Journal of Online Learning Research and Practice Volume 7, Number 2, 2019 | Page 16

The APUS Open Educational Resources (OER) Conversion Project
focused on maintaining a high-quality
student experience.
Competitor OER Conversion Data
Specific data on how much money
APUS’s competitors have spent to
convert courses to OERs are difficult
to acquire. With a few exceptions,
competitors tend not to share their
course-conversion figures. However, a
search of available online articles yielded
some interesting indicators of the
scale of actions taken by others, primarily
state university systems. Many of
these initiatives supported by states are
through grant funding made available
to faculties for this purpose.
Recent articles have claimed that
University of Maryland University College,
the University of Minnesota, Oregon
State University, and the Washington
State Community College systems
have started converting course materials
to OERs, resulting in substantial savings
for students (American Council on
Education, 2015; Millard, 2014). Several
relatively large expenditures mentioned
in the articles are both interesting and
important to note, especially due to
APUS relying largely on full-time faculty
(FTF) to accomplish these tasks as
part of their annual work agreements.
By involving faculty members from the
outset of the project, APUS maintains
low costs and increases faculty buy-in
and curricular ownership.
The University of Connecticut
(n.d.) has engaged faculty members
in an OER conversion project, as has
Tidewater Community College (n.d.)
in Virginia. The preliminary results
were very positive, as a majority of
students reported satisfaction with the
free materials provided (Adams, 2017).
An OER fellowship program based in
the University of Hawaii Community
College system also resulted in savings
for students via conversion of existing
course materials to OERs (Oshiro &
Risely, 2016). Similar, the State of Michigan’s
OER Textbook Initiative was successful
at reducing costs to students;
the University of British Columbia system
in Canada achieved similar results
(Rodriguez & Pieri, 2017). The Ohio
government’s efforts to convert courses
to OERs include grant funding for
faculties in its state university system
(Vogt, 2014). An OER initiative at the
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
was successful, as was one based in the
University of California-Los Angeles library
system, which pays faculty members
small stipends to convert courses
to OERs (Salem, 2017).
The New York and California
state university systems are investing
millions in OER conversion. When
such states adopt an initiative, the rest
of the nation typically follows. More
states are beginning to fund efforts to
convert courses to OERs, and the federal
government recently announced $5
million dollars in grants for institutions
seeking to begin this work (SPARC,
2018; Dimeo, 2017).
Notably, major publishers have
started to enter the OER movement.
Among others, Lumen and VitalSource
recently began wrapping their existing
OER offerings with additional proprietary
materials to create relatively lowcost
courses of their own. It is likely
that such publishers are observing the
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