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- 212