34 Introduction to OER advocacy

Essential Components of OER Advocacy

For librarians or those who work in centers for teaching excellence, here is a quick list of essential advocacy components. Consider advocacy here to be the face-to-face (or virtual) work of encouraging and helping teachers and faculty to adopt OER into their courses.

1. Understanding the workload you’re proposing

While the shift to OER is becoming increasingly common and accepted, it’s not always easy for individuals, institutions, or systems to try new things. Choosing an open educational resource can be scary to some who feel a loss of control. Often, faculty have been teaching in the same modality for many years, and the thought of completely revising their course is off-putting.

Creating this microcredential has been a great experience for me in this regard, as it has given me some insight into the amount of work it takes to build a course from the ground up. Like most things that professionals do, it’s a lot more work than one might think. If you have the chance to work on a course development project, I highly recommend taking it. Perhaps not as a lead, and not during the first one or two years in a position, but as part of a team, once you’ve found some allies you can work with.

Talking to faculty and teachers about adopting entirely new course materials is not simply a conversation about swapping out one book for another. It’s a conversation about course revision. Having built a course once, and having slowly refined it over the years with the resources they’ve assigned, faculty may be understandably hesitant to change things. Often, all they need to do once they’ve reached such a state of equilibrium is slightly adapting assignments and lectures to update them and to reflect new textbook editions.

But when a faculty member changes a book entirely, they must then change lectures, ancillary material, tests, and possibly activities, discussion etc. And as a professional taking part in advocating and promoting OER adoption, part of your job will be to address the concerns and be available to address concerns, to mitigate reservations, and to facilitate successful projects.

Last week, we watched a video in which OER adopter Angelika Stout discussed the process of undertaking a permanent, all-section conversion of a course. This project involved creating and curating a library of open materials, bringing instructors on board with using them, and having plans for bringing new instructors up to speed on the revised course. We created this video with potential faculty adopters in mind. It discusses many anxieties faculty may have about such work. It also touched on what is frequently noted as an unexpected benefit of an OER course redesign – that faculty can start with their learning outcomes and then design a course which aims to meet them. This, more than working from a standard textbook, which will restrict what and when faculty can realistically include in their syllabus. We covered this briefly last week – it’s called “backward course design.”

Discussing the work of course redesign in these terms reframes the discussion as one which focuses on instructor freedom rather than instructor workload.

2. Don’t come empty-handed

Another important advocacy tool is to have examples of excellent OER to show faculty considering this work. For many introductory classes, this has become easy to do, particularly for STEM. It is, as yet, less easy for the humanities. And while it is all well and good to have a general OER resource on hand for a faculty member’s given discipline, it is much better to attempt to find something more specific to their courses. This lets them know that you’re not simply a salesperson, but someone who can and will help them for at least the initial search for materials.

Try it for yourself. From the A-Z programs list at UNO, select a subject and then find an upper level course. Something in the 3000 or 4000 level. Imagine you’re meeting with an instructor for that area. Try to find a quality Open Educational Resource for that course, based on the description.

I selected Interdisciplinary Studies, and for my upper level course selected INDS 4950:

INDS 4950 INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES: CAPSTONE COURSE (3 credits) — The course provides students with the opportunity to refine their practice of interdisciplinary thinking and its application to the real world; to demonstrate the knowledge and skills acquired thus far with the production of a senior project; to produce a rationale for their capstone project and specializations legible to potential employers.

The tricky bit here was that I needed materials suitable for an upper-level course. There is a relevant text, Interdisciplinary Studies: A Connected Approach. This is an openly licensed text, featuring a CC BY 4.0 license, which is great. However, it’s probably not, itself, suitable as a textbook for an upper-level course. This text is the result of an open pedagogy project, being collectively authored by undergraduates at Portland State University, under a professor’s supervision. It is still a cool example of a type of project that an instructor of this course could undertake themselves. But as a textbook, it does not meet the academic rigor one would expect from a textbook produced by a professional publisher.

So, I assembled a collection of resources that are either openly licensed or at least free to access. We’ve already discussed the relative benefits of openly licensed materials over simply free to access materials. Chief among them are that a Creative Commons license is irrevocable, and the materials are free to share. Freely accessible but all-rights-reserved materials, on the other hand, can only be linked to, and they may well be removed from the web at any time. Nevertheless, they can function as an affordable content measure, and it is also possible that there is no viable openly licensed alternative. For the sake of pragmatism, the OER librarian will likely be working with free-to-access but all-rights-reserved materials as well.

3. Be willing to help them through the process

The easiest way to do this is to aid faculty in the creation of a list of resources to consider for their courses. The collection of materials for INDS 4950 linked to above would be a decent example of this. Furthermore, let faculty know that you’re available as a resource for brainstorming, consulting on permissions, resource location, etc. Even if you do not end up working with them very closely, knowing that such a resource exists will go a long way to alleviating adopter anxiety.

4. Don’t simply appeal to abstract notions of altruism

It is important that discussions of OER adoption be framed as ones of benefit to faculty and their students. Odell found a remarkable increase in faculty Institutional Repository engagement by promoting green OA as a way to increase visibility of scholarship and number of citations.

Three strong immediate benefit arguments involve pedagogical freedom, tenure, and student success. We’ve already discussed pedagogical freedom and backwards design, so we’ll move on to tenure and student success.

Through discussions with numerous individuals with experience reviewing tenure portfolios and coaching faculty through the process. What emerged was a method for using OER adoption to virtually guarantee an excellence in teaching assessment for tenure, and at the same time produce scholarship of teaching and learning articles, thereby strengthening the research category as well. Resource for your toolkit: Research on student success Keep abreast of research on the impact of open education on student success and best strategies to achieve these outcomes. Not all initiatives are successful in this regard. Cost savings are not the only benefit of open educational resources to students. A widely cited article by Colvard, Watson & Park (2018) looked at the impact of OER in the context of numerous student demographic factors, including ethnicity and Pell grant recipient status. Classes using OER saw improved overall grades and decreased “DFW” rates¹ among all demographics.² Further, they found that this impact was amplified for historically underserved students. Clinton & Khan (2019) conducted a meta-analysis of 17 studies looking at the impact of OER adoption on student success and found that the withdrawal rate for OER courses was significantly lower than non-OER courses.³ The authors hypothesize that “having access to a textbook may help a student who is behind to cover missed material and not withdraw from the class. In this way, students who are struggling in a course may be less likely to withdraw if they can access an open textbook for free, instead of paying hundreds of dollars for a commercial textbook” (p. 10). Likewise, Grewe & Davis (2017) looked at OER adoptions at Northern Virginia Community College and found that adoptions had both a positive effect on both in- course academic performance and individual student performance relative to previous semesters.⁴

Similarly, Read et. al (2020), looking at OER impact in the context of socioeconomic status and employment, found a significant improvement in self-reported motivation and confidence among socioeconomically at-risk students in OER courses.⁵ Johnson et. al (2022) also found a boost in self-reported student confidence after taking OER classes.⁶ This might be due to a perception of students that the university was invested in taking steps to reduce student financial burden, thereby creating a deeper connection between students and their universities.^{7 8 9}

Even with null results for student performance, researchers conclude that in the worst-cast scenario, OER materials offer the same learning outcomes as traditional textbooks while having the tangible benefit to students of saving them money.^{10 11} Johnson et. al (2022) write that the initial results of assessment of the OER program at two Georgia Universities showed no significant improvement in grades nor a decrease in DFW rates. However, students in the studied class were still relieved of the burden of purchasing a $136 textbook.¹²

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—From, “Student Success in Open Nebraska Courses, NU Intercampus OER Research Committee White Paper Intercampus OER Research Committee White Paper,” Pelton et. al, 2023.

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In all cases, you cannot seem as if you are giving them a “hard sell.” These conversations should be framed as what real benefits this work will have for their students and for themselves.

Grants, of course, offer the most immediate, tangible benefit to faculty adopters, and we’ll cover that in more detail later in this module.

5. Finding and developing allies

Essential to any sort of campus-wide initiative which deals with multiple stakeholders is the development of allies. These are individuals with whom you can work, usually in ways that see their goals dovetail with your own.

Opinion leaders, innovators, early adopters

Everett Rogers studied change management through diffusion theory, describing how a new product or innovation can spread and grow in acceptance.

Think about the faculty on your campus. Do you know who the innovators and early adopters are on your campus?

Most campuses have opinion leaders. Opinion leaders are essential to successfully changing perceptions on campuses. If you are not sure who the opinion leaders are on your campus, ask faculty members with whom you are in contact. Opinion leaders will often be faculty trusted with curriculum revisions, or assessment working groups. If there is a faculty senate, they’ll likely have taken turns in leadership roles there, too. Opinion leaders are faculty who are looked up to, whose advice is sought, who have built up a substantial amount of capital.

One sure sign of an opinion leader is when you see an individual who has taken multiple turns as interim dean of a school, before going back to teaching.

Innovators and early adopters are more self-explanatory. These individuals willing to and eager to engage in emerging trends. While opinion leaders may or may not be innovators or early adopters. It is important to try to find an opinion leader who does fit into one of these two categories.