Her conversation about OER started with Max Fineday, who was the USSU President for 2 years, and the issue of costly textbooks was part of his election platform. The U of S refers to their MOOCs as TOOCs or truly open online course, open, creative commons license, no registration required, keep content. Seems fitting, as it is always cold in Saskatchewan.
Heather advised the audience to get out there, talk to people in line, and be always selling the idea of open textbooks. Further, look for opportunities where you collaborate with others who are doing similar work either on your campus or with other institutions. Find and then celebrate those champions.
Money from province used to create textbooks, raise awareness and promote OER, as well as to create ancillary resources (test banks, online modules, software, teaching materials). Money goes to fund the graduate students who assist in the OER projects on campus.
Heather second piece of advice - feed people. People will come for food! Host lunches, celebrate the champions and build the community. At the U of S, the OER supports are the Gwenna Moss Centre, Instructional Designers, Bookstore (Print on Demand service, link to services of OER), USSU, Library and Media Production. Print on Demand is run by the students union, so all profit goes back to the students. This service prints OER digital items for students that would prefer a print copy.
Educate students about the issues. They can also be your champions, but as others mentioned at the conference, once you get a good group of students they graduate.
Celebrate open textbooks through book launches. Each time a book is published, throw a party!
Lessons Learned:
- Listen to others in the game - get instructional designers involved, treat OER like distance classes
- Requirement of a letter of support from the department head, support the actual adoption of the OER in the course/department before they receive funding
- Funding at the beginning, and after showing partial project examples, and thorough report detailing process
- Technology is a friend and a foe
- Put OER on syllabus, students will be drawn to your course
Challenges:
- Need to discuss homework systems, which will be our next battle with publishers. Pedagogy (students can write the textbooks - ESL written by Education students for example), OER repository, major adoptions
- Need to talk about failures: projects take too long; copyright issues with content that faculty were sharing with their students and then trying to make it open; books that are not successfully adopted, or the champion leaves the department; students didn’t realize that there was a book because there was nothing to buy at the bookstore; we need to feel that we can fail
- Time is always the greatest barrier - faculty are always asked to do more with less; hard to dedicate the time to a new initiative
- Look for individual champions if you are not able to entice a whole department
- Sometimes you have to wait for retirements (RIP – retired in place)
- The publishers are not playing fair with our students, nor is access copyright playing with educational institutions
- This movement is about open, but more importantly, it is about student success. As educators, we do whatever we can to ensure student success!
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