Contributed by Georgia Westbrook

It is not uncommon for libraries and librarians to be asked to “do more with less” when their budgets are slashed each fiscal year. But what about when operating at the margins is the norm? Open Educational Resources, and the work of open in general, require a complex negotiation of labor and economics. This blog post will provide an introduction to the issues and stakes and will consider the practical considerations for budgeting for OER efforts — both in the traditional, monetary sense and otherwise.

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Background

Touro College & University System (often called “Touro College”) is a mid-sized system based in the greater New York City area, with campuses in Nevada, California, and Israel. Touro has many graduate programs with focuses on medicine and allied health sciences, as well as a law school and strong Jewish Studies program; at the undergraduate level, there are several colleges that balance Jewish life with coursework, as well as the New York School of Career & Applied Studies (NYSCAS), which provides general education classes and majors across disciplines. The Touro College Libraries are similarly varied, but our information literacy team, which hosts the OER initiative, works mainly with NYSCAS and other undergraduate programs.

Library Staff Time

One of the best ways to maximize your limited resources is to use your faculty or staff time creatively (librarians are all staff at Touro, but this idea can apply to faculty librarians, too). At Touro, one way we do this is to create sort-of OER consultation chains, where information flows from the OER librarian to a campus-specific librarian to the faculty member. 

Although we only have one staff person whose formal position is to work on OER, many library staff are interested and engaged in OER work. Additionally, we have many small branches scattered across New York City with their own librarians or library assistants. We use both of these to our advantage when it comes to OER consultations. These branch library staff have developed strong relationships with the faculty that work at each of the branches; these faculty often reach out to their home library staff for help with OER, and then, if needed, these library staff will reach out to the OER Librarian for further support. If a faculty member who works at a campus that isn’t the main one, we will try to loop in their home library staff to support them beyond the initial contact. This approach does the double work of building relationships with faculty and with spreading the OER work among several people.

We also combine our OER work with instruction work to maximize the impact of each invitation into the classroom to teach. For example, during the spring 2020 semester, we worked with the Speech & Communication department to teach library orientation sessions. Ahead of the early semester sessions, we put together OER packs for the faculty members, which we formatted as LibGuides and included links to the selected OER texts plus additional open access materials (but not necessarily OER); we introduced those resources during the sessions with students. This department was an established partner of the libraries and we were able to work within that partnership, hastened by this instructional work, to start the process of adapting OER to make a customized volume that they will begin using in the fall for a course on interpersonal communication.

It’s important to identify and communicate about where library staff responsibilities and interests overlap and to use those points as opportunities for collaboration.

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Motivating Faculty

Internal grants are often encouraged as a mode of motivating faculty to engage in OER work, with and from libraries But for many institutions, there is little funding to provide such incentives—so how can you motivate faculty to engage in OER without a financial incentive?

In our experience, we have found a few tactics that work well when your initiative is on a shoestring budget.

Shared assessment: Faculty are encouraged by the opportunity to work with librarians to create and implement assessment plans for their courses in which OER are used. This is a focus of administrators at our institution, both for institutional use and for accreditation purposes, and it is a challenge for many people; how else can you really learn assessment besides doing it? And so then, how can you start? For many, the answer comes like a shining beacon when librarians reach out to work with faculty about OER; these librarians can help with assessment, too, and that is a valuable bonus.

Individual consultation and attention: Along the same lines, the opportunity to work one-on-one for academic support can be a draw for faculty members. While librarians are routinely available to meet with faculty one-on-one to provide support, faculty may feel reluctant to ask for help, much like students experiencing library anxiety. By taking the onus to reach out from the faculty member and initiating contact, librarians can create a positive and welcoming environment for faculty in the library.

Recognition in front of colleagues: Recognizing faculty is a great motivation for other faculty to get on board with OER – they are competitive! This competitive energy can be harnessed into enthusiasm. Using social media recognition, like a “textbook heroes” series, web badges, or even certificates, faculty can show off their OER work at a low cost to you.

Record for promotion: We encourage faculty to include their work on OER on their CV and to include it in their promotion folder. Whether your faculty are on a promotion or tenure system, OER can count as research, writing, or service done for the profession or institution, depending on how they engage with the resource. Touro has a promotion process, instead of tenure, and several department chairs do include OER in their review materials.

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Grants

In the spring of 2020, we applied for and were awarded a grant through the National Network of Libraries of Medicine – Middle Atlantic Region. My predecessor in this role and our supervisor had also applied for an internal grant to support research in OER, and we had planned this semester to apply for another internal grant from our institution, but that timeline has been shifted due to the novel coronavirus crisis. Grants might be the quickest way to increase your budget, even though they require a lot of work up front.

Grants can be an excellent way to secure funds for your OER work. Although budgets have been slashed, many grant funded programs continue to be able to fund projects and positions. Even if you are unable to secure grant funding, working through an application can be a useful way to clarify your pitch and ideas so that you are ready when other opportunities arise.

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Conclusion

The biggest lesson to take away from our experience is that it’s challenging to run an OER initiative on a small budget, but it can be done. By creatively leveraging your existing resources and looking for external opportunities for support and funding, small colleges like ours can contribute to the important work of developing and sustaining open educational resources for our own communities and beyond.

Georgia Westbrook is the Open Educational Resources & Instruction Librarian at Touro College in New York City. She received an MSLIS from Syracuse University and has a BA in art history from Binghamton University. You can find her on Twitter @grw_lib

This post is by Georgia Westbrook 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.