Contributed by Karlyn Schumacher

Why OER, and why now?

Ripon College is located in eastern Wisconsin, with approximately 800 undergraduates, 52 full-time and 20 part-time faculty, and 82 full-time and 20 part-time staff. Ripon is known for its personalized approach to liberal arts education and takes pride in its support of first-generation students, 48% of its student population in 2018. After a year of advocating for OER, I wanted to reflect on and share my experiences doing so as a librarian at a small liberal arts college. 

I serve as the Access Services Librarian at Ripon College’s Lane Library. The library’s small size—2 full-time librarians, 1 full-time staff member, and a plethora of student assistants—means that we all wear many hats. While OER support is not in my official job description, it is an area that I wanted to learn more about and that I felt was important for the library to explore and support. In late 2019, I joined OER email listservs, started reading articles, and watched webinars, particularly those created by and for librarians. 

It was challenging to find examples of OER at small liberal arts colleges like Ripon, and I was grateful for the perspectives offered in the resources that I was able to find (Hurford and Milanese, 2020; Joslin, Meyerhofer, Faiks, & Fishel, 2018; Miller, 2018; Montgomery, 2020; Schleicher, Barnes, & Joslin, 2020). It was difficult to imagine what an OER initiative could look like at a place as small as Ripon, with very few library staff, no center for teaching and learning, and no instructional designers to speak of. A handful of Ripon faculty already used OER in their courses, but no support or initiatives existed on a larger scale. I was unsure of how to advocate for OER on my campus as just one person, especially as an early-career librarian, and then March of 2020 happened.

Like many librarians, much of my time early in the early pandemic was spent assisting faculty with finding alternatives to their assigned textbooks in the rapid shift to online classes. I still did not feel like anything close to an OER expert, but I encouraged faculty to consider using them as much as I could. The social justice movements of the summer of 2020, combined with increasing disparities and hardships for our students due to the pandemic, clarified for me the importance of OER and affordable materials as social justice tools and as necessary parts of equitable education. Advocating for OER at Ripon felt–and still feels–like a necessary and critical part of my role here, and it is one of the most rewarding parts of my position.

OER at Ripon

My OER advocacy has consisted of small actions taken whenever possible and in an admittedly haphazard fashion. Over the past year, I have created a research guide, reached out via email campaigns, created an impact tracking spreadsheet adapted from Open Oregon, given talks, created a video featuring faculty experiences with OER, and assisted faculty in finding OER and affordable educational resources (AER) for their courses (Hofer, 2018). It has been challenging to connect with faculty due to the pandemic, but Ripon’s small size and personal atmosphere makes it a little easier to connect and collaborate, even now. 

The most effective advocacy methods I have used are: 1) emphasizing the ability to embed OER in our LMS, and 2) highlighting the benefits of OER for all students, but especially for Pell-eligible students, first-generation students, and those from racial and ethnic minority groups (Colvard, Watson, & Park, 2018; Jacob Jenkins, Sánchez, Schraedley, Hannans, & Navick, 2020). I hoped the second method in particular would resonate with Ripon’s faculty due to our large first-generation student population. Additionally, the results of a survey I sent to students regarding textbook affordability helped contextualize the need for OER and gave our faculty a glimpse of the financial strain and stress that textbook costs place on all of our students. 

Be realistic

Take a look at your campus’s mission and vision to get an idea of what to emphasize in your OER advocacy efforts. For others employed at extremely small institutions, be realistic about what could work with the resources you have. For example, I knew that I was limited to a budget of $0, no additional staff, and little time outside of my primary job duties to focus on OER advocacy. As much as I wanted to create campus-wide OER initiatives right away, I recognized the constraints surrounding me and that I would have to set my sights on smaller goals to make an impact.

As is the case at many institutions, faculty members at Ripon are often pressed for time and departments are quite small. I knew that even though faculty might be interested in learning about OER and adopting them, lack of time and resources would pose challenges to doing so. As such, I kept my advocacy efforts short and sweet and made the adoption process as simple as possible for our busy faculty. One effort that has been surprisingly successful is simply sending out a faculty-wide email that lists high-quality OER and AER in each department, focusing mostly on lower-level texts and courses. Think about steps you can take at your institution to promote OER that do not feel like huge asks for faculty, and be realistic about probable levels of faculty time and involvement as you plan your OER efforts. 

Conclusion

In the Spring 2021 semester, 12 Ripon College faculty members used OER, library ebooks, and similar affordable materials in their courses, with an estimated maximum savings of $23,605.54. The number of faculty who plan to use OER and AER in their Fall 2021 courses has grown to 15. Many students and faculty who used OER this year speak positively about their experiences with these resources, which gives me hope that interest and adoption will continue to grow. What motivated me to persist with my advocacy, no matter how small or insignificant it felt, was the idea that even one or two faculty members adopting OER would be a good start. 

References

Colvard, N.B., Watson, C. E., Park, H. (2018). The impact of open educational resources on various student success metrics. International Journal of Teaching & Learning in Education, 30(2), 262-276. https://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/IJTLHE3386.pdf 

Hofer, A. (2018, April 19). Estimating student savings from no-cost/low-cost course materials. Open Oregon Educational Resources. https://openoregon.org/estimating-student-savings-from-no-cost-low-cost-course-materials/ 

Hurford, A., & Milanese, E. (2020). Understanding the need for open educational resource (OER) programs at private institutions. OER & Beyond. https://ijoerandbeyond.org/understanding-the-need-for-open-educational-resource-oer-programs-at-private-institutions/ 

Jacob Jenkins, J., Sánchez, L.A., Schraedley, M. A.K., Hannans, J., & Navick, N. (2020). Textbook broke: Textbook affordability as a social justice issue. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1), 1-3. https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.549  

Joslin, R.; Meyerhofer, J.; Faiks, A.; and Fishel, T. A. (2018). Creating an OER toolkit: Offering customized solutions and reducing barriers in a small liberal arts college. In K. Jensen & S. Nackerud (Eds.), The evolution of affordable content efforts in the higher education environment: Programs, case studies, and examples (pp. 104-112). University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. https://doi.org/10.24926/86666.0101 

Miller, J. ( ) Bringing OER to the liberal arts: An innovative grant program. In A. Wesolek, J. Lashley, & A. Langley (Eds.), OER: A field guide for academic librarians (pp. 399-413). Pacific University Press. 

Montgomery, S. E. (2020). OA & OER: A small college library’s plan to promote open access to its faculty. Codex: The journal of the Louisiana chapter of the ACRL, 5(4), 94-110. http://acrlla.org/journal/index.php/codex/article/viewFile/169/352 

Schleicher, C. A., Barnes, C. A., & Joslin, R. A. (2020). OER initiatives at liberal arts colleges: Building support at three small, private institutions. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.7710/2162-3309.230

Karlyn Schumacher (she/her) is the Access Services Librarian at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin. Her favorite parts of this role are working with an excellent group of student employees, supporting student research, and advocating for OER use on campus. She received her MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BA in English and History from Ripon College.

This post is by Karlyn Schumacher 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.