Contributed by Amy Hofer and Phoebe Daurio

Thank you to the Fall 2020 grant proposal development team, who contributed to writing the narrative that this article is based on. Special thanks to team members Gaelen McAllister and Abbey Gaterud, Chemeketa Community College; Shanell Sanchez, Southern Oregon University; Sue Kunda, Western Oregon University; Yvonne Smith, Clackamas Community College; Liz Pearce, Linn-Benton Community College; and Curt Sobolewski, Portland State University.

The Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) Open Textbooks Pilot Program call for proposals in Fall 2020 included requirements that proposals expand the use of open textbooks in high-enrollment courses or in programs that lead to in-demand occupations, while addressing a gap in the existing open textbook marketplace. The proposals also had to demonstrate significance through replicability. Open Oregon Educational Resources is sharing parts of our grant proposal because we believe that our data-driven approach to identifying high-enrollment degree pathways that lead to in-demand occupations, with minimal OER currently available, is replicable for future grant writers seeking federal OER funding. 

Using the method described here, Open Oregon Educational Resources determined that two disciplines, Criminal Justice and Human Development/Family Studies, met the grant proposal criteria. Our proposal was not initially successful, but in 2021 it was accepted at a lower funding level. The funded project develops open materials for four courses in Criminal Justice only. However, having a fully developed proposal to redesign courses in Human Development/Family Studies enabled Open Oregon Educational Resources to receive Governor’s Emergency Education Relief funding for course development in that discipline as well. 

In writing a grant proposal, Open Oregon Educational Resources drew on the model, documents, and advice of the Open RN project at Chippewa Valley Technical College, grantee of the Open Textbooks Pilot Program in 2018. We see sharing our work as a way to pay forward the generosity of the Open RN grant project team. Next month in OER & Beyond we’ll share our approach to demonstrating that developing course materials with an equity lens will lead to improved student success metrics.

Enrollment and Workforce Demand

Open Oregon Educational Resources benefited by being able to reuse an existing analysis of statewide data correlating high-enrollment majors with workforce demand. This analysis was completed by Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission (HECC) in response to House Bill 2998. While this report gave Open Oregon Educational Resources a head start, other states would be able to access similar datasets gathered through centralized reporting processes. 

The HECC’s House Bill 2998 Report identified the 20 majors with the highest workforce demand and the 20 majors with the highest enrollment among students who transfer from a community college to a public university. Additional data provided to Open Oregon Educational Resources by the HECC’s Office of Research and Data identified the top 20 majors of bachelor’s degree graduates. We scored each major based on its rank in both the workforce demand and enrollment data (rank 1 = 20 points, rank 20 = 1 point). Since there were two enrollment-related data sets, Open Oregon Educational Resources doubled the workforce demand score to give it equal weight. 

The HECC’s analysis of workforce demand used the National Center for Education Statistics’ CIP to SOC Crosswalk to match the 4-digit Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) code with Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes, and then used Oregon Employment Department projections of expected job openings for those SOC codes. Open Oregon Educational Resources made use of the state’s employment projections as well in order to demonstrate that CJ and HDFS prepare students for in-demand occupations. 

SOC codes do not map exactly to employment opportunities available based on these majors and may incompletely represent the diversity of future jobs available to CJ and HDFS majors. We referenced university websites to strengthen our case that CJ and HDFS lead to a variety of in-demand occupations. For example, Western Oregon University’s Criminal Justice Sciences Division lists the following potential career paths for CJ degree holders: Residential Treatment Specialist; Investigator; Victim Advocate; Court Counselor; Youth Program Worker; Community Service Coordinator & Officer; Law Enforcement, Parole & Probation, Correctional Officer; and Victim/Offender Mediator. Oregon State University lists the following sample job titles of HDFS graduates: Adoption agency counselor, Childcare coordinator, Community activity director, Emergency relief worker, Housing service worker, Marriage and family counselor, Nursing, Social worker, Teaching, and Youth program specialist.

The resulting ranking identified Criminal Justice (CJ) and Human Development/Family Studies (HDFS) as majors with both high enrollment and high workforce demand. Significantly, both fields offer career opportunities at multiple levels of credential, including certificates, associate’s degree, and bachelor’s degree, making the OER relevant to community college and university students. The additional analysis that we describe below shows why we decided to pursue these two disciplines rather than others that were also highly ranked.

Identifying Gaps in Available OER

Open Oregon Educational Resources took into account the current state of OER development for higher education curricula in North America. Multiple initiatives have created high-quality OER already; the intent of the proposal was to build on rather than duplicate these efforts. Therefore the proposal focused on courses that are essential to completing a two-year or four-year degree within a discipline or major, which have not already received course development resources at scale.

Open Oregon Educational Resources demonstrated that CJ and HDFS met this criteria by searching four OER repositories to determine that there is little for faculty to choose from if they wish to adopt OER for their CJ or HDFS courses:

• Open Oregon Resources Page: tracks known adoptions in Oregon IHEs
• Open Textbook Library: repository of complete, openly licensed textbooks with offline reading options available
• OER Commons: repository of openly licensed content in any format
• Skills Commons: repository of workforce training materials created by TAACCCT grantees

We then cast a wide net by emailing HDFS and CJ faculty in Oregon requesting proposals for specific courses to be redesigned with the grant funding (see Federal OER Grant Proposal Faculty Info Sheet). Faculty submitted 17 course proposal submissions (7 CJ and 10 HDFS proposals). The grant proposal development team pursued 4 CJ and 5 HDFS course proposals that were clustered at specific institutions, represented clear degree pathways, and had the potential to be adopted at many other Oregon institutions (see Course Crosswalk for analysis). 

Access and Equity: Relevance for Oregon IHE Student Success Goals

Open Oregon Educational Resources further made the case that the proposal’s emphasis on equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) aligned with statewide and institutional goals for student success. At the state level, the HECC’s approach to student success includes an equity lens that affirms a commitment to historically underserved and marginalized populations in order to “make intentional equity-informed decisions, actions, targeted interventions, investments and enact systemic change to improve equitable educational outcomes and access to services, programs, and resources.”

Reflecting these statewide priorities, Oregon’s 24 IHEs share a commitment to both access and equity. These two goals are included in institutional statements at all of Oregon’s public community colleges and universities. Open Oregon Educational Resources could therefore demonstrate that developing free, openly licensed course materials that are designed with an EDI approach enables each participating institution to simultaneously make progress on their access and equity goals. We also referenced demographic data on Oregon’s 7 universities and 17 community colleges showing that students at Oregon’s IHEs are becoming more racially diverse; further, the HECC reports increasing numbers of first-generation students and Federal Pell grant recipients. 

Open Oregon Educational Resources also recognized that an EDI approach to course materials for CJ and HDFS will invite students from historically marginalized groups to engage with content that includes their lived experiences. For example, disproportionately harmful outcomes for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in relation to the criminal justice system have been well documented and were the cause of over 100 days of protest in Portland and around the state after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis during the summer of 2020. Likewise, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) families are often overlooked in institutional contexts such as schools, healthcare, and tax preparation. 

Conclusion

Open Oregon Educational Resources used multiple open and online data sources to identify high-enrollment degree pathways that lead to in-demand occupations, with minimal OER currently available, per the priorities of the federal OER grant call for proposals. Additional data demonstrated that this grant proposal would meet the moment by eliminating required textbook costs and creating high-quality, accessible OER with an EDI lens in order to help institutions meet their equity and access goals and promote student success. Other prospective grant writers can use elements of this approach as a starting point for their own proposals.  

Amy Hofer

Amy Hofer, Statewide Open Education Program Director, is the OER librarian for Oregon’s colleges and universities; visit the Open Oregon Educational Resources website at openoregon.org to learn more.

Phoebe Daurio works for Open Oregon Educational Resources welcomes as a Grant Project Manager. Phoebe joins Open Oregon Educational Resources after a decade with the Intensive English Language Program (IELP) at Portland State University. In her time there, she worked as a classroom instructor and as an academic/program coordinator. Her expertise includes teaching communication skills, facilitating student engagement, and managing projects.

Phoebe loves learning, planning, analyzing, and thinking about systems. Her primary role at Open Oregon Educational Resources is to manage the federal grant awarded by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) in the U.S. Department of Education. This project supports the development of openly-licensed, targeted pathway materials with an equity lens for Criminal Justice courses. Phoebe is excited to combine her classroom instruction and program management experience in this work with Oregon instructors, OER experts, and the great team at Open Oregon Educational Resources.

Phoebe’s position is funded by a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education, and the contents of this post were developed under the grant. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

This post is by Amy Hofer and Phoebe Daurio and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.