International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 61

Advancing an Open Educational Resource Initiative through Collaborative Leadership
of earning lower grades. Such studies
have further inspired OER advocates
to center the OER movement on student
success (Florida Virtual Campus,
2019; Jhangiani, 2019). At the University
of Georgia, researchers found that
the use of OER in the classroom led to
increased academic performance for
all students, with the greatest increase
for traditionally underserved students,
such as non-white, part-time, and Pell
Grant recipients (Colvard, Watson, &
Park, 2018). Such research highlights
the potential of OER to advance more
equitable learning in higher education.
More recent movements within the
OER community have emphasized the
overall ethos of Open Pedagogy and the
potential of OER to transform teaching
into a more student-centered practice
where students are viewed as collaborators
and creators in their own right
(Jhangiani, 2019; Yano & Myers, 2018).
In addition to research findings
on perceptions of OER, the impact of
OER adoption on student success measures,
and the turn to open pedagogy,
the OER literature is replete with action-oriented
case studies detailing both
statewide (Bell & Salem, 2017; Frank
& Gallaway, 2018; Hanley & Bonilla,
2016), and institution-specific adoption
efforts (Blick & Marcus, 2017; Davis,
Cochran, Fagerheim, & Thoms, 2016;
Ives & Pringle, 2013; Wesolek, Lashley,
Langley, 2018; Woodward, 2017). Such
case studies illustrate the wide variety
of OER models in terms of team composition,
workflow, and the extent of
top-down versus bottom-up leadership.
Awareness of strategic planning models
and discussions of change management
assisted the authors’ efforts in initiating
the first OER working group at their institution.
Broad concepts can be taken
and applied to local needs and institutional
context.
Change management and
higher education
In a recent dissertation on faculty adoption
of OER, Sterling Brasley drew upon
several prominent change management
theories, including Rogers’ (2003) diffusion
of innovation model. Writing
from a sociological perspective, Rogers
described how innovations gain greater
acceptance as they are increasingly
shared by members of a particular social
group (as cited in Sterling Brasley, 2018,
pp. 19-37). In their discussion of OER
adoption, Braddlee and VanScoy (2019)
stated that OER has not yet crossed the
needed diffusion threshold of a 16%
adoption rate in order to influence more
widespread acceptance. However, it is
clear that faculty awareness of OER is
increasing across the nation. The 2018
Babson Survey Research Group reported
that “46 percent of faculty [are] now
aware of open educational resources,
up from 34 percent three years ago”
(Seaman & Seaman, 2018). While OER
awareness is necessary on a national
scale, greater awareness and adoption
needs to take place at institutional levels
as well (Braddlee & VanScoy, 2019,
p. 2). Sterling Brasley (2018) also drew
upon the change management theory
developed by Anderson and Anderson
(2010), which focused on both internal
and external “drivers of change” at the
individual and organizational levels (as
cited in Sterling Brasley, 2018, pp. 39-
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