Craig Finlay and Renata Valquier Chavez

Introducing the ONE List

Open Nebraska (ONE), is a multifaceted open education and affordable content initiative which includes all three campuses of the University of Nebraska system and includes grant funding for adoption of no-cost and affordable materials, a course-tagging system, and a rigorous program of assessment for metrics of student success.

This project aims to address a deficiency in current categorization and description of Open Educational Resources.  Currently, there is no standardized method by which OER are noted to possess commonly accepted markers of academic authority. Examples of such markers include author/creator credentials, publisher type, editorial oversight, and peer review in creation of content. OER Commons, a major search engine finding resources, includes author affiliation and a 1-5 star user rating, but beyond that only allows for narrowing results by attributes such as intended audience, resource type, and subject area. The Open Textbook Library uses a similar system, with ratings drawing from aggregations of user reviews.

MERLOT, another major discovery tool, features a more robust review system which consists of editorial teams drawn from MERLOT consortia members.  This system analyzes the content of the materials for perceived quality, although the time-consuming nature of such a project means that only around six percent of materials returned in searches feature such assessments. Another common method for finding materials consists of searching for Libguides lists assembled by librarians for a given topic.

In all cases, the ratings systems depend on subjective assessments of quality, rather than representing a standardized system of sorting.  The project proposes the development of a novel tagging system designed, primarily, to address commonly accepted markers of publishing authority.  We do not seek a system in which more reviews of content are offered.  Rather, we seek a system which can be implemented by anyone and which describes the materials themselves.

In the traditional modality print textbooks, perhaps best represented by the familiar multi-edition major publisher’s introduction text, there are certain attributes of which faculty could be sure without needing to double check them. These include that the materials were authored by individuals with related advanced or terminal degrees, the materials were subject to editorial oversight, and, if noted in the title, had undergone a history of revisions as new editions were released.  None of these attributes are readily apparent by way of any current standardized system.

Often, the lack of readily identifiable information about resources is a hurdle to adoption. Faculty adopters often wish to know who created an OER, what their credentials are, who the publisher is, if the material was subject to any kind of editorial process, if the materials have ever been revised and updated.  These attributes, while not a guarantor of quality, and while faculty must ultimately make the decision themselves as to whether they wish to adopt a certain resource, they are nonetheless important and themselves standard components of the academic publishing ecosystem. It is the working hypothesis of this project that, given two equal-sized populations of resources, one of which possesses all of the aforementioned attributes, and the other of which possesses none of them, that potential faculty adopters will end up heavily favoring the first, even given a blind review of materials. Subject expertise, competent editorial review, production organized and managed by teams of professionals, all of these things remain as important as ever.

Often, many of these attributes can be easily obtained from an item record. Just as often, a record will contain none of them.  The DIY potential of Open Educational Resources has been a wonderful addition to the ecosystem of academic publishing.  The Pressbooks platform has enabled the ready creation of many materials that would not likely have otherwise been picked up by a publisher. Faculty members can create course-specific workbooks for their students, produce texts of any length, and thanks to the power of open licensing adapt existing materials for their own courses. At the same time, we have seen the creation of large numbers of resources produced by uncredentialled individuals, or which did not benefit from editorial oversight, or which have never been revised and updated.

We want to reiterate here that we are not, through this system, assigning a given resource a quality rating. We are simply proposing and implementing as proof of concept a system of attribute tags which denote certain attributes which always have been and remain important to academic publishing. Along with these attributes, we are including attributes already in use elsewhere, including but not limited to subject area, resource type, copyright licensing, learning management system content, and instructor-only content.  The goal is to create an OER index that presents curated and tagged resources organized by subject area, type, and level of study.

This proof-of-concept index will broadly reflect the programs of study at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.  We do not have the labor power of funding to implement this project at the scale needed to approach comprehensive indexing. Our hope is that others can implement this project for themselves, and that it becomes a standard component of item records and a permanent component of the OER landscape.  We would like to thank the Office of Dr. Jaci Lindburg, Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovative and Learning Centric Initiatives at UNO, for generous funding to support the piloting and implementation of this project. We would also like to thank private donors Ben and Martha Simmons for their support.

The pilot phase of this project began in the Fall of 2022 and concluded in the Summer of 2023.  The implementation phase is currently ongoing, with anticipated completion in time for the Fall 2024 semester.