Journal of Online Learning Research and Practice Volume 7, Number 2, 2019 | Page 18

The APUS Open Educational Resources (OER) Conversion Project
APUS actively tracks the savings
realized from the 2017 course
conversions, which continue to accrue,
along with the additional savings due
to the 2018 conversions to-date. These
amounts are calculated by summing the
product of the difference between preand
post-conversion costs times the
actual net registrations in each course
since conversion. Notably, undergraduate
conversions save the University
money, and graduate conversions save
the students money. The more course
materials that are converted to OERs,
the more money the institution and students
save.
Reduced expenditures due to the
undergraduate book grant and e-text
costs benefit graduate students directly.
Undergraduate e-text costs typically
range from $35 to $50 per student.
With a few exceptions, $100 is the cap
for graduate course materials, and few
students even have to pay that amount
anymore. As a direct result of this project,
the University has saved close to $5
million dollars in undergraduate ECM
costs, while saving graduate students
more than $1 million dollars to date.
Those amounts continue to increase
monthly.
Institutional Commitment for OERs
The cost savings to the institution and
its students would not have been possible
without an effective institutional
strategy and commitment from leadership,
faculty, and staff at APUS. The
first strategic step was to identify ways
to accomplish the work efficiently. After
an extensive search, APUS developed
a partnership with Intellus Learning
(http://www.intelluslearning.com/)—a
company whose software helps faculty
members quickly identify potential
OERs that align with their courses’
learning objectives. Intellus provides
APUS with the ability to integrate OERs
from its own library database offerings,
online videos and podcasts, and an array
of other educational websites. Intellus
allows tagging of identified resources
to assist APUS with gathering analytic
data on their usage. In addition, Intellus
generates automated email alerts when
OER links in the LMS fail and suggests
potential replacements.
With the right partnership in
place, the next step of the OER strategy
was to leverage the vast amount of
subject-matter expertise among APUS
faculty members, librarians, copyright
team members, and other support
staff. All APUS librarians hold Master’s
of Library Sciences or Master’s of
Library and Information Sciences degrees
and work closely with assigned
Schools within the University based on
their familiarity with particular content
areas. These experts assist faculty
members who may struggle to identify
potential resources. The librarians collaborate
with the copyright and course
materials teams to ensure that Schools
have not only the proper permissions,
but also sufficient licenses for any database
resources to which they might
already subscribe. An ECM cost analysis
helped with prioritizing revisions
in 2017 based on course material costs
in conjunction with course enrollment
data.
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