A Faculty Survival Guide to

Open Educational Resources

TechLogic Spring 2016

Sara Rutter, UHM Library

Open Educational Resources

Educational resources that have Creative

Commons licensing, which allows users to

retain, revise, reuse, remix, and redistribute

those resources as they wish in accordance

with the terms of the CC license.

OER

Talk today

• Why are OER “a thing” now?

• Do OER make a difference?

• What is UH doing with OER?

WHY ARE OER “A THING” NOW?

OER grew out of a combination of

environmental changes

1. Digital landscape

2. Publishing landscape

3. Educational landscape

World Wide Web fosters openness

• GNU General Public Licensing for Free

Software sharing [1989]

• Tim Berners-Lee CERN, WWW [1989]

• Creative Commons licensing [2001]

• Open Access movements [2002]

• Social media, Twitter [2006]

Publishing background

• Open Access changing scholarly

publishing

• Profit vs non-profit motivations

• Increasing modes of information

distribution

• Digital object becoming publication of record for scholarly publishing

Education landscape

• States and communities struggle to fund K-12 education

• School systems select and pay for textbooks

• Leveraging funds used to pay for commercial publishing products to create OER

Higher education

• States and communities struggle to fund public post-secondary education

• Faculty select textbooks, students pay for them

• Students borrow to pay for tuition and textbooks

UH Manoa student debt

• Average 2013-2014: $24,277

• Graduates with debt: 45%

School expenses

What do we want for students?

• Life long learning—how to find, evaluate,

and synthesize information to solve new

problems

• Retention & graduation

DO OER MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

63.6%Not purchase the required

textbook

49.2% Take fewer courses

45.1% Not register for a specific course

33.9% Earn a poor grade

26.7% Drop a course

17.0% Fail a course

In your academic career, has the cost of required textbooks caused you to:

http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org/pdf/2012_Florida_Student_Textbook_Survey.pdf

OER and student learning

Study

• 4128 students in four 4-year colleges

• 12,599 students in six community colleges

• 15 courses, range of disciplines

Results

• Completion of course

– 2 courses (biol & business) OER had better

completion

– Remaining 13 had non-significant differences

• C- or better

– 5 OER classes had more students with C- or

better; one course (business) with standard

text did better

– Remaining 9 had non-significant differences

11 Peer Reviewed Studies

http://openedgroup.org/

48,623 Students

http://openedgroup.org/

93% Same or Better Outcomes

http://openedgroup.org/

9 Peer Reviewed Studies of Perceptions of OER Quality

http://openedgroup.org/

4,510 Professors and Students

http://openedgroup.org/

50%Same35%

Better

15%Worse

http://openedgroup.org/

WHAT IS UH DOING WITH OER?

OER at UH

• System: University of Hawai‘i Strategic

Directions 2015-2021 includes “Reduce

cost of textbooks,”

• CCs: UHCC Strategic Directions 2015-

2021 includes “Adoption of Open

Education Resources to replace

textbooks, with most textbooks replaced

by 2021.”

UHM Student Engagement, Retention and Graduation (SERG) Action Plan

The OER initiative at Manoa:

• Reduce the cost of education

• Improve student success

• Promote academic innovation

Next five years:

• Promote the widespread adoption of OER

and the development of new OER material

oer.hawaii.edu

• Outreach College leads Manoa OER Initiative

• Check out the website and sign up for OER news.

guides.library.manoa.hawaii.edu

• Contact your subject librarian to help you

find resources to replace costly course

materials.

• Search guides by OER to find subject

guides with open resources

Textbook cost: $0

Manoa Physics & OpenStax

Physics 151/152 replaced $160 textbook

with OpenStax College Physics.

OpenStax College

open.umn.edu

Open Education

• Open education is about increasing student

achievement, inspiring passion among

faculty, and building better connections

between students and the materials that they

use to meet their educational goals.

_____________________

Quill West (OER Project Director Tacoma CC) &

Kristi Jensen (eLearning Support Univ

Minnesota). 2015

OER are gifts to your students and

to your teaching

Questions? srutter@hawaii.edu

• The Thing. Simon Child. https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=thing&i=149471.

CCBy.

• Flowers. To Uyen. https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=flowers&i=231768. CCBy.

• Student engagement, retention, and graduation, an action plan [draft]

https://manoa.hawaii.edu/strategicplan/pdf/serg_committee_action_plan_v7.pdf

• Dropout. Musavvir Ahmed. https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=student&i=44218.

CCBy

• Brainstorm. Bjorn Andersson.

https://thenounproject.com/search/?q=creativity&i=15232. CCBy

• Gift box. Creative Stall. https://thenounproject.com/term/gift-box/130115/. CCBy

• In your academic

career…http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org/pdf/2012_Florida_Student_Textbook_S

urvey.pdf

• Fischer, Lane; Hilton III, John; Robinson, Jared; Wiley, David A. 2015. A multi-

institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes

of post-secondary students. Journal of Computing in Higher Education 27 (3) 159-

172 DOI: 10.1007/s12528-015-9101-x

• West, Quill & K. Jensen. (2015). Open educational resources and the higher education movement: a leadership opportunity for libraries. C&RL News, 76(4), 215-218.

• Open Textbooks, slides. David Ernst. http://www.slideshare.net/djernst/university-of-

north-dakota.

• Hilton III, John. 2016. Open educational resources and college textbook choices: a review of research on efficacy and perceptions. Educational Technology Research and Development. DOI: 10.1007/s11423-016-9434-9