Playing an Active Role in Affordable Course Content: A Step by Step Guide

Editor's Notes

• #7: Leo- We used a Fishbone Diagram investigate this problem, exploring, identifying, and displaying the possible causes of why is OER not being widely adopted? We divided the possible causes into 4 categories: People, Policies, Resources, and Advocacy. And within each one, we list out the more specific obstacles.
• #8: We saw that many of our peer- academic libraries were getting involved in the Affordable Course Content and OER movement, we knew that it our situation, an initiative like this would not be successful if the Libraries were the sole coordinator, leader, or funder of the initiative. So early on in this initiative, we wanted to collaborate with campus partners to pool both expertise and resources, keeping in mind, the most important group of people in this movement, our students. While it’s easy for us to find national statistics on the rising costs of textbooks, and longitudinal studies about the impact of OER on student success, the students at ODU have their own unique situations and stories to tell, and this is where we can help in making a case to faculty for considering the use of OER or ACC in their classes.
• #9: Our students have some unique qualities, for example, we’re starting to see students who have experienced Zero Textbook, or Z-degree courses at Tidewater Community College or other Virginia Community Colleges. We also have a large military population, including both veterans, active duty, and spouses, as well as more non-traditional students than many of our peer institutions, as well as many of what some might think of as the typical undergraduate college student. And so, we’ve involved our students in two ways. First, we have looked to student leaders to help us in organizing advocacy and educational events, and secondly, we’ve done two student perception surveys.
• #10: This is a picture of a couple of our SGA student leaders, who have been instrumental in the success of some of our advocacy events. When involving students, an important thing to keep in mind is to let them lead. In the very early stages of the Libraries’ involvement with OER, an officer from our Student Government Association connected with our University Librarian, because he had learned about Maryland’s open textbook program, which was driven by their SGA. This student, along with a leader in the Graduate Student Organization, met with us and the other stakeholders throughout the summer of 2016, and wrote a proposal from SGA to our new Provost about OER. They also assisted in planning our first faculty forum on OER, which was sponsored by Academic Affairs, but coordinated by the Libraries. We involved SGA leaders in our open education week event planning, and they did a great job of bringing student participants to our events. They came up with the idea of having a talk back wall in our student center and in our main library. A talk back wall is just a bulletin board where students can write and post their thoughts on a topic, and this is something that SGA regularly does, so students are used to responding. You see here in the picture the talk back wall at our kick-off event, which by the end of the week had over 250 responses tacked to it. The student leaders sat at the table during our kick-off event, and other students to join in and share their opinions an experiences, more than they would have if librarians were sitting there.
• #11: Having the perspective from our Graduate Student leader was also important because he was able to speak from both a student perspective and a graduate teaching assistant perspective. Since GTAs teach mostly general education courses, where there are a lot of open textbook options, his advocacy was very beneficial to both faculty and students, and he was able to speak to both groups in their own languages. One of our graduate students co-led a workshop with me for our Preparing Future Faculty program on how to select appropriate OER and ACC for courses, so we were able to introduce the idea to our grad students even before they go out and find jobs as faculty at other institutions, and they were able to receive this information from one of their peers.
• #13: This graph shows the number of students from each academic College at ODU who participated in our textbook perception survey. In addition to collaborating with student leaders, we conducted 2 surveys to learn more about student perspectives of the cost of textbooks, and the students who participated were another really important group of stakeholders, because our student leaders represent to top notch students at ODU, and it was really important for us to have a broader sample of student perspectives. 489 undergraduates responded to our initial survey. This is a pretty close representative of our population at ODU, with Arts & Letters having the most majors with about 30% of survey participants, and the College of Sciences coming in 2nd with just under 20%.  
• #14: In this presentation, we’re focusing mainly on student collaborations, but I wanted to point out that a few other people who are very important in OER and ACC initiatives, our Center for Learning & Teaching, which deals with faculty teaching development and educational technology, and our Center for High Impact Practices, which focuses on student success. The Libraries have an expertise in copyright and creative commons, can provide affordable content for faculty and students, and are really good at helping faculty find resources, our Center for Learning and Teaching has instructional designers and funding for faculty grants and professional development, and there other departments on campus whose main roles are to support student success, including our Center for High Impact Practices.
• #15: A few initiatives have taken place at ODU for which the Libraries played a supporting role, but did not fund or lead. Our CLT offers mini-grants to faculty every year related to a specific topic, and last year the mini-grants were for implementing OER into courses. As the campus leader for the Open Textbook Network, I was able to offer the OTN workshops around the same time that the faculty mini-grant applications were due, so many of the faculty who attended the OTN workshops did so to gain the knowledge that they’d need to write their grant applications. The CLT also hosts a Summer Institute Conference, and this past summer the topic was OER. All of their efforts helped to bring awareness to the topic and to educate our faculty. The Libraries participated in the Summer Institute in several ways. Leo and I presented the preliminary results of our student survey, I facilitated a student panel, and I collaborated with our graduate student and a few other faculty to do a workshop for our preparing future faculty program, to get this idea going with our graduate students before they become faculty. Our Center for High Impact Practices, which is also under Academic Affairs, received a SCHEV grant to design a textbook-free degree in Leadership that involves a local high school, TCC, and ODU, and the Libraries assisted those faculty in locating OER as they were designing the courses for that program. CHIP has also partnered with us on 2 workshops, Open Education Week activities, and Open Access Week events.
• #16: In this section, we’re going to look at some of our survey results, which include how much are our students spending on textbooks, what resources to they have to pay for them, and how do they engage with their textbooks, if they decide to purchase them at all. This is an image of our talk-back wall posts, which I’ll share an analysis of in this section. First, I’ll address the student perception surveys. This survey has 2 parts. We sent a general survey to a sample of our undergraduate population, and we received 488 responses. Within that survey, we asked students who had transferred to ODU from TCC to identify themselves, and asked if they’d be interested in participating in a follow-up study. We recently completed the follow-up study, and had 30 TCC transfer students participate. In that study, we wanted explore the perceptions of students who had taken Z courses at TCC, and had also taken traditional courses at ODU to find out more about their experiences.
• #17: This chart shows the average amount that students pay for textbooks by major. The gold bar at the top represents students who paid $500 or more last Spring for their textbooks. The Blue bar represents students who paid between $301-500, and the Red represents those who paid $300 or less. We learned that at ODU, a higher percentage of our Business students report paying $500 or more for their books than any other college, and the Colleges of Health Sciences and Education have more students falling into that $300 or less range.
• #18: This chart compares how much student budgeted for their textbooks last Spring to how much they actually ended up paying. The orange bar shows how much the student thought they’d pay, and the blue bar shows what the students actually paid. So, those that are on the lower end, the $0-300 range budgeted more than they actually paid. But, when we get past $300, we see that students ended up paying more than they budgeted, and at the $500 and above range, significantly more. So, this leaves us to wonder how students deal with unexpected textbook costs. Do their parents foot the bill, do they use more of their student loan money, are they working more hours?
• #19: Next, we wanted to look at our working students. Of the 489 students who completed the survey, 255 indicated that they work at least part-time. As you can see here on this chart, most of our working students work between 11-20 hours a week, but 51 students indicated that they work over 40 hours a week.
• #20: Our survey also looked at how students try to save money when it comes to textbooks. Here we see that most buy books from somewhere else other than the campus book store, they also rent or buy digital or used books. 24% say that they share books with classmates, and only about 10% check to see if the ODU Libraries have their textbooks. Only about 3% of respondents said that they do not attempt to reduce their textbooks costs. We also learned that very few students are finding their textbooks on reserve at the Libraries, so this tells us that we could do a better job of marketing this service to students and faculty. Some of these methods for reducing costs could have an impact on student success. For example, if students are renting books or single chapters, this means that they will no longer have access to that information after the semester is over. If they are sharing books, this could cause problems if everyone has a test or assignment due at the same time. In addition to the surveys, we gathered a lot of qualitative data last Spring. The talk back wall that I mentioned earlier gave us a lot of really honest information from students. I used NVivo to analyze the responses, and the two biggest themes that emerged for coping with textbook costs was that students use online vendors, and that they do not buy the books at all unless they think that they will really need them. Using online vendors seems pretty resourceful, but not buying the books is obviously problematic. We also saw comments about waiting until later in the semester to see if they would actually need the book before buying it. This tells us that perhaps we can work with our student success center and our faculty to do a better job of teaching students how to engage with the information resources that their professor is requiring for class.
• #21: In addition to the surveys, we gathered a lot of qualitative data last Spring. The talk back wall that I mentioned earlier gave us a lot of really honest information from students. I used NVivo to analyze the responses, and the two biggest themes that emerged for coping with textbook costs was that students use online vendors, and that they do not buy the books at all unless they think that they will really need them. Using online vendors seems pretty resourceful, but not buying the books is obviously problematic. We also saw comments about waiting until later in the semester to see if they would actually need the book before buying it. This tells us that perhaps we can work with our student success center and our faculty to do a better job of teaching students how to engage with the information resources that their professor is requiring for class.
• #22: If you haven’t, I encourage you to do some searches on Twitter for the term textbook and your institution, or terms like book and cost and your institution. You will find a wealth of data. Here’s one example of a positive Tweet from a student who discovered that there was no textbook for a class, but shout outs were few and far between. A search of student tweets with the hashtag ODU and textbooks, or “books” finds that there are many, many students that use social media to both sell and find used books that they can purchase directly from other students. I saw a few that were really concerning, such as “does anyone have the textbook for such and such class, I need it tonight to study for a text,” and of course, there were plenty of complaints about things like paying for access codes or the cost of books in-general.
• #23: Add ARL Specs data http://publications.arl.org/Affordable-Course-Content-Open-Educational-Resources-SPEC-Kit-351/
• #24: Add ARL Specs data http://publications.arl.org/Affordable-Course-Content-Open-Educational-Resources-SPEC-Kit-351/
• #25: Step Six in our process is Advocacy, and this is ongoing. One of the important things that we can do is not only to advocate FOR our students, but to give students opportunities to advocate for themselves. We started this by supporting SGA in their OER proposal to the Provost, and continued this by involving student leaders in event planning, and asking our students about their experiences. Our job is to give them structured opportunities to do this. For example, for Open Access week, we are hosting a student panel which is going to be made of TCC transfer students who experienced zero or no cost textbook courses there, and they will talk about how those experiences compare to traditional textbook courses. We are also doing this by sharing our survey results with administrators and faculty, in several formats. We’ve presented the preliminary results in a couple of different settings, and our next step is to publish them in a peer-reviewed journal to bring more attention to our students’ perspectives. We also need to arm our liaison librarians with knowledge about OER and ACC, and data from our student perception studies so that they can share this with faculty whenever they might have a chance to do so. Our ultimate goal is to really advocate for our students, by sharing the results of our survey, and continuing to educate faculty on what OER and ACC are, and how they can include it in their courses.
• #26: We applied a Design Thinking framework to solving this complex problem. Design thinking is a method for practical, creative resolution of problems. It is a form of solution-based thinking with the intent of producing a constructive future result. Compared to the scientific method, which begins by stating a hypothesis and then, via a feedback mechanism, continues iteratively to form a model or theory, design thinking differs from that by including consideration of the emotional content of the situation. As you can see on the slide, the 1st step of design thinking is “Emphasize”. We want to understand what matters to our users. And then “define” the problem we want to solve. Using the data from our users, we try to come up with as many creative solutions as possible during the “Ideate” stage. Then we experiment some of the ideas with rapid prototyping, and finally we test those prototypes and get feedback from our users to refine our ideas. In this case, as the price of textbooks exceeds student’s budgets, we look to Open Educational Resources (OER) as a viable long term option. We at the Libraries seek to promote the development of Open Educational Resources (OER). However, there are some problems: It is not widely adopted. How do we begin the tackle this problem?
• #27: Examples from other universities http://publications.arl.org/Affordable-Course-Content-Open-Educational-Resources-SPEC-Kit-351/