International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 220
International Journal of Open Educational Resources
To support the new campus OER
initiative, the provost charged the university
librarian and the ETS director to
lead the university’s efforts. The library
had recently hired a scholarly communications
librarian. With the provost’s
approval, the directors recruited her to
join them as an informal three-person
OER working group. The group immediately
began promoting the state’s OER
grant program on campus. The timing
of these events was not ideal, occurring
at the end of the spring semester,
a time when faculty are busy finishing
spring courses and preparing for summer
schedules. However, one education
professor’s interest in adapting OER for
a course resulted in a grant award for a
university team who were subsequently
asked by ACHE to partner with another
team from Wallace State Community
College.
The scholarly communications
librarian was part of the team awarded
the statewide grant at UNA. In addition
to the education professor and
the librarian, the grant team included
an instructional designer to help integrate
the OER into the course shell and
a second education professor to assist
in the research analysis and reporting.
The grant required the instructor to use
traditional material in a fall semester
section of the class and OER in a spring
semester section of the class. The librarian
worked closely with the education
professor to locate OER materials to replace
her traditional course materials.
The course is a required, high-enrollment
general education course in her
department. Preliminary data shows
on overall 3.9 (on a 1-5 scale) student
satisfaction score when using the traditional
learning materials. When using
the OER, the satisfaction rate was a 4.7.
A full report to ACHE is expected at a
later date.
In Fall 2018, the campus OER
initiative received a second boost
when the university’s strategic plan for
2019-2024, Roaring with Excellence,
specifically included OER. The plan
defined an aspiration to integrate OER
of some form into at least half of all
academic programs at the university.
Given this formal directive, the OER
working group created an agenda and
goals, and started to work on the first
steps to realizing this aspirational strategic
directive.
First Steps
Faculty survey
In order to set a clear timeline for OER
adoption and implementation, it was
important to first assess the current status
of awareness and use of OER on campus.
An IRB-approved survey was sent
out to all faculty, staff, and adjuncts affiliated
with UNA in September of 2018
through a variety of channels, including
campus-wide emails and campus digital
announcements. The survey was created
based on the strategic aspiration of
the university and many questions were
borrowed from a variety of openly licensed
sources. We utilized questions
from OpenStax College Educator Survey
(2016), the Babson Survey Research
Group (Seaman & Seaman, 2018), and
the faculty perceptions survey administered
by Jung, Bauer, and Heaps (2017).
The survey recorded 101 total attempt-
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