Open Education 2017

As the state of Idaho moves toward the adoption of open education resources, one of the biggest challenges is getting the word out about OER to K-12 educators throughout the state. Idaho State Department of Education teamed up with University of Idaho's Doceo Center for Innovation + Learning to create a unique experience for educators with the following goals concerning OER: 1) increase understanding 2) promote use 3) demonstrate how to access 4) share technologies that support use 5) assist with creating collections for use. The outcome was a one-day professional development opportunity offered at three different locations in the state (Moscow, Boise, and Pocatello) to reach out to the majority of Idaho K-12 educators. The day included 12 sessions to create a more individualized experience including a general session to support understanding of OER, sessions on specific OER tools, sessions to support specific subject areas, sessions to introduce technologies that support the use of OER, etc. Teachers could earn one professional development credit with an additional assignment related to implementing OER. This session will share an overview of this pd opportunity and feedback from educators who attended the event. This feedback is being used to guide future OER professional development opportunities including the creation of an online OER professional development course.

Abstract: Emerging research shows the impact of quality instructional materials on student achievement to be as large as quality instruction, and almost 40 times more cost-effective than class size reduction. As Open Education Resources seek to bolster their credibility in the materials space, it is imperative that OERs meet expectations when it comes to alignment with CCSS, usability, and other quality criteria. EdReports.org is an independent nonprofit that publishes free reviews of instructional materials, using an educator-designed tool that measures these criteria. The reports help districts and educators make informed purchasing and instructional decisions that support improved student outcomes. EdReports.org has reviewed or is in the process of reviewing 6 OER series finding a mix of quality with some grade-level materials meeting expectations and others only partially meeting expectations. At this session, we'll discuss the landscape of education materials with our panel and walk through how collaboration can lead to excellent materials for all students.

In October of 2015, state and district leaders from around the country gathered at the White House to announce their intention to "Go Open." The districts in attendance pledged to replace at least one set of course materials with open educational resources, while state leaders committed to supporting district work and work to establish infrastructure for sharing OER.

Just two years later, this work has grown into a diverse movement of state and district education leaders across the country who are exploring OER as a potential solution to shortcomings in the marketplace for PreK-12 curricular materials. These leaders are identifying teachers who are already using OER in the classroom, integrating OER into existing processes for curriculum selection, and leveraging OER to fill existing gaps in resources.

Lindsey Tepe, senior policy analyst at New America, will provide an overview of state and district work, covered in a forthcoming policy paper to be released in summer 2017. Kristina Peters, K-12 Open Education Fellow with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology, will highlight implementation of PreK-12 OER at the district level. Erika Aparaka, OER Fellow with the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), will provide insight into future directions for state work and the potential for state collaboration around OER.

The Middletown Learning Path is an innovative new OER tool for educators and students which solves for inefficiencies in the curriculum marketplace and fosters personalized learning. The OER player provides access to high-quality, standards aligned, vetted digital resources and assessments for educators and students. The player feeds data to educators, allowing them to create personalized playlists for students, enabling increased student agency and choice.

We are proposing an interactive discussion session in which we will provide a short presentation on OER and the Middletown Learning Path tool. The presenters will each have a few minutes to discuss their involvement in the development and use of the tool. We will conduct a poll to better understand the audience and use Google slides to facilitate a discussion around the implementation, vetting and development of OER to fill curriculum gaps and personalize learning for students.

The Middletown Learning Path is being developed in a partnership between the Enlarged School District of Middletown, New York and Education Elements. The Learning Accelerator is spotlighting examples of how OER can be used in blended and personalized classrooms to increase student agency and engagement. The panel members will include Ken Eastwood, Superintendent of Middletown School District, Ray Rozycki, Vice President of Education at Education Elements and Jennifer Wolfe, Partner at The Learning Accelerator.

As a system, the University of Hawai'i faces unique barriers against and opportunities for the adoption of Open Educational Resources. As part of a larger advocacy strategy, the UH OER initiative is demystifying production workflows and visual/learning design principles, as well as beginning the process of skilling up staff to handle growing requests for expertise working with OER. This session will explain our process of empowering faculty and staff to take part in course and content design processes that put control back in the hands of instructional faculty, and provide a glimpse into the big picture plan for connecting our Open Education efforts with the rest of the globe.

This presentation will include three parts. First, we will report the instructional strategies, identified from former studies, used to reduce statistics anxiety caused by 1) worth of statistics, 2) interpretation anxiety, 3) test and class anxiety, 4) computation self-concept, 5) fear of asking for help, and 6) fear of statistics teachers. Second, we will share the experience how we assist three instructors in introductory statistics/quantitative research methodology courses to select and customize OERs through reuse, redistribution, revision, and remix. The customization of OER closely aligned with instructional strategies we proposed to reduce statistics anxiety. All OERs we adopted in this study were collected from 12 OER repository websites. The OERs used in this study included scholarly articles, datasets, simulations, video/screencast tutorials, comics or cartoons, and lesson plans Third, we will present students' perception toward the use of OER to reduce statistics anxiety. The participants in this study were students who enrolled in 5 introductory statistics/ quantitative research methodology courses at a university located in the southeastern United States. These participants came from different programs or departments. There were 113 participants in total. All participants in this study were pursuing an undergraduate or graduate degree at the time this study was being conducted. The presentation will benefit both OER development and curriculum design.

Until summer 2016, there was no organized effort at PCC for the adoption and utilization of open education resources. Seeds of interest existed as individual faculty members developed some OER courses, but their work was not widely shared or recognized. However, those involved in the individual efforts understood how Pima's students could reap tremendous benefits from OER courses, and it was that thought that spurred our application for and eventual award of the Achieving the Dream grant. Now, as we attempt to create the courses for a fully online OER pathway to the AA Liberal Arts, we have one year of experience and insight into what it takes to grow OER courses in sustainable and collaborative ways. Join a team of PCC instructional designers as they share their experiences and best practices for developing a design team, defining the framework for the project, navigating successful partnerships with faculty, and addressing specific challenges finding and utilizing open resources.

Boise State University is a relatively new entrant to the area of OER in higher education. However, it has already developed a faculty professional development model. This model is characterized by a graduated progression, wherein faculty have the opportunity of experiencing professional development on OER through various short and long term programs like hour long workshops, single day institutes, semester long faculty learning communities, faculty mentorships, and grant projects. It is facilitated by Instructional designers and technologists from the IDEA (Instructional Design and Educational Assessment) shop in collaboration with LTS (Learning Technology Solutions). Challenges faced and lessons learned will be discussed, which might be useful for faculty professional developers looking to implement a similar program in their organizations.

This presentation will provide a brief overview of the OER professional development model at Boise State University. We will present background/timeline information on why and how OER professional development started at Boise State. We will talk about each of the components of the model, elaborating on the process of call for applications, participant selection, learning content and method. We will look at outside factors, Student Government involvement, and dealings with the school's administration. We will also talk about challenges faced and lessons learned which might be useful for faculty professional developers looking to implement a similar program in their organizations. The participants will engage in active discussions (think-pair-share) and share how OER is being implemented in their institutions as well as discuss ideas on how the current Boise State model can be improved.

The panel presentation on the Multiply K-12 OER media project explore what OER means for K-12 education. Through a series of interviews with OER scholars and practicing K-12 teachers, the podcasts and videos cover the strengths and challenges of the awareness, use and advocacy of OER for K-12 within Canada and beyond. The 17 podcasts and 3 videos are housed on the Blended and Online Learning and Teaching (BOLT) blog that shares out pedagogical views, research in practice, and professional insights from in-service teachers who work in blended and online environments.The podcasts use interviewee commentary on the following OER topics: a history of OER; the current landscape; benefits to K-12 learning; acceptance; learning with OER; teaching with OER; openness and the open mindset in learning; 8 attributes of Open Pedagogy; the Open Pedagogy model; creating OER policy in Canada; and Canadian copyright and user rights, including K-12 scenarios. The 3 videos cover the following areas: Attributes of Open Community; Attributes of Open Practice; and Albertan Perspectives on OER in K-12 Learning.Due to participatory technologies, K-12 educators are already engaging with OER without being fully aware that they are involved to some degree in OER and a philosophy of openness. Through the Multiply K-12 OER media, all levels of K-12 educators can examine their current understanding and see the future of OER wherever they teach. The sharing out of the media and having teachers elsewhere in the world access these media will be part of the multiplying effect of these podcasts and videos and highlights the changing nature of professional learning in the era of OER. This panel presentation will discuss the media project and the response by educators regarding this OER professional learning for in-service teachers. Funded by the Alberta Open Educational Resources (ABOER) Initiative, the project was made possible through an investment from the Alberta government.

Mountain Heights Academy is renewing its commitment to OER by involving all faculty members in a race to learn, create, and invite students to design OER with them. Teachers will be given an OER Passport at the beginning of the year with a list of tasks, resources, and courses to complete in whichever order they choose. Upon completion of each one, their OER Passport will be stamped and by the end of the school year each teacher will be even more of an OER expert than they were to begin with.

In 2012, Washington passed legislation directing the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to create a library of OER and promote awareness and adoption. Over the past five years, the K-12 OER Project has evolved in response to stakeholder needs, experiencing many successes and challenges to share with the OER community.

Successful strategies

- Evaluating OER quality led to an OER Library reviewed using the same procedure as traditional materials and generated a cadre of teacher OER advocates.

- Grants to groups implementing OER provided legitimacy to the work and encouraged districts to look closely at OER options as viable choices.

- On the policy front, work with the Washington State School Directors' Association created model Instructional Material Adoption policy that recognized OER as an option for core instructional material consideration. In addition, OSPI adopted an agency wide Copyright and Open Licensing Policy that acts as a model for school districts.

- Joining the #GoOpen initiative provided access to a large community of OER champions across the US willing to share critical expertise and resources

Challenges

- Many school boards struggle with the adoption of adaptable resources that could impact fidelity of implementation district wide.

- Addressing misconceptions about what OER is and is not remains an issue.

- Encouraging a culture of document sharing beyond the district LMS can be difficult -- OER shines light on copyright issues that have been ignored when resources are kept in-house

Washington has advocated district consideration of OER. This message has been amplified by a similar push from the U.S. Department of Education. Having a dedicated program at the state level is critical to provide ongoing guidance about the inclusion of OER as an important part of the instructional materials ecosystem. However, to scale the work partners and collaborators are needed at the district, state, and national level.

The Stone Arch Bridge Initiative for Education Resources, SABIER, takes the goals in the five phases of OER-implementation identified in the #GoOpen launch packet and combines them into a custom professional development and curriculum implementation program for grade level teams in a district or teams coming together from smaller districts. SABIER provides the professional development to support teachers in their open teaching practices and in the use of OER curriculum with web devices like iPads and Chromebooks.

SABIER also assists the districts in acquiring funds to pay for the initial transition.

This presentation demonstrates the collaboration of SABIER and the Concord Consortium to provide STEM courses delivered via an LMS that includes outcomes reporting.

With little question, OER have the potential to greatly improve affordability, access, and student success in education. Yet, to achieve the greatest impact, OER need to be successfully adopted at scale with intentional planning for sustainability. In this session, the authors present a model for identifying and defining eight dimensions of sustainability in OER adoption:

• open content creation

• institutional program management

• initial course design and course refresh

• faculty development

• content sustainability and development

• marketing and communications

• technical support

• research and reporting

The model will demonstrate how to prioritize these various dimensions, how their interrelated nature impacts sustainable OER adoption, and ultimately how each dimension facilitates OER adoption at scale for the greatest long-term impact. The model draws on the empirical examples from ongoing system-level higher education OER initiatives at the City University of New York (CUNY), the State University System of New York (SUNY), and the University System of Maryland (USM) to demonstrate real-world approaches to engaging with these various dimensions of institutional OER transformation.

Moving from a focus on saving students money on textbooks to a system that supports open pedagogy and innovative approaches to education is challenging and rewarding. In 2016, our campus renewed its focus on creating a more affordable learning experience through reducing the cost of textbooks. The first steps of this effort occurred with minimal work. Faculty were eager to join the project. In some cases, the mere act of showing faculty the cost of their textbooks was enough to get them to investigate new options. For others, conversations with peers or students did the trick. In one semester, we were able to get a commitment from faculty to save the students over $73,000.

As we moved towards this goal, we learned that much more can be gained if we go beyond affordable and dive into the benefits of open. We learned by focusing on OER and open pedagogy, that we not only can save students money, but also enhance their overall learning experience via improved digital literacy and increased classroom engagement. Our pivot proved to be the easy step. New challenges arose when we removed the concept and structure of the well loved textbook from our message.

Our team has landed on a approach that supports those that are ready to reduce cost, while also encouraging faculty that are ready to explore concepts of open. During this presentation, we will share our approach and ideas for how we are helping faculty move from affordable to open.

Why is it so difficult for OER to become government policy? Should it even be? Federal, state, and local governments, institutions, and school districts have varying policies around use of open licenses. Have these policies increased the impact of the resources and improved teaching and learning for students in the US?

Join us as we look at Bills on Capitol Hill and the mechanics of government at all levels. Policymakers from all levels will dissect their policymaking successes and failures and consider the impact of these experiences. Panelists will also help attendees better understand how they can participate in this process regardless of their roles.

Publishers and OER are generally thought to mix like oil and water. Learning Objects, a Cengage Business Unit, is making significant strides to bridge this gap by designing and delivering OER-based courseware for colleges and universities. In this session, we provide an overview of our efforts to provide instructors, curriculum designers, and academic leaders with reliable, high quality, effective, learning materials that are easy to implement, support, and scale to large numbers of students. In doing so, we are constantly evaluating (together with our institutional partners) the balance between affordability, total-cost-of-learning, and learning outcome achievement. We provide some early insights into this process and the broader LO / Cengage OER strategy.

Developing and maintaining successful OER programs in higher education is always challenging, even as it leads to great rewards. This panel discussion will look at OER program administration from the system level perspective, particularly focusing on how to unite diverse institutions and attitudes around OER adoption. Panelists from the University System of Maryland, SUNY, and CUNY will address the roles these systems are playing in the widespread deployment and scaling-up of OER initiatives. We will explore common challenges and unique circumstances among the three systems and invite conversations with attendees around best practices for operations, as well as lessons learned so far. We look to find common wisdom and build upon system strengths for widespread OER implementation practices.

When it comes to the variety of issues our higher education system is facing today, course materials don't typically hit the top of the list. Most of the decision-makers at universities, foundations, organizations, and in the government are focused on boosting completion rates, managing growing student debt burdens, preparing for changing workforce needs, and addressing equity issues – if they have time to step away from broader fights around immigration, sexual assault, guns on campus, and free speech.

As OER advocates, we're often pushing up against those issues as we battle for airtime or funding for OER projects – and we shouldn't be.

We will be far more effective if we look for opportunities to meet the broader higher education community where they're at: in terms of our strategy and messaging, and in terms of our outreach and targeting.

This workshop will discuss four major topics faced by the higher education community: completion rates, student debt, changing workforce needs, and equity; how our community can better message OER as a solution to those problems, and how we can more effectively organize those outside our echo chamber to champion OER.

Public policy is an important component of the environment around OER. Policy can be leveraged to help advance the use and creation of OER by providing resources, creating programs, or giving direction to institutions and schools. It can also be used to remove barriers, such as older systems or practices that favor traditional publishing models.

Public policy can also present challenges, especially at times of political tension and change. The good news is that OER has proven to have appeal across the political spectrum, so there are avenues for positive OER policy no matter who is in office.

This session will provide a up-to-the minute briefing on the current policy environment around OER in the United States: what is happening in Congress, where there may be avenues with the new administration, and which states are most active. It will also include behind-the-scenes analysis of policy opportunities coming up in the next year, and how members of the audience can become involved.