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Campus Center Auditorium

Arrival, Registration, Breakfast – 8:00-9:00am

Welcome – Introduce Program –9:00-9:15

Morning Keynote: Dr. David Wiley, Lumen Learning –9:15 – 10:00

Concurrent Session 1: 10:10 – 11:00am

Campus Center Auditorium

Communicating Open: Policy and Advocacy in Open Education 
Nicole Allen, SPARC

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. This session will provide a briefing on current US policy around OER. Participants will learn how to communicate and advocate for OER and open policies.

Room 162

Prices Change, Freedom is Forever
Nicole Finkbeiner, Rice University (TX) 

The true value of open goes beyond reduced or no cost, it greatly increases academic freedom for faculty and content freedom for students, which can change the way faculty and students approach their teaching and learning.

Room 165

Sharing OER Successes 
Michael V. Daly, Assistant Professor, Instruction/Public Services Librarian, Fulton-Montgomery Community College, Alan Witt, Business Librarian, SUNY Geneseo

The Milne Library at SUNY Geneseo sponsored a symposium on OER usage and invited SUNY faculty to present on their usage of OER, in the hopes of overcoming skepticism about those resources using evidence from their peers. Attendees will brainstorm potential marketing approaches to faculty, using the information from the SUNY Geneseo presentation about the symposium approach as a jumping off point. Attendees will receive an overview of the planning process for the symposium as a potential resource for replicating that event on their own campuses.

Off and Running: Launched in June 2016, Open SUNY Textbooks’ (OST) expansion to offer Open Education Resources Services (SOS) provided Fulton-Montgomery Community College (FM) the much needed opportunity to move from enthusiastic but ad-hoc OER offerings to a formalized, institutionalized and sustainable partnership that has proved a potential pathway for faculty collaboration and student success. Session attendees will learn how, in one year,  the services offered by SOS leveraged the knowledge and experience of 30% more FM faculty to create more robust OER on a stable platform, and allowed 34% more FM students to experience OER in a variety of access points (e.g., digital, web, and print). The expansion of OER resources also contributed to a 4% increase in measured course throughput rates for FM students electing to take a course using OER. Also detailed in this session will be how FM instituted a course fee in Spring, 2017 for OER courses in an effort to sustain these successes.  This fee was met with widespread approval from college administration, faculty, staff and members of Fulton and Montgomery counties. Future casting the role of SOS at FM, includes discussing the potential for widening our reach into college-high school partnership programs and positing the need for a SUNY-wide OER print platform.

Room 168C

Anatomy of a Statewide Open Initiative: Tales from 4 States
Jody Carson, Sue Tashjian, Massachusetts Community Colleges Go Open Project, Reta Chaffee, Granite State College, Kevin Corcoran, Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium, Mark McBride, Open SUNY

Creating and scaling an initiative at the state level has it unique complexities and inevitable bumps along the way. Learn how 4 different states created their own OER/Open Ed initiatives. Identify stakeholders and potential partners in your own state.

In this session, panelists from 4 states will describe their statewide projects in Open Education sharing how their initiatives came to be. Panelists will share their own processes, strategies, stakeholder, successes, challenges and outcomes. Participants will have an opportunity to ask questions and participate in shared brainstorming and note-taking which will be the start of a draft plan for an open education initiative in their own state. This session will be of interest to all levels although it may be a distant planning consideration for beginners.

Room 174

Developing a Community of Practice for OER Adoption and OER Degrees with the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)  
Una Daly, Director, Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) Quill West, Open Education Project Manager, Pierce College, Andrea Milligan, Andrea Milligan, Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Innovation, North Shore Community College, Jennifer Nohai-Seaman, Assistant Professor of Developmental Studies, Housatonic Community College

Many colleges have developed successful OER initiatives through participation in communities of practice (CoP). Panelists will share information about their OER initiatives and how participation in community activities supports the design of effective open educational practices and policies at their institutions. As part of an ongoing community of practice, members create and freely share knowledge based on experiences at their institutions. This cross-institutional exchange supports new OER adopters and gives them an opportunity to grow into mentors for the next generation of first-time OER adopters.

As OER-based degrees have emerged as a promising new open education practice, CCCOER is working with Achieve the Dream’s OER Degree grantees and other colleges to support the cross-institutional development work and share best practices for successful implementation. Audience members will be encouraged to share any OER projects in the planning or implementation stage that would benefit from cross-institutional support and get feedback from our panelists.

Concurrent Session 2: 11:10 – 12:00pm

Campus Center Auditorium

How to launch an OER degree: Discussing the early implementation research of ATD’s OER Degree Initiative
Richard Sebastian, Achieving the Dream, Cheryl Huff, Germanna Community College, Ann Fiddler, CUNY

There is scant research on the impact of OER degree programs. For colleges to invest in launching an OER degree program, they need to know these programs benefit students and are sustainable. During this panel discussion, faculty in Achieving the Dream’s OER Degree Initiative will discuss the early data on OER degree implementation.

Achieving the Dream (ATD) launched the OER Degree Initiative in 2016, funding 38 community colleges from 13 states to create OER degrees by redesigning courses in a degree program through the replacement of proprietary textbooks with open educational resources. An important component of the initiative is a robust evaluation, led by ATD partners SRI International, of the implementation and impact of OER degree programs. This evaluation will answer, among other questions: what is necessary for a college to successfully develop and deliver an OER degree program?

During this panel discussion, OER Degree Initiative grantees will discuss their roles launching OER degrees at their institutions and how the findings in the report align with their own experiences. Panelists will be asked to consider: What was needed to successfully launch an OER degree program at their college?, How does their institution plan to scale their OER degrees?, and What implementation roadblocks, if any, surfaced during the first year of the project? Session participants will begin a plan for how they would approach launching a similar program at their own institutions. All levels of OER practitioners are encouraged to attend and share stories of their experience.

Room 162

Case studies: Creating successful OER institutional initiatives with big impact
Nicole Finkbeiner, Rice University; Sue Tashjian and Jody Carson from Northern Essex Community College; Kathy Labadorf from University of Connecticut; and Regina Gong from Lansing Community College    

Are there tried-and-true best practices to make a big impact in OER at your institution? Absolutely! Nicole Finkbeiner of Rice University’s OpenStax will cover the key components partner schools utilized to greatly increase the number of students impacted by OER in one year. Sue Tashjian and Jody Carson from Northern Essex Community College, Kathy Labadorf from University of Connecticut, and Regina Gong from Lansing Community College will then discuss the specifics of their OER initiatives and how they successfully impacted thousands of their students in a short amount of time.

Room 165

What OER Users need to know about Universal Design, Accessibility, and Bookshare
Minh Le, Lance Hidy, Rick Lizotte, Northern Essex Community College (MA), Jane Bambrick, William Paterson University (NJ)

Whether you are creating OER materials, or selecting them for your students, it is important know what accessibility features to look for, and how they are used by your students. This richly-illustrated presentation will describe in detail the key features of accessibility, and the Universal Design principles underlying them. Two of the presenters are professors who will give examples from their own teaching experience.

The three presenters will explain the fundamentals: how Universal Design for Learning benefits all students–not only those with disabilities; how to make sure that Universal Design is embedded in your OER course materials; learn easy-to-use techniques in Word and other software for embedding accessibility in the materials you create.

The session will be divided into two parts. One part will be about the theory and practice of accessibility. The second part will be a demonstration, showing how to incorporate accessibility into typical documents used in course materials, using Microsoft Office.

Open Educational Resources are an exciting pathway for the future growth of textbooks in academia. One important consideration is that these sources be accessible to all students. If in doubt, one can turn to Bookshare (www.bookshare.org), a premier database that provides access to books to those with print disabilities.

After several praiseworthy remarks about Benetech’s commitment to Technology Serving Humanity, a brief overview of Bookshare will be presented. After limiting the database to the textbook collection, the results will be displayed and several records can be examined. Bookshare members now have the option to read books from their desktops, tablets or iPhones. This session would be beneficial to attendees of all levels. Participants are welcome to bring their tablets and iPhones and follow along with the presentation. Inquiries about specific titles and/or subject areas can be retrieved as well as any other questions about the presentation. The speaker welcomes audience participation to suggest and/or compare counterparts to Bookshare.

Room 168C

Open Licensing 101 
David Wiley, Chief Academic Officer, Lumen Learning

This workshop will cover the basics of the public domain and copyright, describe the relationship between copyright and Creative Commons, define the six Creative Commons licenses, and explore CC license compatibility issues. There will also be time for Q&A

Room 174

Open Pedagogy Practicalities 
Quill West, Open Education Project Manager, Pierce College and Una Daly, Director, Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER)  

Open Pedagogy encourages development of 21st century skills, and it can increase learner engagement. However, some structure and careful thought is needed in designing open learning experiences. This session will address practical concerns for teachers integrating OP into educational practice.  OBJECTIVES:

Open pedagogy matters in the field of education, because it is one way to both provide low-cost options to students, and to encourage newer and more engaging pedagogy. However, open pedagogy only works if instructors have worked out practical issues, like explaining open licensing to students or how to assess student work. This session provides a hands-on opportunity for participants to design an open pedagogy experience, and consider all of the practical issues related to that lesson. Participants will explore their own ideas around how the 5Rs can change student experiences, and then they will engage in problem solving for how to address practical concerns. At the end, participants should walk away with an idea for implementing open pedagogy in their own teaching, and some tools for addressing overall practical issues.

While this session is largely hands-on, and speaks mostly to people who have some basic knowledge in using OER, it is appropriate for people at any level of familiarity with open pedagogy.

Lunchtime: 12:00 – 1:15pm

Campus Center Auditorium

 Lunch Keynote: Marilyn Billings, UMass Amherst Library (12:30 – 1:15)

Concurrent Session 3: Short Session Presentations: 1:20 – 1:50pm
(Two 10-minute presentations)

Campus Center Auditorium

Plotting the impact of OER on student academic experience: beyond performance measures  
Cailean Cooney, CUNY City Tech (NY)

This presentation will share findings from a research project that studied the impacts of using faculty curated OER from the students’ perspective. The presenter will discuss intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for conducting qualitative assessment with students, and will highlight the importance of librarians in this research realm.

The presenter will share a concise overview of findings from a research project that asked students how they engaged with an OER as their primary assigned course material. Findings include student feedback about the overall organization of the OER, ease of use, methods used to access the OER and complete coursework, benefits and challenges, and differences and similarities to using a traditional print textbook. The presenter will discuss motivations for conducting this research as the lead on an OER initiative run out of the college library and share practical implications for this type of data to inform assessment of and improvements to faculty development relating to OER curation. Similar research projects can also stimulate conversations with faculty about best practices for developing, revising, and teaching with OER.  This presentation will be especially relevant to anyone with intermediate and advanced knowledge of OER

Open Rangers in Ontario – Fostering Open Community
Jenni Hayman, eCampusOntario (Canada)

Jenni Hayman, Program Manager for eCampusOntario will provide insight into new strategies that may help launch and sustain higher education open working groups. Using the Ontario Open Rangers as an example, Jenni will describe her work with this new community of practice, and share the Open Ranger Toolkit.

In this brief session I will cover the basics of the eCampusOntario Open Rangers initiative and describe some of the strategies for community building for higher education open working groups. Elements of the Open Ranger Toolkit will be shared and participants will be invited to describe challenges and successes starting or sustaining open working groups on their own campuses. The ed tech tool Padlet will be used (a collaborative digital whiteboard) to capture participant input and reflection, all materials will be linked and shared.

Room 162

Converting my Communications/Editing Course to OER
Professor Eileen Cusick, Springfield Technical Community College (MA)

During this session, you will learn about the redesign of my communications course using OER – including curating resources, collaboration, and more!

Pairing OER with Adaptive Learning to Support Non-traditional Learners 
Jeremy Anderson, Bay Path University (MA)

High access institutions face a double challenge in needing to control prices while maintaining high quality learning opportunities. Pairing OER with an adaptive learning system serve both outcomes, but presents its own challenges. This session will describe the efforts at The American Women’s College to leverage the benefits of each technology at scale by eliminating barriers to adoption.

This session will introduce the mission, vision, and student demographics of The American Women’s College (TAWC) in order to provide context for a description of the college’s adoption of OER and adaptive technology. Benefits – lower prices for students, personalized learning experiences at scale, improved learning outcomes – will be weighed against challenges – lack of technical standards, need for new business models to evaluate the current return on investment. These challenges compound the baseline barriers to adoption for each technology on its own. The presentation will then turn to describing a variety of methods for overcoming these challenges – strategic partnerships, investigation of OER technical structure, etc. – that have facilitated the successful integration of OER and adaptive learning at TAWC. Future directions will also be shared with the hopes of eliciting cross-institutional collaboration.

Attendees will be engaged in a variety of ways. The session will begin with live polls to learn about the attendees and their prior knowledge/experience with OER and adaptive. A back-channel Twitter feed will be used to collect open-ended questions throughout. Time will be devoted at the midpoint and end of the presentation to address these questions.

Attendees with an intermediate or advanced knowledge of OER and adaptive will benefit most from this session.

Room 165

Increasing Engagement by OER Creativity
Professor Catherine Sughrue Etter, Ph.D., Cape Cod Community College

OER not only saves students time and money, but it allows unlimited flexibility in assignment designs.  For environmental science, students build our course materials. The course objectives are fulfilled through data collected throughout the semester.  Since each student’s semester data is unique, cheating is eliminated.  

Opening the Chemistry Lab Manual
Sarah Courchesne, Northern Essex Community College  

In Introductory Chemistry, students need strong supports in the lab, but also encouragement to explore, and not simply to blindly follow rote steps. This session will present a sample of a newly developed, free, open, engaging lab manual for Introductory Chemistry.

Introductory Chemistry students come to the class often with little prior knowledge, or worse, with negative former experiences in chemistry classes. I will present one of the pre-class preparation exercises (on separation of mixtures) that I developed for this lab manual project, and ask attendees to work through a series of exercises solo and then in small groups. Though we will not actually perform an experiment, the thinking steps needed to prepare the mind for chemistry exploration can be done without any specialized equipment. No previous chemistry knowledge is necessary, since that is the nature of the course itself–if a beginner can’t understand it, then I haven’t done my job.

Room 168C

Facilitating Adoption of OERs in the Classroom with the Open Access Course Reserves
Amanda Tarbet and Jessica Bell, MGH Institute of Health Professions (MA)

With the Open Access Course Reserves, a place to collect and share course specific OA reading lists, faculty seeking to include OER in their courses can see how other teachers have replaced pricey textbooks with fully open reading lists.

Librarians at the MGH Institute of Health Professions built the Open Access Course Reserves, a publicly available, curated repository that provides ready-made reading lists of free, copyright compliant (open access when possible), educational materials. The materials are selected to match typical syllabi and textbook contents and organized by discipline and course. The goal of the project is to create a place for faculty of any higher education course from anywhere in the world to find course packs to replace traditionally published textbooks and therefore reduce the financial burden on their students. The 10 minute session will primarily be a demonstration of the Open Access Course Reserves. It will include an explanation of the creation of the repository as well as its features and potential value to faculty and institutions. Attendees will be asked for their feedback and to share any ideas they may have about how they will potentially use this new tool. This was an IMLS grant-funded project.

Teaching and Learning with Free and Open Educational Resources Emma Bojinova, University of Connecticut (CT)

Overview and Analysis of Teaching and Learning with Open Educational Resources  ABSTRACT:

I plan to briefly discuss the benefits of using open educational resources (OER). I have adopted an OER textbook in my large enrollment general education course in Applied and Resource Economics. I will talk about my experience with OER, student perceptions based on an end-of-semester survey, and will provide a preliminary analysis of student learning with an OER textbook.

I will have a short presentation of the benefits of OER and my experience with OER. I will provide a preliminary analysis from a summer course (a pilot study) before implementing my project in the fall semester with my large enrollment class. I will discuss student perceptions about the use of an OER textbook based on a brief survey conducted at the end of the semester. I will also analyze student learning based on their academic performance on homework assignments, quizzes and exams.

Room 174

OER Awareness, Advocacy, and Adoption: An Institutional Approach
Jaya Kannan and Chelsea Stone, Sacred Heart University (CT)

Sacred Heart University is among the few private universities from Connecticut that are actively participating in the OER movement. This presentation will provide SHU’s emerging framework for an institutional approach to OER integration, and will address the challenges involved when bringing the administrative, academic, and instructional digital elements together.

Sacred Heart University (SHU) has launched a university-wide Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative with three goals in mind – reduce the cost of textbooks for students, increase access to course materials, and strengthen pedagogical effectiveness.

SHU has made appreciable headway in the short span of one and a half years by formulating a vision, defining the goals, developing a plan of action, and implementing a pilot study to integrate open textbooks in two math courses. Although it is a nascent initiative, this presentation summarizing the lessons-learned will make a useful contribution to the OER academic discussion .

The presentation will describe the following aspects of the strategic process:

  • The process mechanisms that contributed to building an institutional approach, and an honest look at the challenges
  • Innovative approaches used to build awareness and advocacy , and enhanced access to OER materials  • Establishment of a collaborative task force (comprising the provost, Office of Digital Learning, SHU library, and faculty champions) to design and implement a plan of action, including policies and incentive structures
  • The evidence-based methodology employed to establish a baseline, using survey data about faculty and student perspectives
  • Emerging results from a pilot study in which open textbook was selected and adopted in two math undergraduate courses, and the instructional design elements that aided pedagogical effectiveness.

Important take-aways for the attendees will be strategies that contribute to effective OER integration – namely, an understanding of challenges in private institutions, a list of concrete process mechanisms, valuable insights from survey results, and replicability in other institutions.

Concurrent Session 4: 1:55 – 2:20pm

Campus Center Auditorium

(iOER) Interactive Open Educational Resources: The Next Stage for OER
Peter Shea, Middlesex Community College, Jim Grenier, MassBay Community College (MA)

In this presentation, instructional designer/technologists Peter Shea and Jim Grenier will make the case that the OER movement needs to start thinking and planning seriously about a strategy for introducing interactive open educational resources. They will discuss both the challenges and opportunities involved in creating iOER.

For its first decade, the Open Educational Resource movement has focused largely on the creation and dissemination of traditional educational media–textbooks, graphics, podcasts, and videos. It has rarely made full use of the special qualities inherent in a web-based environment which supports simulations and interactive educational games. Commercial academic publishers have exploited this absence by offering such immersive learning tools as part of the package students receive when they purchase a textbook instead of using OER.

In this presentation, instructional designer/technologists Peter Shea and Jim Grenier will make the case that the OER movement needs to start thinking and planning seriously about a strategy for introducing interactive open educational resources. They will discuss both the challenges and opportunities involved in creating iOER.

Room 162

Getting Started with OER
Nicole Allen, SPARC

Interested in working on your own OER project?  This session will teach you what you need to know to get started, where to look for resources and a few basic OER/licensing rules you need to know to be successful.

Room 165

Affordable Learning Georgia: Lessons Learned from a Statewide Initiative
Jeff Gallant, Affordable Learning Georgia, part of the University System of Georgia (GA)

Jeff Gallant, Program Manager for the library-driven statewide Affordable Learning Georgia initiative, will discuss advantages, pitfalls, lessons learned, and necessary advice for librarians, instructional designers, administrators, and teaching faculty working within a large-scale OER program.

Affordable Learning Georgia (http://affordablelearninggeorgia.org/) is a University System of Georgia initiative that has implemented open educational resources and library resources at scale for three years. The initiative has focused on preserving academic freedom while providing support and incentives for OER adoption, while partnering with both internal and external organizations to foster the creation of new open textbooks, implement OER within a statewide core curriculum program for all courses, and maximize the amount of opportunities for faculty and staff training and development in OER. In anticipation of large-scale and even statewide initiatives happening in the Northeast, I will describe how ALG went from a one-time funded initiative to a long-term program with a new Strategic Plan of its own. To encourage faculty participation, polls and large discussion questions will be integrated into the presentation. By the end of the session, I hope to transition the session from a presentation to a large group discussion related to participants’ needs in participating within these new large OER initiatives.

Room 168C

Finding and Curating OER  
Mindy Boland, Senior Product Manager, OER Commons

With OER comes increased access to learning resources. ISKME will share tools to support the discovery and curation of high quality OER, helping you integrate and organize various materials from full textbooks to interactive simulations to improve your teaching and your student’s learning.

Room 174

Triumphs, Challenges, and Strategies of Opening Up: OER course design and implementation at Passaic County Community College
Ken Karol, Mike Whelpley, Martha Brozyna, Jennifer Gasparino, Passaic County Community College (NJ)

This presentation will share experiences of faculty and college administrators related to the design and implementation of courses using Open Education Resources (OER). Details will be presented on the various team dynamics and approaches to OER course designs, as well as the effects of OER on teaching and learning.

Passaic County Community College is implementing an OER initiative utilizing in-house innovation and expertise. The administrative OER support team all report to the same dean and work in close proximity. Administrators have good relationships with faculty champions from work on previous grant-funded projects. This unique infrastructure facilitates collaboration, flexibility, and efficiency. The OER team is anticipating that their efforts will not only save students money, but will also energize instruction and contribute to student success.

Concurrent Session 5: 2:25 – 2:50pm

Campus Center Auditorium

Unleashing Z Degree
Amy Tan – Houston Community College (TX)

Houston Community College will share experiences of creating what sometimes feels like an enormous and unrealizable task and what may seem to be a monstrous educational disruption, a Z-Degree. Building a Z-Degree might seem like simply a matter of packaging courses, but in reality, it requires design, intention, and cultivation.

After years of piecemeal attempts to adopt and promote OER, HCC gained focus with a directive to launch a Z-Degree, which came from multiple stakeholders, including students, Board of Trustees, senior administration, and faculty champions. This commitment enabled us to secure external and internal funding sources, clarify policies and procedures, and ultimately place OER on a solid foundation for the future. We will share our process for revising and adopting an OER policy guide, identifying and recruiting faculty, and engaging with multiple stakeholders within the institution (Board of Trustees, administration, faculty, libraries, CTLE, and students). HCC has partnered with Lumen Learning to provide initial training and course hosting, and we are working with our Institute for Instructional Engagement & Development to create a sustainable infrastructure to build our capacity of OER course offerings. In some cases, it has been necessary to make compromises to bring critical programs on board, but the college has done so out of a commitment to the ultimate goal of building a complete degree plan and developing OERs options for the future. Finally, HCC is establishing a program for data collection and analysis in order to understand the effects of the initiative on key indicators. This session will include real time polls and Twitter feeds. It is aimed at all levels, but particularly colleges who want to launch a Z Degree.

Room 162

OERs in Flipped Learning Classes
Robert Maloy, Sharon Edwards, University of Massachusetts, Amherst   

This session highlights strategies for using open educational resources (OERs) in college classes featuring flipped learning and community engagement by undergraduate students. It explores three dimensions of OER including creating OER-based online assignments, teaching student’s strategies to locate reliable Web resources, and integrating OERs into weekly discussions and activities.

This session will feature an interactive presentation format centered around OER use in two college courses at the University of Massachusetts Amherst: Education 497I (Tutoring in Schools) and Education 613 (New Developments in History and Political Science).

Both courses use free public wikis to provide OER resources to students. The Tutoring in Schools wiki is TEAMS-Tutoring in Schools, online at https://teams-tutoringinschools.wikispaces.com/Home. The Education 613 wiki is resourcesforhistoryteachers, online at http://resourcesforhistoryteachers.wikispaces.com/home

As part of the interactive nature of the session, attendees will participate in short demonstration lessons using activities that college students complete as part of OER-based classes, including investigating reliable vs, unreliable online resources and developing online assignments for flipped classes. Participants in the workshop will also have opportunities to share their own experiences using OERs as well as teaching and learning in flipped classrooms. Participants at all levels of background with OERs are encouraged to attend.

Room 165

The UNH OER Ambassadors Program
Eleta Exline and Jennifer Carroll, University of New Hampshire

The University of New Hampshire launched its OER Ambassadors program 2015 and is now entering its third year. In this session, we’ll discuss collaboration, gathering financial and administrative support, supporting instructors in OER adoption, program assessment, student and faculty outcomes, systemwide expansion of the program, and plans for the future.

Since 2014 the University of New Hampshire OER Team has been promoting adoption of Open Educational Resources to UNH faculty. In 2015 we launched the UNH OER Ambassadors program, which provides funding and support to faculty who are transforming their teaching using open and free resources. Our faculty “Ambassadors” are academic leaders committed to effective pedagogy, eager to experiment with “open,” and willing to share their experiences with colleagues and peers. Criteria for program success are savings realized by students, maintaining or improving student learning outcomes, faculty success in identifying and adopting OER, faculty satisfaction with support and services, and student satisfaction with the course materials. Harder to measure is what engagement with OER inspired in our faculty: a spirit of innovation and the development of a community of practice around openness. In this session, we’ll discuss the nature of the partnerships we’ve developed, gathering financial and administrative support, working with faculty on successful OER adoption, assessment, student and faculty outcomes, system-wide expansion of the program, and our plans for building on our successes. Participants will collaborate on creating a strategy statement for initiating campus conversations about OER, and identifying key collaborators, stakeholders, and gatekeepers. Beginning to intermediate level.

Room 168C

Leaping into OER at UT San Antonio: Leveraging Partnerships & Communication Strategies to Spur Growth
DeeAnn Ivie, University of Texas at San Antonio (TX)

This presentation will provide a snapshot of UTSA librarians’ work with OER in the past year and a half and will present future strategies for OER expansion. The UTSA Libraries began exploring OER in 2015, essentially starting from scratch in an unfamiliar realm. Since then, we have made substantial strides in building a framework to support OER awareness and adoption. In addition to learning about UTSA’s program, the audience will be encouraged to brainstorm, in small groups, strategies for improving existing OER programs and frameworks. What can we learn from each other to build more robust and effective OER programs?

We’ve drafted an OER library project plan with measurable outcomes as part of our partnership with OpenStax, leveraging their expertise in growing OER adoption on college campuses. In addition to our OpenStax partnership, we have also worked closely with campus partners to spur OER growth: the Libraries’ relationships with the Office of the Provost, the Faculty Center, the Teaching and Learning Center, Office of the Registrar, Online Learning, the Campus Bookstore, and our Student Government Association have been crucial to the success of our initiative. Our OER faculty grant program, now in its second year, will be outlined in detail with special emphases on communication strategies, partner relationships, and our scoring and selection process for applications. In addition to learning about UTSA’s program, the audience will be encouraged to brainstorm, in small groups, strategies for improving existing OER programs and frameworks. What can we learn from each other to build more robust and effective OER programs? This track is for beginner or intermediate OER program leaders.

The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) is a Hispanic-serving institution with 46% of our 30,000 students identifying as first-generation college students. One critical aspect of UTSA’s mission is to provide access to higher education for residents of South Central Texas. Currently, UTSA’s four-year graduation rate is 11%; increasing this number has been identified as a high priority for the entire University. UTSA Librarians believe increasing access to open educational resources (OER) supports and advances this effort. OER research reveals a relationship between textbook access and course outcomes, allowing for more engaged classrooms, student savings, and correlates with a decrease in students dropping and failing courses. OER advocacy is a natural fit for UTSA, and aligns well with our mission and institutional goals.

Room 174

OA, OER and the Future of Libraries
Jeremy Smith, UMass Amherst Libraries, Gabe Stetson, UMass Amherst Libraries, Tim Dolan Greenfield Community College

As library budgets shrink and state and federal cuts loom, public academic libraries must make tough decisions about where to allocate funding in all areas of the library. Once primarily the concern of Scholarly Communication departments, all library units must now consider how they can contribute to making course materials accessible. This session will discuss how librarians can collaborate across units and across institutions to provide more OA & OER materials as well as assigned course material to maximize student success.

Concurrent Session 6: 2:55 – 3:20pm

Campus Center Auditorium

Growing Your OER Initiative
Josh Baron, Open Education Ambassador, Lumen Learning, Ross Strader, Director of Learning Engineering, Lumen Learning

Moving OER from “early-adopters” innovating with new instructional models to mainstream use requires an institutional strategy aimed at removing barriers to adoption for faculty and students. This session will discuss strategies for scaling and sustaining OER adoption and building institutional support. Areas to consider include policies, sustainability models, professional development and support, technology, and achieving equivalency and improvement in the OER learning experience as compared to the non-OER resources it is replacing.  

Room 162

How can OER initiatives parlay into curriculum overhauls at the course and program level?
Cailean Cooney and Jeremy Seto, CUNY City Tech (NY)

Facilitators will guide discussion on how OER initiatives can parlay into curriculum development at the departmental level and program/college assessment initiatives. This discussion will ponder pragmatic strategies to create faculty driven OER initiatives.

There will be two facilitators to initiate and guide a discussion about how OER initiatives can parlay into curriculum development and assessment at the department and college level, with consideration to accreditation requirements as well. Much has been published and discussed about reservations and lack of awareness among faculty members regarding OER. This discussion aims to push against that narrative to seek pragmatic strategies toward faculty driven OER initiatives. Participants will ask how OER projects might align with departmental and college goals which might include curricular revamps, establishing curricular consistency among (high enrollment) courses, and improving low performing gateway prerequisite courses? Are there implications for faculty development/ownership? Is there room for these strategies to resist the banking model of education?

A basic knowledge of OER in higher education is recommended to join this session. Instructors, administrators, and OER program coordinators are welcome to join the discussion.

Room 165

Partnership for Success: How the HCC OER Task Force came Together to Tackle Soaring Textbook Costs
Karen Hines, Mary Dixey, Lindsey Rothschild and Karin Camihort, Holyoke Community College (MA)

We will share HCC’s student and faculty experience and how textbook costs are impacting our students and creating barriers for success. HCC faculty came together under the OER Taskforce to review data and create a feasible strategy for OER adoption. We will share our specific approach, planning process, and support systems. Attendees will be provided with implementation guidelines and resources to share at their campuses.

Presentation by four members of the HCC OER Taskforce: a faculty member, instructional designer, the dean of the library and the dean of online programs. The presentation is intended for people interested in developing (or in the process of developing) an OER initiative on their campus with a solid structure. Essential elements such as engaging a range of stakeholders, collecting data and creating measurable goals will be discussed. We will dedicate half the time to telling our story and half to engaging attendees to share their stories and ask questions.

Room 168C

When Getting Funding Actually Slows Your Progress
Jennifer Nohai-Seaman, Michael Brown, Housatonic Community College

In 2014 Housatonic Community College began its OER journey with mathematics courses and the movement began to steadily grow. In 2016, we were proudly awarded the ATD OER degree initiative grant and then involvement of faculty in OER began to decline. We will discuss the strengths, shortcomings, and our future.

Room 174

Are we related?
Patricia Erwin-Ploog, Granite State College (NH)

The joy of OER is that they may be reused and remixed to accommodate a variety of new teaching options. However, this flexibility presents challenges in the discovery and management of OER. This SIG session will discuss techniques used in management, including the feasibility of applying newspaper cataloging techniques in OER management.

Faculty report that one of the challenges to using OER is the discovery. This session looks at ways librarians may be able to facilitate this discovery through the use of existing cataloging tools. My focus is to explore this option and see what my colleagues think- is this an option that should be pursued, or do colleagues have other approaches that work well.

Panel Discussion: 3:30 – 4:30pm

Campus Center Auditorium

Current Trends and The Future of OER

David Wiley, Nicole Allen, Quill West, Nicole Finkbeiner, Richard Sebastian, Josh Strader

Coffee, Cookies, and Conclusion!

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