International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 237

Beyond Saving Money: Engaging Multiple Stakeholders is a Key to OER Success
Introduction
The open educational resources
(OER) initiative in the Early
Childhood Education (ECE)
program at an urban community college
began with a $300,000 Achieving
the Dream (AtD) grant, shared with two
other community colleges and funded
in late Spring 2016. The executive director
of the library and the coordinator
of the academic program had multiple
questions as they wrote the proposal:
(a) How will OER benefit faculty and
students? (b) How do we find the right
resources for our courses? (c) How does
this benefit the institution? and (d) Will
faculty from liberal arts be interested in
this project?
For faculty, OERs offer teaching,
learning, and research resources
that reside in the public domain or
have been released under an intellectual-property
license that permits their
free use, distribution, and/or adaptation
by others. OERs include full courses,
course materials, modules, textbooks,
streaming media, tests, software and
other tools, and/or techniques used to
support access to knowledge. Students
benefit from having course content
available with zero costs and a wealth of
resources available to them.
The final result was expected
to be that ECE students would be able
to complete all 60 credits required for
their degree with zero textbook costs—
an anticipated savings of approximately
$2,800 across 60 required credits. Faculty
from English, Education, Mathematics,
and the Behavioral and Social
Sciences began working on adapting
their existing course in Fall 2017. The
goal was to complete at least one section
of each required course by 2019.
The starting point for each
course was to tie together specific student
learning objectives, program
learning outcomes, and general education
competencies used in the sections
that relied on traditional for-purchase
textbooks. Faculty who developed OER
sections had three choices: adopt, adapt,
or create. They began by reviewing the
objectives, outcomes, competencies,
topics, and assignments before identifying
or developing OER materials for
each course. Faculty developers could
have adopted a complete course and
used it in its entirety, they could have
selected components from more than
one existing course to compile a new
OER course, or they could have created
their own content units and resources.
Regardless of which way the OER
sections were developed, they must
have been available to anyone seeking
to adopt or adapt their content.
As a college community striving
to reach a 50% graduation rate by
2021-2022, it was hoped that the proliferation
of OER would help students
reduce their costs, thereby mitigating
one of the factors that often delays
graduation—a lack of funds. It was also
anticipated that OERs would level the
academic playing field because all students
would have access to academic
content on the first day of class—no
more waiting for the secondhand book
to come from another state or students
using earlier editions that may be worn,
damaged, or incomplete. Faculty and
administration expected that students
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