Contributed by Elizabeth Batte

I am an OER Coordinator for a regional public university in Louisiana. We are very fortunate to have our academic libraries work alongside each other through our consortium, LOUIS which is part of our state’s Board of Regents (BoR). LOUIS advocates on behalf of libraries and affordable learning. In 2018 there was a state initiative to increase the affordability of textbooks in higher education, as well as being more transparent about which courses were using OERs. As part of this initiative, the BoR created a grant for faculty to adopt, modify, or create OERs for their courses. The first year, I worked with our culinary institute on this grant and this was our process, hurdles, and successes. 

In 2018, I was part of the initial team that curated a LOUIS operated OER commons. The commons would be separate from a general OER repository because the OERs included in the commons were aligned with the curriculum in Louisiana higher education. This includes public and private institutions, as well as community and technical colleges. Working on this project would set up the framework for my involvement in the OER grant with the Nicholls culinary institute. 

In the fall of 2018, Dr. Bill Thibodeaux and I paired up to work on a new OER grant funded by the BoR. Dr. Thibodeaux teaches courses ranging from restaurant design, facility layout and design, hospitality management and organizational leadership to quantitative and qualitative statistics. Along with his B.S. in Culinary Arts, he has a Masters degree in Higher Education and a PhD in Urban Studies. His current research includes hospitality education and the links between tourism and hospitality. Dr. Thibodeaux has been with Nicholls State University for 15 years. Within that time he had been exposed to OERs but because of the lack of culinary OERs, neither he nor his colleagues in the culinary institute had done any major OER adoptions for their courses.

In our first meeting, we discussed what type of information he was looking for in an OER. I got excited when I realized they were wanting to replace a textbook that was used for six courses with individual OERs for those courses. Students could put the individual OERs together and create one large textbook that would be beneficial in their professional careers after graduation. Our first plan of action was to look at what culinary OERs were currently available to see what gaps in information would need to be filled by the culinary professors. Unfortunately, the information the chefs needed for their courses was not covered in already available OERs. We decided to submit our grant anyways.

The criteria for the Course Transformation Grant was based on current textbook adoptions, how many courses would be adopting the new textbook or open resource, and looked at the enrollment for those courses. The largest funding allocation was reserved for OER creations that would be applicable to multiple courses on multiple campuses, but since our culinary program is the only 4-year program in the state, we were unable to fulfill that requirement. We received $7,500 to create six open access supplements that could be combined together to create one large culinary open textbook. The grant was for OER creation, but also focused on course transformation. What I felt was so smart about this grant was that it allowed faculty a transition period to get comfortable with open access materials and also give them a safety net for modifications with their newly created or adopted content. 

Overall we had eight team members for the grant: Dr. Thibodeaux was the project lead, I was the OER coordinator, the culinary department head was in charge of the budget, and then the 5 other faculty members were content providers. The projected number of students affected by this project in the first academic year was 357 with a savings of $50,196.40 total or $396.40 per student. These faculty members were chosen because of their subject expertise needed for the OER project.

LOUIS team members were a big support system for all of the grant recipients in creating OERs. In January 2019, LOUIS hosted a kick-off event similar to the one I attended for the original LOUIS OER commons project. This event laid out the groundwork for timelines for deliverables, financial payouts, upload schedules, and course transformations. Dr. Thibodeaux and his colleagues would spend the next few months putting on paper their decades of culinary experience. They were able to fulfil a unique need in the open-access community.

My role as the OER coordinator came into play at the beginning when looking for current culinary OERs and again towards the end of the project. I helped the team learn about ways to find images that had creative commons licensing or were in the public domain. The team also came to me at the end when it was time to upload their completed resources onto the LOUIS OER commons to make sure their licensing was correct and to help with metadata on the site. In comparison to all that the chefs had to do in order to create their OERs, I had the easy job and because they were so wonderful they made my role even better. 

In the summer following the first round of grants, Dr. Thibodeaux and another colleague decided they had been bitten by the OER bug and applied to create more culinary resources. They were awarded for a second round and have successfully been able to transform 30% of the culinary institute’s curriculum to OER. He is currently waiting to hear back about the third round of grant funding that would add two more courses into the OER adoption and bring the department to 40% using OER. 

Here are the resources the Nicholls culinary team created: 

• Culinary Foundations
• Garde Manger: A guide to the cold kitchen
• Flavors of the Saucier: Stocks, Sauces, and Soups
• Meat Identification and Fabrication
• Introduction to Baking and Pastries
• Fruits, Vegetables, and Farinaceous Products

The second round of grants, Dr. Thibodeaux and Chef Jean-Pierre Daigle created two internship development OERs with syllabi.

• CULA 241 Sophomore Internship
• CULA 495 Senior Internship

My takeaways from this experience were that when faculty are truly passionate about what they teach and wanting to ease financial burdens on their students, nothing will get in their way. Yes, creating an OER is difficult and time-consuming, but when faculty are motivated the end result is amazing. Also, this is sometimes a controversial topic among open access advocates, but a passion for your discipline does not have to be the only motivator in creating an OER. Having a way to pay faculty to create a free resource is a way of respecting their expertise and time commitment. Not all universities have the funding to do this locally on campus and thankfully the Louisiana Board of Regents was willing to fund this opportunity. If you would like to know more about our culinary grant or the process we went through, reach out to me elizabeth.batte@nicholls.edu and follow me on Twitter @beaverbatte. 

Elizabeth Batte (they/she) is the director of the Ellender Memorial Library and the Open Education Resource Coordinator for the Nicholls State University. They are an active member in library services within Louisiana, serving as president of Louisiana’s ARCL chapter, assistant editor for the ACRL-LA open access peer-reviewed journal CODEX, and columns editor for the Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education.

This post is by Elizabeth Batte 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.