42 An example of a mid-term goal
I like to think of goals in terms of near term, mid-term and long-term. I try to make sure that each goal includes component goals that constitute specific, achievable deliverables. While I want to keep these sufficiently general to allow flexible incorporation of work with existing initiatives, I also don’t want them to so general as to be effectively useless. For example, a long-term goal of mine is to develop a viable no-cost pathway through the General Education curriculum at University of Nebraska at Omaha.
By viable, I mean there have to be enough options to choose from to allow for students to select courses based on interest and schedule requirements. A pathway through the GenEd curriculum that only has one option for each requirement will be useful to only a few students. And OER is, after all, about impact.
Such an undertaking – involving buy in from the office of General Education, undertaking multiple projects with different departments, trying to work toward all-section conversions with multiple projects, and of course the funding to pull it off – well it’s the kind of thing that probably seems near-impossible when viewed as the final project alone. It becomes much more managable, mentally, when broken down into smaller component projects.
So, let’s start with a mid-term goal to achieving that long-term goal:
Complete conversion of courses into OER/affordable content that will at least make it possible to *technically* satisfy the General Education requirements at UNO.
Stepping Stone
For this phase, I don’t yet need a realistic pathway allowing sufficient flexibility of schedule and diversity of interest areas that would make it useful for a large population of students. I just need to have the pieces in place in which existing no-materials-cost courses exist which satisfy all the required content areas of the General Education Curriculum. Building diverse options into the pathway will come later.
During my environmental scan, I gathered a list of courses which already classified as no-cost, low-cost (less than $40), which are the classifications that the Open Nebraska project uses. Here are component goals for the midterm goal above, which I wrote at the start of my second semester here:
“Toward this end, target these courses for conversion:
- CHEM 1180, with approximately eight sections per year, of which 3-4 are already low cost (Update: There have been no additional 1180 projects, but we have funded six other chemistry projects through the Affordable Content Grants.)
- CYBR 1100, with approximately 12 sections per year, of which five are already low-cost (Update: There have been no additional 1100 conversions, but we’ve funded other College of Information Science and Technology courses, thereby increasing engagement with the faculty.)
- PSYC 1010, with approximately 36 sections per year, of which around 18 are already low cost. (Update: one additional 1010 project funded.)
- ENGL 1160, which has limited engagement at present, but about which the department has expressed interest in converting to being OER (Update: collaboratively funded large OER project with two other stakeholders.)
- One course each from the 10-highest enrolled course lists for Natural/Physical Sciences, Humanities/Fine Arts, Social Science, and Diversity. (Update: completed!)
- Two courses which satisfy the Humanities & Fine Arts requirement” (Update: we’ve funded five projects for courses that meet this requirement!)
In hindsight, the goals for specific, named and numbered courses were too rigid. If I didn’t complete these exact tasks, the goals would not be met. I should have instead articulated goals of increasing department-level engagement to develop a culture of OER, which would make it easier to pursue specific courses later.
These goals were informed by the scan I did looking at presently converted courses and comparing them to the GenEd requirements, as well as some meetings with relevant stakeholders. These were near-term goals that served as a starting point for the long-term goal of the viable General Education pathway. The sub-goals are specific projects which will contribute to the realization of the larger midterm goal.
When articulating your goals portion of your final project, be sure to include references to relevant toolkits and practice papers describing implementation of such projects at peer-institutions. There is a wonderful amount of useful information on this topic.
Two toolkits that I used in my working on my GenEd OER report include:
- “Stakes and Stakeholders: Open Educational Resources—Framing the Issues,” by Brady Yano & Carla Myers, in OER: A Field Guide for Academic Librarians (2019) and
- “Engage Different Stakeholders,” in Working Group Guide: Establish, run and sustain an open working group (2019), by Lucas Wright and Kirsta Lambert.
I also included practice articles and presentations, including:
- Rush, L., Lo, L. S., Abdous, M. h., & Draper, D. (2018). All hands on deck: how one university pooled resources to educate and advocate for affordable course content In K. Jensen, S. Nackerud, & R. A. Joslin (Eds.), The evolution of affordable content efforts in higher education : programs, case studies, and examples (pp. 93-104). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Libraries.
- Allosso, Dan, “Textbook Affordability with Dan Allosso: Session 2: The Z-Degree Program” (2023). All Resources. 161. https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/all/161
