International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 52

International Journal of Open Educational Resources
This challenge is not specific
to IP instructors; many main-campus
courses have standardized course materials
across all course sections and instructors
in said courses often feel like
they have limited freedom to adopt new
materials, creating a real or imagined
barrier to instructor adoption of OER.
This challenge is also very difficult to
address due to the diversity of course
material selection processes in place
in different departments. In theory,
the best strategy for overcoming these
challenges would involve identifying
and consulting with those responsible
for course material selection in departments
that make decisions centrally.
Our ATG team has had difficulty pursuing
this strategy, however, due both
to the scale of the work involved and
a lack of responsiveness from chairs of
curriculum committees.
This challenge of deference to
main-campus course material selection
can also present an interesting opportunity,
particularly in cases where an IP
instructor makes a bold choice to select
course materials that deviate from
those used by other course sections. For
example, at the IP study center in the
Republic of Panama, instructors have
adopted The Word on College Reading
and Writing from the Open Textbook
Library for a high-enrollment English
Composition course, citing a need to
reduce the cost of the materials used
by main campus sections of the course.
In such cases, if IP students perform as
well or better with the newly adopted
materials, IP instructors may be able
to demonstrate to the sponsoring academic
department that the benefits of
adopting the new materials outweigh
the risks. Although the librarians who
manage the ATG program have no direct
way of evaluating student performance,
they do share the guidebook to
research on OER adoption with all new
ATG instructors and encourage them
to evaluate student outcomes using the
COUP Framework (Hilton et al., n.d.).
Impact
The most immediate impact of
the IP partnership has been an
increase in funding for the ATG
program. University Libraries allocated
$6,000 for the ATG program in 2017
and increased the allocation to $10,000
in 2018 and 2019. IP contributed an
additional $5,000 in 2018 and $18,000
in 2019, significantly expanding the total
funding allocation for the program.
Although these contributions exceeded
the level of interest from IP instructors,
they were nonetheless an encouraging
development, allowing the ATG team
to award more mini-grants than would
have otherwise been possible with
funding from University Libraries.
Since the launch of the IP partnership
in 2018, the ATG team has received
11 applications from IP instructors,
10 of which were approved for
funding (see Table 1). The total student
enrollment across these 10 courses was
373, and the total estimated savings to
students (based on the new print retail
cost of the materials previously assigned
in these courses) was $44,956.40. Stated
a different way, the IP mini grants have
generated $4.49 in student savings for
every $1.00 spent. It should be noted
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