courses and 200 million visitors, unlocking knowledge and empowering minds is at the heart of what we do at MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW). In addition to sharing OER through OCW, many MIT faculty members also share their teaching experiences, ideas, and approaches in a special section of their OCW courses, called Instructor Insights. In this section, instructors discuss topics of interest to practicing teachers, such as course design, active learning, engaging learners, teaching with technology, and creating learning communities ”the types of things that help teachers use the resources more effectively with students, thus multiplying their impact.

MIT Instructors share their insights through the OCW Educator project, a faculty-inspired initiative designed to pull back the curtain on MIT teaching for their colleagues at the Institute and around the world. It's based on the idea that sharing the how behind the what of OER makes the materials more useful for educators, and thus, for learners. OCW Educator has been up and running for 3 years, and in that time, we've worked with MIT educators to share more than 130 sets of instructor insights. As the OCW Educator project manager, I've learned a lot about what works for encouraging faculty to openly share their teaching approaches along with their OER. In this presentation, I provide a brief tour of OCW Educator, including how it got started and what the site looks like today, and share 10 tips for getting faculty members to share their instructional approaches. The presentation, which aims to inspire and provide a framework for other institutions to do similar work, will conclude with an interactive conversation about how we can more systematically collect and share faculty insights to support OER use.

Austin Community College (ACC) is the lead college in a Texas Consortium, a recipient of the Achieving the Dream OER Degree Initiative Grant. Faculty are involved in developing and reviewing courses to create an OER degree pathway in General Studies.

One of the courses in the degree pathway is Composition II. Composition II at ACC focuses on critical thinking skills through analyzing short stories and writing compositions. There are many, many short stories in the public domain. The main objective was finding stories that meet the course learning outcomes and the OER grant guidelines. Handouts and other instruction were necessary to develop to support analysis skills and replace textbook instruction.

Adjunct Professor Tina Buck and Head Librarian Carrie Gits worked together to create materials to meet the objective of both the Comp II curriculum and the OER AtD Grant guidelines.

The presenters will share their tips on the process and collaboration. Final comments from students who participated in two OER sections of the pilot class will also be shared.

Linda Williams, Faculty OER Lead at Tidewater Community College will share her experiences as an OER Champion for the Z Degrees at TCC. After leading TCC's OER initiatives since 2013, Professor Williams has gained insight into what it means to be an OER advocate. Whether you are the champion or trying to identify potential champions at your institution, this session will provide key characteristics and traits that make faculty advocates successful. Professor Williams will also share the successes and challenges of leading faculty driven OER adoption initiatives, including recruiting, managing and supporting faculty adopters. Participants will leave this session with information that can be immediately applied to their own OER initiatives, regardless of their scope or scale.

In today's world of higher education, everyone is being asked to do much more with much less. So when members of Northern Essex Community College's Textbook Task Force decided to launch a pilot Open Educational Resources initiative, we knew having support at every level was critical to its success. In this presentation, we will share with you our process for a campus-wide acceptance of OER and the important role early adopters played in the fast growth of the OER movement at NECC.

A brief overview of NECC's OER project will be shared, which outlines a significant return on investment with student savings of more than $815,000 in a few short years. The focus of the presentation will be on the faculty role in securing funding, motivating other faculty to get involved, creating partnerships and sharing resources. The mindset change that occurred in most cases will also be discussed because what started as a way to save students money has truly changed the way many of our faculty are teaching and more importantly, how our students are learning.

With great gratitude to the NEH we propose to share a new OER learning resource obtained for our community college during a two year …Bridging Cultures' NEH grant. Fifteen Ivy Tech teachers from 8 disciplines created 150 one-page Teaching Modules (TM) on five world religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism & Buddhism. These TM are publically archived by IUPUI, our four-year partner school on this grant. Thus, this OER resource is readily available for community college teachers across Indiana and (may we propose) across the USA.

We will report the measured response and interpret the results we get in a six month campaign of advocacy for these TM as an OER actively used by teachers at Ivy Tech campuses across the state. We will recruit selected teachers at the Central Indiana Region (the largest in the state) and engage them in adopting and using at least one TM in one of their classes for summer and fall terms. Simultaneously, we will recruit teachers in three other Ivy Tech regions who will also …adopt and use' the TM during the same period. Our findings will give us data to report on the practical aspects of OER advocacy and support when we present a splendid new OER resource. We will set metrics to report on teacher and student interest and engagement, metrics on student learning results, metrics to measure the ease of use for this set of new OER materials. We will interpret our findings to permit judging of the enthusiasm for and even skepticism about the adoption and use of OER resources.

As part of our presentation we will propose to actively recruit teachers from our audience who we hope will be inspired by our advocacy such that we can continue our conversation and possibly plan to use the TM at their school during the next year. We will propose that our findings for this …national' roll out of our TM would be a wonderful …adoptions and use' story we can report findings on at the 2018 OER conference.

In 1995, long before Open Educational Resources were called OERS, I began developing my first online open resource materials for use by my own microbiology students as well as any students having Internet access. This eventually evolved into an entire microbiology course, taken mainly by students entering the allied health professions, consisting of interconnected and mostly self-authored OERs. Both lecture and laboratory OERs are openly available on my faculty website (http://faculty.ccbcmd.edu/~gkaiser/index.html) while all of my lecture OERs are available on SoftChalk Cloud (http://faculty.ccbcmd.edu/~gkaiser/SoftChalk%20BIOL%20230/Softchalk_index.html). This includes 138 SoftChalk lessons, 250 original Flash animations, over a thousand original illustrations, photographs, and photomicrographs, 38 YouTube videos on laboratory techniques, and many concept maps and self quizzes.

This presentation will provide practical tips on including a variety of best practices and technologies in authoring OERs as well as developing a complete 4 credit course consisting entirely of OERs. Some of my experiences in using OERs to help fulfill the mission of large multi-campus community college will also be shared.