Contributed by Zachary Beamer

Introduction

Over the past two decades, OER have been increasingly recognized as a way to lower cost for students (Baker et al., 2009; Hilton & Wiley, 2011; Hilton et al., 2014), increase student use of course materials (Hilton et al., 2013), and improve student satisfaction with course materials (Farrow et al., 2015).  In my own teaching experience over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to adopt OER for courses in precalculus and applied calculus.  Through the experience I developed the CREATES conceptual process for implementing OER.

CREATES – Seven Steps to Implementing Open Educational Resources

1.     Connect

Insufficient institutional supports and lack of time are significant barriers for those looking to adopt OER (Andrade et al., 2011).  Because of these issues, faculty should begin by connecting with communities of faculty familiar with and enthusiastic about these resources.  Peer networks like the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources and the yearly Open Education Conference can provide ideas for how to start.  Faculty should also connect with state and federal grant-funded opportunities supporting the implementation of OER.  Finally, many initiatives within published research (e.g., Hinton et al., 2013) are formed by collaboration between colleagues; faculty should identify peers within their institution to become involved in OER to share the workload and encourage wider adoption.

2.     Research

The next step is to research enrollment figures and course materials costs to identify courses where transitioning to OER is impactful and achievable.  One community college found that transitioning a high-enrollment gatekeeper mathematics course saved a quarter of a million dollars to students in a single semester (Hilton et al., 2013).  Another alternative is to replace courses with particularly high textbook costs – my first initiative replaced a $120 textbook in a one-semester applied calculus course.  Doing so can increase educational access: a survey by Morris-Babb and Henderson (2012) found that 23% of college and university students reported not registering for a course section because of prohibitively high textbook costs.  Once faculty have decided upon a course within their area of expertise with sizable but achievable impact, they should begin looking for resources specific to that chosen course.  Several locations to explore include OpenStax, the Saylor Foundation, Washington State’s Open Course Library, and the Minnesota Open Textbook Library.  Choosing one or a small number of primary resources provides a reasonable starting point for forming a course.

3.     Enrich

Choosing a primary textbook(s) provides a foundation for an OER-based course.  Once chosen, faculty should consider ways to enrich their courses with additional OER materials.  This can include online homework systems, interactive online visualizations, classroom activities and instructional videos, among others.

In my own courses, I used MyOpenMath, which utilized a bank of CC-licensed questions linked to OER textbooks.  I supplemented my course with additional activities using resources such as the PhET library of simulations, (see Wieman, Adams,& Perkins, 2008), Desmos, and GeoGebra.  Some research suggests that students have positive perceptions of homework systems and that online homework has positive impacts on student learning outcomes (Zerr, 2007).

4.     Align

Ensuring alignment between curricular objectives and course materials is a critical part of ensuring the success of a transition to OER.  In my experience, ensuring complete coverage of objectives by checking each textbook section and homework exercise was the most time-intensive part of the process.  In some instances, faculty may find that they need to create their own exercises outside of a given textbook or homework system; in my case, this meant writing new problems in the homework system to fill gaps in coverage.  At the end of this process, I arranged and organized sections to create a logical order to the curriculum.  Because I leveraged a number of existing resources, I could dedicate my time to ensuring that existing resources could be modified and supplemented to meet my needs, rather than trying to create an entire course from the ground-up.

5.     Test

Once the design of the course is completed, faculty familiar with the course resources should pilot the course.  These pilot tests may reveal technical challenges to implementing OER, such as issues with instructional software (Chiorescu, 2017).  Quality control is another issue to anticipate – one study found that only 13% of materials in the MERLOT online teaching repository were peer-reviewed (Rodriguez, Dodero, & Alonso, 2011).  To identify and overcome these issues, faculty implementing OER can take the opportunity to survey students at multiple points throughout the course to identify issues and challenges with course resources.  Another issue that faculty should anticipate when working with online resources is the potential for broken links and outdated technologies, such as simulations based on Flash or Java that may not be supported by all systems.  Faculty should regularly test course links and technologies and have backup copies of any important files such as textbooks.

6.     Edit

Editing is a critical step throughout the process of OER adoption, but the structure of CC licensing often allows for considerable flexibility.  When teaching pilot sections of my courses, I encouraged students to identify questions that contained errors, unclear directions, or ambiguity in the online homework system.  I incentivized this process by offering small amounts of extra credit when students found these areas for improvement and pointed them out.  

When faculty are piloting OER-based courses, they should emphasize the evolving nature of these resources and welcome constructive feedback.  In my own pilots, students helped me to identify inconsistent uses of terminology in the homework and concepts different than those I explained.  Taking time to edit resources can ensure a smoother transition to large-scale OER adoption.  This leads to the final step of sharing resources with the community for their continued improvement and to increase impact.

7.     Share

The final step to implementing OER is to ensure that their use extends beyond a single classroom, and there are three primary ways that faculty can share OER with the broader community.  First, faculty can increase adoption of OER within their own institution.  I set up courses in the online homework system so that faculty could copy the entire course, reducing the barrier to entry.  A second way to share resources is by contributing to OER repositories and libraries.  For example, homework systems such as MyOpenMath allow instructors to make exercises they create available for use in other courses.  A final way to share OER is to report findings to audiences of scholars and practitioners. 

Conclusion

The OER movement has progressed considerably in the past fifteen years, but there remains much research to be done to improve upon products, review processes, and implementation. Adopting OER can be an overwhelming and frustrating process, but the benefits to students can be significant.  Many resources already exist, especially for high-enrollment courses, and these can form the basis of a new OER course that is modified to suit the individual needs of an institution.  Moreover, as OER continue to become more popular and more faculty implement them into their courses, these resources many continue to improve and become easier to use.  The CREATES process described above outlines steps for faculty to execute the vision of OER and equalize access to high-quality resources. 

Zack Beamer is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, VA.  He teaches a variety of courses, including Quantitative Reasoning and Calculus I – III.  He recently completed an Ed.D. in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Virginia where he studied corequisite developmental education reforms in the Virginia Community College System..  His research interests include technology-enhanced learning environments, developmental education policies, and implementing open educational resources.  He is an avid musician and plays bass, guitar, trombone, and pretty much anything he can find.     

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