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OER Advocacy Toolkit

Data

Map the environment for textbook use at your institution with data on:

  • Use of the library textbook collection – Ask your library collections team for usage statistics such as ebook turnaways, holds on prescribed texts, searches for commercial books, downloads, searches for open access books, etc.
  • Course enrolment – Collect statistics on the number of students enrolled in courses using commercial textbooks. Consider whether compulsory courses assign commercial texts  these courses are often high-enrolment, first-year courses. Degree completion is predicated on these courses and access issues are compounded when commercial texts are set.
  • Costs of commercial textbooks assigned as required course readings – You might consider presenting these figures as an aggregate. For example, how much the average first-year student is expected to pay for textbooks (this could be broken down by degree), whether these textbooks are used across multiple courses (thus representing a better return on investment), or the total expected expenditure per annum on textbooks by undergraduate students.
  • Open textbook adoptions – Collect data on the amount of money students at your institution save by using open textbooks, such as this Australian student savings calculator created by the Open Textbook Initiative.
  • Institutional student loans data – If your university offers loans to students to help cover the cost of educational materials, you can investigate how many students access the loans scheme, the average value of loans, and if possible, the disciplines represented in these applications. Aggregate figures could show trends in the need for loans across years, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Impact Stories

Use impact stories to illustrate positive outcomes of OER adoptions and projects. For example:

  • other institutions’ impact stories such as these curated by SPARC and this video of James Glapa-Grossklag (College of the Canyons) discussing the benefits of OERs
  • testimonials of teachers who have adopted OERs in their classrooms, like RMIT's textbook heroes
  • testimonials of students who are using open textbooks in their courses
  • from the literature, for example –
    • Fischer, L., Hilton, J., Robinson, T. J., & Wiley, D. 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. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-015-9101-x
    • Ross, H. M., Hendricks, C., & Mowat, V. (2018). Open textbooks in an introductory sociology course in Canada: Student views and completion rates. Open Praxis, 10(4), 393–403. https://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.10.4.892
    • Zhao, Y., Satyanarayana, A., & Cooney, C. (2020, November 7). Impact of open education resources (OER) on student academic performance and retention rates in undergraduate engineering departments [Paper presentation]. 2020 Fall ASEE Mid-Atlantic Section Meeting, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, United States. https://peer.asee.org/36048.

Curate Your Own Evidence

Evidence of the impact of OER use in your institution and local region acts as a powerful incentive for decision-makers and potential adopters. As the use of OER grows, curate testimonials from teachers, students and other stakeholders to create an impact story of your own.

There are a range of tools you can use to help you record, illustrate and communicate your evidence including: 

  • Excel spreadsheets
  • Google Analytics
  • Power BI
  • infographic software.

In most institutions, access to this type of data can be spread across many departments. Using the examples in this section is a good starting point to identify potential sources of data and to identify local custodians at your institution.

Identifying Barriers to Adoption

Understanding the potential barriers or challenges to OER adoption can help you develop strategies for specific audiences. Some stakeholders may be resistant to OER so you'll need to prepare responses to common questions and concerns. For example:

Findability

Barrier

Response

Strategy

It’s hard to find OER. It's much easier to find a traditional textbook. It can be hard to find OER due to the variety of ways OER are produced, published and shared. However, OER collections and repositories help bring OER content together to make it easier to locate.

Prepare a guide with links to key collections and strategies to find OER in different discipline areas that you can share with your stakeholders.

Ask for feedback on the suitability of the located resources and use this as an opportunity to deeply engage with a discipline or subject area.

Lastly, consider tailoring a short list of ‘recommended repositories’ that act as a starting point for staff to search unassisted.

Availability

Barrier

Response

Strategy

There are no suitable OER for a specific topic. There is low OER coverage in some subject areas. You may not be able to find an OER for every requirement of a course but you may be able to find OER that the stakeholder could tailor for their course or outline support available for them to create their own OER. They can add or remove content from existing OER or mix multiple resources together to create a resource suitable for their course. New OER are regularly being developed so if nothing is suitable currently there may be an option available in the near future.

Find examples of OER activities that have potential to be tailored or remixed for different subject areas.

Maintain awareness of the development of new OER in particular disciplines. If you can locate an OER in the discipline, ask the staff about its suitability for the curriculum. Should the feedback include actionable statements requiring change to the resource, this could be a catalyst to engaging staff in repurposing or redesigning the OER for local use.

Quality

Barrier

Response

Strategy

OER are freely available so they must not be as good as paid content. OER are often created by discipline experts and undergo a process of peer review to ensure the quality of the resources. Staff should review any OER they plan to adopt as they would any resource they intend to use in their course. If an OER is not perfect, Creative Commons licensing will often allow the staff member to adapt the content to fit their needs. Studies have shown that the use of OER in courses can lead to better student learning outcomes than the use of traditional resources (Fischer et al., 2015; Ross et al., 2018; Zhao et al., 2020).

Show examples of peer reviewed OER and share studies that look at student learning outcomes from the use of OER in courses. If you're starting with a discussion about open textbooks, consider using the Open Textbook Library and show the transparent reviews that accompany over 80 per cent of these texts. Encourage staff to leave reviews if they use OER. This is an effective way to contribute back to the open community.

Time and Technical Knowledge

Barrier

Response

Strategy

It takes time and technical skills to use OER. It can take time to find, adapt or create an OER. Maintenance and improvement of existing OER will also take time. OER authors may need to learn how to use a particular platform and how to make content accessible. Setting up a grant program or providing support options can help to alleviate this concern.

Establish avenues for OER support within the institution, as open education can be positioned as a natural extension of many existing responsibilities. Librarians can help locate and evaluate OER, learning designers can advise on pedagogically sound ways to integrate OER with learning outcomes and graphic designers can support remixing and repurposing activities. Prepare a guide that explains how to do the technical steps, how to make content accessible and where to get support. Offer workshops that help build skills for adapting or creating OER and communicate ongoing support strategies.

Copyright

Barrier

Response

Strategy

Copyright for OER is difficult to understand. OER generally use Creative Commons licensing with ‘plain English’ statements that explain the permissions and conditions of re-use. OER authors can add an attribution statement that indicates which CC licence they have applied to their resource and a link to the specific licence. This allows the author to be correctly attributed whenever their resource is re-used and to set conditions on how it is used.

Clarify support options for open licencing, such as requesting advice from a copyright officer or librarian. Seek ways to integrate open licencing and attribution with existing information sessions (for example, copyright training). Prepare a guide that explains the different CC licences, how to select a CC licence for a work and how to correctly attribute others’ work. Consider too whether CC licences can be incorporated into copyright FAQ webpages and other similar resources.

Attributions

Adapted from:

The OER Starter Kit for Program Managers by Abbey K. Elder, Stefanie Buck, Jeff Gallant, Marco Seiferle-Valencia and Apurva Ashok, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

OER Mythbusting by SPARC, licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

References

Fischer, L., Hilton, J., Robinson, T. J., & Wiley, D. 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. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-015-9101-x

Ross, H. M., Hendricks, C., & Mowat, V. (2018). Open textbooks in an introductory sociology course in Canada: Student views and completion rates. Open Praxis, 10(4), 393–403. https://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.10.4.892

Zhao, Y., Satyanarayana, A., & Cooney, C. (2020, November 7). Impact of open education resources (OER) on student academic performance and retention rates in undergraduate engineering departments [Paper presentation]. 2020 Fall ASEE Mid-Atlantic Section Meeting, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, United States. https://peer.asee.org/36048