40 Looking at OER Work

OER Work: From Small to Large

The base building block of OER work is the institutional level project, where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. With funding, the faculty grants program is becoming increasingly common. These programs reward faculty for the labor of adopting and/or creating Open Educational Resources.

An example is the Affordable Content Grants overseen at University of Nebraska Omaha by UNO Libraries. Originally, a program operated by the library alone with cobbled-together funding from university administration and library foundation money, it has grown to become a cooperative effort between the library, the Division of Innovative and Learning-Centric Initiatives, and the Office of General Education and Dual Enrollment. This is a common growth pattern for such initiatives. As allies are found with goals that dovetail with an initiative, labor, and funding can be pooled to approach bigger projects. Examples of cooperatively funded projects here include a larger grant to develop an OER library for English composition and another to convert all sections of Introduction to Astronomy, the highest-enrolled STEM general education course at UNO.

The Affordable Content Grants program is itself part of a larger, multi-campus initiative, Open Nebraska (ONE). This larger initiative includes all three University of Nebraska Campuses, and includes a course marking project, assessment, and open education events.

Often, system-wide initiatives are themselves partner-components of statewide initiatives. The State of New York, for example, has allocated millions of dollars for OER projects, which has allowed for the growth of SUNY OER and CUNY OER.

Collaboration is essential as programs grow. A notable example of how this happens can be seen here in the list of funders and history of the organization Achieving the Dream. Starting with a single investor, Achieving the Dream grew to partner with multiple organizations, including 38 community colleges with which it developed OER degree pathways, also known as Z-degrees.

Until 2023, the U.S. Department of Education’s Open Textbook Pilot program distributed millions of dollars in grants to develop OER and open education capacity. Grant applicants were required to be multi-institution partnerships, reflecting the scale of the work that needed to be done at that level.

The Individual Grants Program

Why Grants?

Grant programs are a common and effective practice within OER initiatives; these programs are so widespread and trusted that statewide OER legislation often includes the establishment or continuation of a grant program. A grant program encourages action without mandating action, supporting the time and resources necessary for faculty to implement OER. Open education programs can support and grow the adoption, adaptation, and creation of OER while still giving instructors and departments the agency to choose which resources are best for their courses and students. Grants are therefore a core method of “opt-in” support, inviting faculty members to explore, collaborate, and build new OER within their areas of subject expertise.

Let’s discuss building an OER grants program.

Step 1: Determine Your Strategic Priorities

Before you begin building a grant program, ensure that you have the vision, mission, and strategic goals of the program finalized. While grant programs typically address common goals of student savings and student success, it’s important to link what you will prioritize in the grant application and review process to what your overall program prioritizes. Let’s assume that, at this stage, early work to develop allies and find ready projects to work on has proved fruitful. You’re ready to develop a proposal for a funded grants program. What should you do before approaching the administration for funding? Start by addressing these points:

Defining focus, and planning for assessment

Early open education programs often focus on the zero-cost aspect of OER and its potential to enhance student success through equitable access to materials. Grant programs focused on textbook cost savings often prioritize the adoption of OER regarding the number of students affected by a project and how much the new OER will save each student. The reason for this is simple. Monetary impact is easy to track, and therefore easy to report to funders as a return on investment. Tracking student success metrics such as drop-fail-withdraw rates and GPA, particularly for traditionally underserved populations, should also be a primary goal.

Once established, a program may look to expand into creation of OER, issues of access and infrastructure, and research initiatives. Grant programs focused on the global or national impact of sharing OER, such as the Open Textbook Pilot mentioned above, may prioritize the creation of original open materials.

Who makes the decisions on textbook selection?

In higher education institutions, individual faculty often select the materials they will use for their courses. Textbook decisions at the K-12 level are often less the individual choice of the teacher and instead the decision of a committee consulting state education guidelines.

This could vary by the course or the institution, though: departments will sometimes choose a uniform set of course materials for their courses, or a major introductory course may uniquely have a uniform set of materials to accommodate part-time and adjunct instructors. Grant programs supporting individual faculty may focus on course release time and stipends, while grant programs supporting entire departments may include a partnership with embedded professional staff support (instructional designers, librarians) and include a department-wide approval process for materials.

Understanding capacity and setting realistic goals

It’s easy to succumb to “goal creep” in planning an initiative. Open education programs often address student success through both affordability and innovative ways of teaching, but there are other goals that open education programs could support. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals could be supported through the creation of inclusive and accessible OER, while digital access-focused goals could be supported through zero-cost, day-one access to OER as an institution moves to online or hybrid instruction.

Be realistic here. What can you do and do well now? Focus on that. Use success to develop future directions when you’re ready.

Finally, schedule meetings with an institutional grants officer or grants office, if one is available. They’re an invaluable resource that will know what the bureaucracy requires of a grants program, what the law requires, and how to avoid headaches later by addressing these issues early. Once that has been completed, you’ll be ready for step 2.

Step 2: Create a Draft Request for Proposals

The creation of a draft Request for Proposals (RFP) might seem sudden at this stage of creating a grant program, but this process happens early for a reason: designing the grant program that best fits the needs of your faculty, staff, and students first will function as the basis of your formal proposal for the implementation and funding of the grant program. Having an RFP ready means that you are ready to tell administrators exactly what you need for the program and why you need it. When creating an RFP draft, include at least these sections:

Purpose/Background

Why do these grants exist? State the strategic goals the program is addressing, along with a few desired outcomes of the program, such as enhancing student success through open educational practices, making access to course materials more equitable and affordable, or impacting the global community through sharing institutional resources.

Grant Structure

What do your grants look like? Are there multiple categories? Do those categories differ in how much you can award each grantee? This is where you define what these grants look like and the desired amount of funding. Here are some examples of different OER grant structures:

• Affordable Learning Georgia, has “transformation grants,” for individual instructors, which include both adoption and creation projects. They also offer “continuous improvement” grants, which address sustainability and revision of OER, and research grants looking at pedagogy, impact, and assessment.
• Open Oregon Educational Resources’ OER Grants have six categories based on the type of work being done: as-is, maintenance, interactives, revise/remix, author, and a catch-all “other” category (Open Oregon Educational Resources 2021).

While it is useful to think about and discuss what future directions your initiative might take, remember to stay realistic. A realistic project done well is always better than an ambitious project done poorly.

Required Activities

What will your grantees need to do before, during, and after the project? The work as described on each proposal will be the majority of the work, but consider whether these activities will also be required:

• Getting signatures on an agreement or contract
• Submitting invoices for payment
• Attending a kickoff meeting or regular check-ins
• Completing reports before the project is done
• Completing a final report
• Submitting any created materials
• Ensuring any created materials are accessible and inclusive
• Assigning a Creative Commons license to new materials
• Marking completed OER courses with a designator in the course schedule
• Participating in presentations and other program communications

Application Process

While it may seem like a separate application form would suffice to explain how the application process works, it’s both good for applicants to know what to expect in the RFP and good for administrators to know how the process works. Be sure to address the following:

• How to apply, including links to the application forms and any review rubrics
• The review process, including how peer and/or administrative reviews will work
• Any approvals needed, including departmental letters of support
• How notifications work once applications are accepted or rejected

Timeline

What are the dates and deadlines that applicants will need to know? Setting a timeline will also give administrators a heads-up on when funding needs to be available. Be sure to include:

• The application deadline, including the date and time when applications close
• The review period, separated by peer and administrative reviews if applicable
• The notification date when all applicants should expect to know whether their application was awarded
• Any required meeting dates for accepted applicants, such as a kickoff meeting

Funding Details

While the award amount is critical to know, and you may have already put these award amounts in the Grant Structure section, you will need a space to explain the details for how funding works. Some of these might be TBD until funding is approved by your institution or until you meet with applicable grants/research office staff, but the following should be addressed early:

• When are grant funds disbursed? Do awardees receive all funding up-front, all funding at the end when a final report is submitted, or half up-front and half at the end? Funding methods where at least partial funds are disbursed at the end of the project can ensure an extra level of accountability for project completion.
• Are these direct stipends, departmental funding, or given in the form of release time?
• What happens if there is a change in personnel? Direct stipends can be tough to manage in the event of turnover or other personnel changes in the middle of a project.

At this point, you now have an RFP that outlines how your grants will work; if you already have funding ready, you can continue with creating all your supporting documentation to make these grants happen. If you are trying to secure funding, you may be doing extra work too soon by creating the rest of the documentation; consider stopping here and working toward securing funds with the RFP as your outline for administrators on how everything will work. Once funding is secured, you can move to the next step.

Step 3: Create Supporting Documentation

The RFP Draft as described in Step 2 will require quite a few documents to ensure that the launch of your grant process moves smoothly. These documents will include:

• The application form(s), including downloadable/printable versions for applicants to use as a template before applying (see Chapter 21, Data Collection and Strategies for OER Programs, for data you may need to gather for reports)
• The online application submission form
• A review rubric to share with reviewers and applicants with evaluation criteria
• A web page to host the RFP and all applicable forms
• An announcement to raise awareness of your grant program and the release of your RFP
• In addition to the documentation required for launching the program, you will need the following documents created in the near future:
• Report templates for mid-project and final reports
• Agenda, presentations, and activities for a kickoff meeting

Step 4: Finalize and Announce

Now that your documentation is completed, and your grant program is ready to launch, it’s time to launch it. Finalize the RFP, with links to all supporting documents, and host the finalized documents on your web page. Be sure to run any official documentation through appropriate channels for approval, such as your department’s director. Work through as many communications channels relevant to your instructional faculty as you can, and capitalize on any opportunities to present to faculty at regular events such as new faculty orientation, committee meetings, and faculty senate meetings. Be sure to set some time aside to answer questions from interested faculty during the timeline for the RFP.

A note on reviewers:

Discussion of the review process will take place during conversations with administration and funders. Depending on your review process, you may be soliciting a rotating group of reviewers, you may be managing review in-house, you may have a committee that is charged with reviews, or you may have a review committee with standing members from relevant stakeholders. Blind peer review is less common because the nature of open education grants handed out within an institution, for specific courses, effectively makes it impossible to anonymize the applications.

Finding regular reviewers is a separate workflow. A good strategy can be to rely on your cultivated allies, but you also do not want to ask more of them than you need to, lest you damage that relationship. What is a good strategy, then, for finding new reviewers for your grants program?

The answer is often pre-tenured faculty members. Recall that the tenure process most often examines faculty contributions to research, teaching, and service. Service can either be to the profession or to the institution. Professional service most often takes the form of active participation in professional organizations and associations. Institutional service most often takes the form of committee membership.

Reach out to the individuals listed as chairpersons of departments and let them know you’re looking for reviewers for a grants program. Chairpersons are always happy to find new service opportunities for their tenure-track faculty, and tenure track faculty are continually investigating how to strengthen their service case. Such options can be difficult to come by. I’ve been a tenure-track faculty librarian at UNO since July 2021 and have yet to grab a coveted faculty senate committee membership. I’ve been looking for more than two and a half years.

Step 5: Get Grant Projects Started

Signed Agreements

Now that you have your confirmed awardees, it’s time to help these projects move forward. Most institutions will have a standard Service Level Agreement (SLA) or Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the grantees and your program, and these signed agreements will be connected to the disbursement of funds. Be sure to adapt this agreement to your specific program: for example, what happens if a project is only partially completed? What happens if zero work is done? What happens if someone leaves the institution or is replaced by another instructor on the project due to time constraints?

Kickoff Meetings

A kickoff meeting is a great way to ensure that all grantees understand the fundamentals of open education, accessibility, and hosting, along with how to complete reports and receive funding. They often take the form of an all-day workshop. Perhaps more importantly, it gets all awardees together as one ad-hoc community of practice centered in open education. Whether it is online or in-person, kickoff meetings put a face to the email addresses and position titles and link those experienced with open education with those who are just getting started.

With the increased move to asynchronous and virtual meetings, the in-person workshops will perhaps become less common. Having individual meetings with grant recipients and providing them with access to modules built into a learning management system can be effective too.

Step 6: Deadlines and Reports

Once the deadline for grant projects gets close, send reminders out to awardees who should be filling out their reports, finalizing their materials, and sending everything to you. Have a final report submission form ready with everything you want to know about the project, including a narrative description of the project, successes, lessons learned, quantitative and qualitative data (e.g., student perceptions of the materials, student success data, course-level student retention data such as drop/fail/withdraw rates), and prospects to sustain the implementation of OER.

Have a folder structure ready to organize all reports – you may want to do this by the unique identifier assigned to each project. Ensure that all documents, including invoices for final payments if applicable, are sent to you. Consider hosting this in a closed space shared by your organization, such as Microsoft Sharepoint.

Additional Considerations and Resources

Moving from Pilot Funding to Consistent Funding

Grant programs often start with a one-time pilot round of funding. These OER pilot rounds often attract faculty who are innovative instructors with the time and agency to learn about new teaching methods and apply them in their courses. To bring faculty with less time to devote to teaching and learning innovations within the program, grant programs will need to run for more than one round. This allows faculty who are not early adopters to see successful examples, read successful applications, and plan out an adoption, adaptation.

If you are running a grant program with just one year of funding, securing a renewal of the program in the following fiscal year should be a listed goal of the initiative. To reach this goal, the Program Manager will need to make the case that this is an impactful program worth sustaining. The following activities are crucial in securing a renewal of the program:

• Executing a data collection plan.
• Analyzing data and reporting on student savings and student success to those responsible for funding the program.
• Marketing to these key stakeholders. Libraries are often not great at self-promotion. Do not be afraid to trumpet your successes loudly, and in doing so, acknowledge those whose funding and labor made the program possible in the first place.
• Strategic Connections to Other Faculty Incentives

The long-term sustainability of an OER program often depends on more than just grant funding; without additional incentives, interest may wane quickly. To encourage the use of OER, consider a grant program which connects with other faculty incentives, such as:

• the inclusion of OER work in promotion and tenure criteria
• linking the grants to an already-existing course redesign initiative, perhaps one focusing on online course development or innovation
• a link to a goal or objective within the organization’s strategic plan
• a link to an already-existing faculty awards program

Recognition and rewards outside the grant program will drive further engagement with OER past the term of a grant project and frame OER adoption, adaptation, and creation as a practice that is not dependent on grant funding alone. At UNO, our Textbook Mavericks recognition program highlights grant projects each year. And UNO Libraries has also held a recognition event that acknowledged funders and supporters with personalized gifts.

Conclusion

Grant programs within your OER initiative will depend heavily on the program’s environment, contexts, funding, and staff time available. Starting with existing and successful models will help to jump-start a grant program and provide a solid rationale to those responsible for funding at your institution or system. Keep an eye on your institution’s unique mission, strategies, and values while building your grant program, and be sure to connect grants with other faculty incentives available within your program or your institution.

Acknowledgements

This module makes use of material adapted from:

• The OER Starter Kit for Program Managers Copyright © 2022 by Jeff Gallant, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
• SPARC Open Education Leadership Program, Attribution 4.0 International

Additional Resources

• Real-world project example: OER Curriculum Pathways, OER Week 2023, Craig Finlay and Dan Hawkins.
• Real-world project example: NU OER Research Highlights, OER Week 2023, Julie Pelton and Dan Hawkins.
• Real-world project example: One Step at a Time: Reflecting on the Path Towards an OER Creation Program, Ariana Santiago, 2023 Open Education Conference. https://youtu.be/oKzMFMLQA_U?si=vjjQO_3RjPT0emwb