California colleges set 100% OER goals as textbook publishers go digital
The state passed its budget in July with $115 million for developing OER
The textbook publisher Pearson last month announced a new digital subscription model that allows students unlimited access to titles for $14.99 a month, following similar services offered by competitors Cengage and Chegg.
A consortium of six colleges led by Framingham State University, as well as the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, has received a $441,367 grant from the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) aimed at increasing the number of college courses utilizing free Open Educational Resources (OER) rather than costly textbooks.
The project – Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens (ROTEL): Culturally Relevant Open Textbooks for High Enrollment General Education Courses and Career and Professional Courses at Six Public Massachusetts Colleges – will test the hypothesis that underrepresented students will achieve higher academic outcomes if free, culturally-relevant course materials that reflect their experiences are utilized.
Student savings on textbooks over the three-year grant period are projected to be over
$800,000, and the goal is to create a new model that provides continued savings long into the future.
when the Digital Humanities emerged as a field, most tenure and promotion systems didn’t address digital scholarship, leaving this new form of academic work unrecognized and uncitable in tenure and promotion portfolio.
Many postsecondary institutions in North America evaluate tenure candidates along three dimensions: research, teaching and service.
OER-related activities are forms of research, teaching and service.
unfortunately, OER work isn’t a standard criterion for tenure and promotion evaluation. Moreover, the tenure review committee may not be familiar with OER and thus may not appropriately take this work into account while evaluating the faculty member’s portfolio.
the Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success (DOERS3) collaborative, a group of 25 public higher education systems and statewide/provincewide organizations that are committed to supporting student success by promoting OER, has developed a tool to help tenure-track faculty include OER work in their tenure and promotion portfolios.
The matrix could also be used to incentivize OER adaptation and creation: For example, a department chair who has spearheaded an OER initiative in their department could adapt the matrix to show faculty how they can fit their OER work into their tenure and promotion portfolio, thus piquing faculty’s interest in OER. This department chair could also share the matrix with other chairs on their campus who are interested in OER so they could adapt it for their own departments.