OER Update for FACTC Oct 2014

Editor's Notes

• #5: As an example, let’s look at Green River.
• #6: Students spend * an average of $1100 per year on textbooks.   That’s about 25% of tuition at my school. Additionally, * online homework access codes force students to buy new books or pay additional costs on top of the used book, usually making it cheaper to buy the new book.   * Even time-bombed eBooks often sell for $75-$100. For me, I really became aware of the cost impact on students while reading scholarship applications for a math textbook program we have.  I would regularly read statements from students like these: *
• #7: Textbook prices have been increasing much faster than inflation. *
• #8: 31% choose not to register for a course due to textbook cost, and 14% have dropped a course due to cost. A similar study by Student PIRGS of students at 13 campus found *
• #9: 70% skipping buying at least one book due to cost, even though they believed it could result in them doing worse. What this is causing is an access inequity, in a system that prides itself on open access to all.
• #10: They offer 27 sections of 141 there. With * 30 students per section. Compared to if each bought * Stewart, they’re saving students $162,000 in one year, for course course.
• #11: This is a simple way that we as faculty can address access inequity, and help ensure our students have their course materials and are ready to learn on day 1. I know there are those that think we shouldn’t have to do this; that the state should put more towards education and lower tuition. And of course I’d love to see that. But all I can do about that is call my legislator – I have no direct control. With textbooks, I have direct control, and can individually make a difference in my students’ access. My second argument is going to be more philosophical. It starts with this idea that * education is sharing.
• #13: just to clear up some potential confusion Open does * not equal digital, and * open does not equal free.   Perhaps * a Venn diagram would help There are free materials online that are not open, and there are open materials that are not online. *
• #15: Which allows the creators to explicitly state the permissions they were allowing, The idea of “some rights reserved” You’ll notice a collection of licenses – each provides a different set of permissions. The Attribution license simply requires that attribution to the original creator is retained. The Sharealike license requires any adaptations be shared under the same license – it can’t be made more restrictive. This one is most similar to the “copyleft” license used on a lot of open source software, so I really like this one. The Non-commercial licenses prohibit commercial use, though that can get messy with things like printing books, so I steer clear of that one if I can. These licenses allowed the author to easily indicate that they were OK with others using and adapting their materials without needing to ask permission.
• #16: The real essence of “open” are the 5R’s…. The easiest way to identify open resources are by looking for the * Creative Commons licenses
• #17: At the most basic level, this is about avoiding frustration. For online materials, this mean No broken links, because I can retain a copy of the material. Likewise, No surprise changes, with ads or a paywall suddenly appearing. And compared to commercial texts, this means * no forced new editions every 3 years. But there’s much more. OER gives * freedom
• #18: OER gives freedom to make changes: * add content, * remove sections you don’t need, * modify a definition you don’t like. OER gives freedom to innovate with the curriculum... For example, I taught elementary algebra last year.  I used an open textbook for reference and for connected videos and homework, but since it’s not a commercial book, I felt more free to leave material out and * supplement the book and to some extent * ignore the book, something I wouldn’t feel right doing if my students are paying $200 for it. I could customize the materials to be what I wanted. Just as one tiny example,
• #19: customize and localize the content. Instead of * searching through dozens of books for the perfect TOC, We can * mix contents from multiple sources to exactly align with our outcomes. So hopefully at this point, you’re saying * I’m sold!
• #20: In the beginning, there were some obscure books out there, mostly ones that people probably put online because no publisher would consider them, or because they were too non-mainstream. An example is this book, that I remember looking at back in 2006 or so
• #21: Open Course Library project. The goal was this: build complete, open courses for the 81 highest enrolled courses in the state. The theory was brilliant – it recognized that the hardest parts of adopting open materials are finding them, vetting them, and building assessments and other support materials. Unfortunately, the reality didn’t match the vision. They allowed faculty to use <$30 commercial texts, so many of the “open courses” aren’t much more useful than those MIT OCW courses. Luckily, the math team didn’t go that route. The math team ended up creating complete open courses, including an open text, homework in WAMAP, and in some cases additional sample tests, worksheets, instructor guides, and other resources. In the first round,
• #22: CK12.org was founded, working to build K-12 level open resources in a platform that allowed for easy remixing. Several cool things have come out of that work. David Wiley founded the Open High School of Utah, a charter school, to research the effectiveness of open textbooks. They found students performed just as well, and this prompted the state of Utah to adopt open textbooks for several math and science courses. Other states are now looking at doing the same. At our level, instructors at a number of community colleges have used the materials for developmental level courses. James Sousa in Phoenix, for example, built an intro algebra text using their material.
• #23: Merlot started several years earlier, but it was almost useless towards finding anything – it listed materials of every grain size from worksheet to text, and there was a ton of junk. Connexions from Rice Univ was another early player in the OER repository world. If you’re familiar with the book Collaborative Statistics, then you’ve seen connexions. It tried to be an everything platform – search, housing, and editing, but the editing system was horrible, and they only allowed CC-BY licensed materials, so it got less use than they would have liked. College Open Textbooks was a different type of listing. It came out of the California OER training efforts, and created a condensed list of about 500 items that actually looked more or less like textbooks. They tried to get reviews of books done, but never had much luck. More recently, the Univ Minnesota Open Textbook library, and the BC campus open ed have both created new listing sites, with even more restricted listings. For math, the AIM keeps a list of reviewed open textbooks, but they seem focused on a university perspective. One of my own sites, OpenTextBookStore.com, provides a list of community-college level math textbooks that I think are pretty good. The best thing about this, though, is that the increased awareness of OER started bringing like-minded people together.
• #25: OpenStax is pouring stupid amounts of money into developing publisher-level textbooks, complete with focus groups, peer reviews, and pandering to the middle. Many of their books come with instructor supplemental materials, and they’re partnering with commercial companies like WebAssign to provide online homework. For everyone who’s looked at our Precalc book and said “gee, those graphs are kind of fuzzy and I really wish they had arrows” – just wait until the OpenStax version of the book comes out. Lots of lovely graphics, with a toned down conceptual focus. Also,
• #26: BC Canada has committed to developing open textbooks for the top 40 highest enrolled courses in BC. And California The most interesting movement is what’s happening at colleges and in departments.
• #27: Kaleidoscope project, a Next Generation Learning Challenge funded project. While lots of grant money had been going towards creation of open resources, there hadn’t been much adoption. Kaleidoscope was trying to address this. It pulled together faculty from multiple institutions, who collectively developed a course using existing OER. In the first round, they did beginning and intermediate algebra, and discovered Tyler’s materials on MOM. They did some small modifications and quickly adopted those materials. I ended up getting connected up with Lumen Learning, the company managing Kaleidoscope, and have been on leave working with them on the second round of Kaleidoscope, completing the rest of the freshman and lower math sequence.
• #28: While we math folks like to focus on the quantitative measures, there is also good qualitative evidence of quality.
• #31: At Tidewater CC in Virginia, they introduced the Z degree – a zero textbook cost business associates degree, saving students a third on the cost of the program.
• #32: Virginia’s CC system provided grants for producing openly-licensed courses, built by multi-college teams, and recently announced a second round of grants. It is somewhat similar to the OCL project, except they’re requiring only the use of OER.
• #33: In Arizona, the Maricopa district is doing a district-wide all-discipline OER adoption campaign, working to save students $5mill over 5 years
• #34: More locally, Tacoma CC started an OER project in 2012 hoping to save students $250,000 by end of June 2014. They reached that goal by April 2013. One cool thing about their project is that it was largely funded by the students. I’m hopeful that we’ll continue to see