International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 203

From Soup to Nuts: Expanding Liaison and Technical Services for OER Development bundled resources that include digital access codes or course-related software packages. These bundled resources are often time-limited or non-transferable, reducing students’ ability to save money through the secondary textbook market. This, coupled with overall rising education costs, forces students to make tough decisions concerning course materials. A recent survey at Virginia Tech shows that students are opting to share materials, increase working hours, and reduce course loads to help pay for, or simply go without, the course materials they need to succeed (Walz, 2017). A now well-known Florida study reveals similar results, with students opting not to take certain courses due to the cost of course materials (Florida Virtual Campus, 2019). Such behaviors contribute to course failure and dropout rates, and increase students’ time to degree completion (Martin, Belikov, Hilton, Wiley, & Fischer, 2017). At the same time that awareness of student material costs has increased, higher education stakeholders have begun to explore OER alternatives, beginning with the development of Merlot, publication of PLOS, MIT’s requirement that all course materials carry an open courseware license, and the development of what is now Open- Stax by Rice University (Bliss & Smith, 2017). Through these and other efforts, instructors and OER advocates have shown that students can perform just as well using open resources, and that students rate low and no-cost materials favorably (Hilton, 2016; Todorinova & Wilkinson, 2019). As a result, a growing number of institutions and university systems have focused efforts on OER development to manage student material costs (Bliss, Robinson, Hilton, & Wiley, 2013; Farrow et al., 2014). Moreover, as OERs have become more widely adopted, educators have discovered benefits beyond cost management, including equal access to materials from the first day of class; increased student engagement; lower drop, fail, and withdrawal rates among at-risk populations; and slightly higher grades among atrisk students (Colvard, Watson, & Park, 2018). For several years now, these and other benefits have contributed to broad institutional and system-level administrative buy-in for OERs, especially for high-enrollment core courses and lower-division STEM courses that tend to use expensive texts that are updated frequently. At the same time, however, the transition to OERs has been slow for many institutions (Doan, 2017). While the reasons for this are varied, several sources indicate that locating appropriate OER materials and setting aside time to overhaul curricula are significant barriers to faculty for developing OER materials (Allen & Seaman, 2016; DeVries, 2013; Wang & Towey, 2017). Addressing these concerns has led institutions and university systems to develop a diverse array of awards and funding-based incentives for faculty to research, review, create, and adopt OERs. These incentives exist at the state level (e.g., Georgia, Oregon), the system level (e.g., SUNY), and the institution level (e.g., Temple), with varying degrees of impact and success (Bell & Salem, 2017). 195