Open Education 2014

Use of OER in the K-12 environment has its own set of opportunities and challenges.

As a part of a legislative mandate to identify a collection of OER courseware aligned with the Common Core State Standards, the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) in Washington conducted a review of resources targeting secondary math and English Language Arts. As a follow up to this review, OSPI developed a competitive grant program for districts interested in adapting materials based on reviewer feedback and/or implementing open resources in the classroom.

Five school districts in Washington State received grants. They act as case studies from a variety of teaching environments "large districts to small schools in both rural and urban areas. Hear about the goals, challenges, and successes of each of the model projects below:

Lake Washington School District
Lake Washington School District is located in the suburbs east of Seattle. It is the fifth-largest school district in Washington. The district is working to adapt OER high school science textbooks aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards and develop supplemental OER teaching materials and resources to bring to the school board as an option for district adoption.

Selkirk School District
Selkirk School District is a two-school, rural district in the northeast corner of Washington. As a small school district, often old or outdated curriculum materials are used, as funds are scarce with regard to new curriculum purchases. Three secondary classes are piloting and implementing OER resources in Algebra I, 11th and 12th grade English, and Biology. Their new 1:1 environment creates an incredible opportunity to incorporate OER materials into their instructional program.

Southwest Washington Math Consortium
With grant funds, a consortium of four school districts will complete their district-developed Algebra 1 curriculum, pilot the material in the classroom, and design accompanying professional development resources. Prior to the grant, the materials were limited in access to the participating school districts. As a CC BY licensing requirement was placed on all materials created with grant funds, this work will now be available to all.

Spokane Public Schools
Spokane Public Schools is the largest school district in eastern Washington and the second largest in the state. OER grant funds will help launch the district's K-8 implementation of an OER mathematics curriculum, including professional development for instructional leaders and math support resources for students and parents.

Sunnyside School District
Sunnyside School District is located in the heart of the Yakima Valley in central Washington. They will implement a Common Core aligned OER curriculum across the 6-11 grade bands and are creating resources to support teachers in curriculum implementation and ensure successful student completion of both the new Common Core assessments and WA state exit exams.

In 2012 ISKME initiated the Primary Source Project (PSP), working with educators across four states. The goal of the project was to address educator needs for discoverability and engagement with high quality, openly licensed primary sources, particularly informational texts, that support the cross-subject literacy shifts called for by the new U.S. education standards, the Common Core State Standards. Through the project, participating educators selected and critiqued a set of informational texts, and developed cross-subject, wraparound lessons that support students' ability to access, critically analyze, and build evidence-based arguments from texts. Based on examination of the lesson building process, an instructional design pathway tool was created - with openly licensed professional learning materials and lesson exemplars - to support future educators in selecting and sequencing informational texts, and in collaborating with colleagues across subjects to create integrated lessons around those texts. This presentation will discuss how this model can be used to support OER adoption in K-12 by demonstrating the necessary teacher collaboration needed to integrate the new standards across disciplines, to enable feedback loops and knowledge sharing around Common Core instructional shifts, and to leverage digital technology and openly licensed content to fill curriculum needs.

No matter how enthusiastic superintendents, district technology directors, librarians, and principals may be about open educational resources (OER) and blended learning, the success of making the transition from traditional textbooks to OER is completely dependent upon the willingness of the individual teachers to embrace making the change. The most important aspect of building and promoting broad adoption of OER is making that transition as seamless as possible for faculty.

Paving a smooth pathway for OER adoption means accommodating all hardware options, Wi-Fi limitations, various states of flux schools may be experiencing with regard to their technology as well as accommodating variations in faculty tech savvy. Making adoption more feasible means educating teachers on just what OER is, where to find high quality OER, and how they can implement it in to their classrooms. This means making sure teachers understand the various copyright licensing options if they want to use their own materials. It means creating venues for teachers to collaborate with other teachers within their schools, districts, and states. It means understanding how find common core state standard aligned materials that correspond to their curriculum.

We have found that encouraging teacher collaboration as well as cross-district collaboration among OER users, and non-users, to come join in and listen, helps to build the "OER momentum".

In Staten Island, New York we are facilitating teachers across the district to come together by subject and grade to create courses, which will then be approved by the curriculum managers and superintendent. These courses will be fully common core aligned and adhere to their specific curriculums/syllabi yet the OER will still be malleable for the teachers to reconfigure and add additional materials. When one teacher finds a great resource or implementation strategy he or she can share it. Other teachers can decide if they want to use it.

Providing communication and collaboration opportunities for teachers and curriculum managers helps to create a comfort level for teachers that the OER is not only robust and of high quality but also has the support of their superiors. This in turn gives educators the freedom to comfortably use these highly adaptable materials to create customizable courses that accommodate the unique learning makeup of their individual classrooms. With teachers more aware than ever that
students are not one size fits all, this is an especially invaluable feature of OER.

We will share the knowledge we have gained from creating and using OER courseware on various devices in schools in Atlanta, GA, Amarillo, TX, Burlington, MA, Staten Island, NY, Charleston, SC and elsewhere, including specific OER materials, the pros and cons of going textbook-free, the challenges of implementing a 1:1 tablet program with real-life school infrastructure and how to keep the momentum of OER adoption rolling.

Canada's three western provinces signed an agreement in Spring 2014 to implement OER. This session reports on OER challenges/opportunities of the collaboration and the successes and problems incurred by the three initiatives. British Columbia, led by BCCampus, started the OER initiatives by implementing a program to build 40 (and now 60) first and second year post-secondary course etextbooks as OER. Athabasca University and eCampus Alberta followed up with an OER workshop in Edmonton shortly after. Alberta Ministry of Innovation and Advanced Education representatives then attended an OER meeting held in Vancouver with representatives from Washington and California. This year, Saskatchewan has also expressed a commitment to support OER. The province has agreed with the others to join with the other two western provinces to facilitate cooperation among the participants in sharing and encouraging the use of best practices in OER, fostering greater collaboration using technology and gaining an understanding of key issues and trends in OER among post-secondary institutions. Several institutions and organizations in Western Canada are members of the OER Univeritas (OERu) initiative. These include two consortia: BCcampus and eCampus Alberta; three universities: Athabasca University, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Thompson Rivers University; and a Community College: Portage College.

Attention for open and online higher education in the Netherlands has grown tremendously in the last decade. Programs and initiatives were initiated on institutional level, supra-institutional level and on national level.

On institutional level open courseware, weblectures, and short video clips on specific subjects were published under an open license. The OER-program (see: http://www.surf.nl/en/themes/learning-and-testing/open-educational-resources/index.html) initiated by SURF, the collaborative ICT organisation for Dutch higher education and research, is an example of an initiative on supra-institutional level. This OER-program aimed at collecting, disseminating and sharing knowledge and best practices on OER on behalf of all institutions for higher education in the Netherlands. On national level, the Dutch Ministry of Education initiated and financed the Wikiwijs program, an open, internet-based platform aimed at finding, sharing, and developing open educational resources (http://openserviceblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/110815-wikiwijs-program-plan-2011-2013-def.pdf). The rise of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), starting in 2012, which also gained a lot of attention in the Netherlands, resulted in increased attention for open and online education at the level of the Board of Directors of Dutch universities.

All these initiatives have led to a vast amount of information on OER: research papers, white papers, an OER Toolkit, (conference) presentations, master classes, seminars, webinars are few of the formats used to disseminate the available information. SURF maintains a website (in Dutch) to curate this information (http://www.surf.nl/kennis-en-innovative/kennisbank). More and more it became apparent though that the main actors in this area, the teachers, felt hardly called upon. A gap between the information available (in particular its level of abstraction) and the practical usefulness for teachers was felt.

To tackle this problem, the SURF Special Interest Group Open Education (https://www.surfspace.nl/sig/5-open-education/) started developing a reference model for open education, targeted to all stakeholders, with an initial focus on teachers. The aim for this model is:
* to categorize, label, and organize the available information,
* demanded by a teacher to start searching/finding Open Education and OER related products and resources, to start reusing, designing and developing, and, last but not least, publishing Open Education and OER related products or getting informed and involved in other means of open and online education developments
* at the right level of detail for the user.

The reference model will be used to offer Open Education and OER related information, based on a profile of the user. The profile of the user indicates the level of expertise in the field of open education (e.g. experienced or novice) and the role of the user (e.g. teacher, member of a curriculum development group, instructional/learner product designer, multi-media support specialist, OER-expert etc.). Depending on the specific profiles, information will be accessible to the user, whereby it can occur that the user is referred to an expert for more information or support.

In the presentation we will present the initial version of the reference model and the first experiences in using the model for access to a portal with Open Education and OER related information.

This paper will present and discuss a small research project funded by the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching. The project aims to design, develop and test a free, open and online professional development course focussed on supporting curriculum design in Higher Education. The course will have a specific aim to develop the capacity of academics in Australia to adopt and incorporate Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Educational Practices (OEP) into curriculum development for more effective and efficient learning and teaching across the Australian higher education sector. The initiative will address an identified gap between awareness of OEP and implementation of OEP, particularly the production, adaptation and use of OER to support the design of innovative, engaging and agile curriculum. This course will be a micro Open Online Course (mOOC) where "micro" refers to a sub-component of a full course. mOOCs (hereafter micro-courses) are a different concept than Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which tend to be courses/units or part of a unit purposely developed to be delivered to thousands of learners across the world. The large majority of MOOCs do not provide clear articulations or pathways towards degrees. The micro-course developed in this project will lead to micro credentials, which are recognition of learning on a smaller scale than traditional university provision courses. The advantage in this case is that the micro course would be focussed on curriculum design and therefore able to provide just in time development for academic staff involved in curriculum design and renewal, but could also be assessed and validated for articulation into larger courses for credit. Such recognition of learning in a small batch, is perfect for a model of course design which brings together learning from across many partners and beyond and can be readily adapted and incorporated into professional development programs of different universities.

Despite recent federal investments and important developments in OER and OEP, the Australian higher education sector lags behind other countries in these endeavours. The US, UK and some other European countries have regulatory frameworks and institutional and national support, including funding, that are widely available to academics and educators in general. Considering the evolving pace and demonstrable impact of OER and OEP on the international higher education sector, the need for further professional development and capacity-building to facilitate the adoption of OER and OEP in Australia is critical. In fact, previous research on OER and OEP have identified a lack of appropriate academic staff professional development programs available for academics as one of the main reasons for the limited adoption of OER and OEP in Australian universities (Bossu, Bull & Brown, 2012). This project offers a strategic approach to bridge this gap and make a significant contribution to the adoption of OER and OEP in learning and teaching in higher education in Australia and beyond.

Bossu, C., Bull, D., & Brown, M. (2012). Opening up Down Under: the role of open educational resources in promoting social inclusion in Australia. Distance Education, 33(2), 151?164. doi: 10.1080/01587919.2012.692050

Rapidly expanding institutional awareness is beginning to drive adoption to scale. What are the institutional factors driving this focus on OER? What are the most effective institutional strategies, and how do institutions enhance academic freedom and balance their economic needs with growing OER usage?

Textbook costs create a financial burden on college students that can impact their higher education access and academic success. Open textbooks can help alleviate the burden of textbook costs. Open textbooks are full, real textbooks that are licensed to be freely used, edited, and distributed. An increasing number of quality open textbooks are available for faculty to choose from. But adoptions of open textbooks by faculty have come slowly.

During our three years of experience with open textbooks at the University of Minnesota, we discovered several reasons why faculty don't adopt open textbooks, and then found solutions and strategies to help faculty overcome the barriers. From those solutions, the University of Minnesota has developed an initiative to help other institutions overcome those barriers. The initiative includes faculty and staff development models, textbook quality reviews, and a toolkit of resources that are freely available.

Wanting other institutions to benefit from the expertise and successful strategies we developed, we created a toolkit of materials and curricula (Creative Commons licensed of course) that can be used at other institutions to help their faculty adopt open textbooks. We then traveled to several partner institutions to provide faculty development and engagement, and also trained local staff how to continue the work after we leave.

This session will be an update on the initiative. We will discuss the lessons learned as we traveled to other institutions and worked within a number of different environments and contexts. We will provide information about the number of open textbook adoptions resulting from the initiative and the potential savings by students. We will attempt to involve staff from partner institutions to talk about the impact of the initiative on their campuses.

In addition, changes to the University of Minnesota's open textbook library (open.umn.edu) will be presented. After two years, the open textbook library has had 132,000 visits from around the world. Faculty from partner institutions have contributed reviews which help visitors better judge the quality of the materials. During this presentation, we will discuss changes to the open textbook library functionality and collection.

Often the quickest route to implementation for any new initiative is by leveraging existing systems and processes. For OER, this often means considering what can be accomplished within the confines of an institutional LMS rather than standing up another new IT system. This presentation will cover strategies that you can take to support OER at your institution by leveraging your existing LMS and the implications to supporting reuse, revision, remix, and redistribution (the Four R?s).

Few community colleges are pushing the envelope to expose the full impact of OER on teaching and learning. While there are numerous OER efforts underway, this session will provide a synopsis of key components in scaling an OER effort from a single course to an entire degree. The Z-Degree is amplifying the power of OER to improve student success not only through increased access and affordability, but also by enhanced teaching efficiency and effectiveness. The foundation of the Z-Degree is the ability to focus, analyze, augment and evolve course materials directly aligned with a courses learning outcomes. This session will share how the Z-Degree model can be replicated in a way that is scalable, encompassing a single course or an entire degree, while remaining flexible enough to engage both full-time and adjunct Faculty in online, hybrid, or traditional courses.

Most OER initiatives have focussed on the production of OER, search and discovery tools for OER, or aggregation & repository sites for OER. However, in between production and search and discovery lies an under examined part of the process -- community *re*-sharing of materials.

By "re-sharing", we refer to the re-publication of materials the publisher has not created themselves, and has often only minimally edited. Over the past ten years, re-sharing has become a central feature of many social publishing platforms. Most such platforms rely on these re-sharers to make discoverability happen, and see sharing as the behavior which drives production and community engagement. Tumblr is the land of "reblogs", Twitter of re-tweets, and Facebook of resharing posts. Central to many of these systems is the idea that to "use" is necessarily to "reshare". Additionally, reuse in these systems is not seen as "consumption", but rather an activity valuable in its own right.

This session will focus on the role that newer software architectures for re-sharing can play in the publication, dissemination, and discovery of Open Educational Resources. While we will deal with the theoretical underpinnings of the new approaches, the main focus will be to demonstrate new tools we have built that make the resharing of material a natural, rewarding, and enjoyable, and to some extent automatic part of the reuse process.

Adapt, Remix, or Modify. Join members of the BCcampus Open Textbook team to learn how to manage the adaptation of open textbooks.

A successful OER project is one in which free and openly licensed course materials are not just created but reused. Through a combination of grant initiatives, colleges projects, and individual faculty efforts, the 23 colleges of the VCCS have created over 30 high enrollment courses that carry no textbook costs. However, the real challenge now is building a culture in which these course materials are shared, reused, and maintained.

This presentation will be both a practical guide and cautionary tale for anyone interested in hearing of the trials and tribulations of a large community college system quickly scaling an open culture among heterogeneous institutions in a large, diverse state. The story of OER in Virginia is a good one, but is just beginning.

The JIBC is a Canadian public post-secondary institution with a strong social justice mandate that aligns quite nicely with the open education resource movement, yet it struggles to find its place within the conservative business models of the institution. Nonetheless, the open projects that have been implemented or are underway range from open courses and open textbooks to open simulations and entire program curriculum. This presentation describes some of these projects, and provides a descriptive analysis of the numerous drivers that have lead to the evolution of the institution to one that is more actively engaging with open. These drivers include better technologies, government policy, cost savings, strong sector-wide communication and leadership, funding expectations, and a greater understanding of the benefits for the institution and for students, among others. Interestingly and importantly, the remix and reuse advantages have provided greater buy-in than creating new OER. It is apparent that the combination of these drivers as a "critical mass' has been the key in evolving the institution towards embracing, rather than fearing open, in a short period of time.

The need to increase access to and reduce the costs of attending college is a burden shared by all higher education institutions. One way that Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) has addressed this growing concern is through an innovative two-phase project to promote the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) across the curriculum.

NOVA's OER-Based Certificate and Associate Degree Project is designed to provide any student at NOVA the opportunity to take anywhere from one course to an entire degree, utilizing free and/or open course materials, to deliver a high quality learning experience without requiring the purchase of textbooks. Many of these OER courses are also offered to students enrolled at more than a dozen other Virginia Community Colleges.

The OER-Based Certificate and Associate Degree Project at NOVA was designed to affect the broadest possible population of students by creating course options in a variety of subjects that will save students money and ensure that all students in these courses have equal access to all course materials. Students can take selected courses, complete a General Education Certificate, or complete two Associate Degree tracks that do not require the purchase of textbooks.

Our team of Faculty, Distance Learning Librarians, and Instructional Designers are able to develop, deliver, and maintain effective and engaging courses using quality free and open materials thanks in part to an active and growing global OER community.

It's easy to fall in love with the promise of open education. However, it's difficult to put the promise into an effective and scalable practice on a college or university campus. This session will discuss one model for facilitating OER course development on a college campus.

Motivated by a challenge to make higher education more affordable, Chadron State College (CSC) has remixed recipes drawn from others in the OER community, tossed additional ingredients into the mix, and developed approaches to curriculum and course design that encourage, as well as endorse, the use of open-education resources (OER). A librarian, an instructional designer, a faculty member, and a technical specialist will discuss CSC's history with OER and the evolution of a design process that reduces (and works toward eliminating) course textbook costs. Expect a convivial yet candid mix of remixers who will share with attendees some of their successes tempered by a few of their concerns.

The group invites spontaneity and may include attendee participation throughout much of the session. Potential topics of discussion may include faculty incentives, copyright issues, academic rigor, backward design, authorship and attribution, interoperability, undergraduate research, sustainable practice, ADA compliance, costs savings, permissions and licensing, course evaluation and revision.

The California State Senate passed the Open Textbook Initiative in 2012 to reduce costs for students through promoting faculty adoption of high-quality, peer reviewed open textbooks in the highest impact college level courses. This legislation has the potential to make college more accessible to the approximately three million students who currently attend one of the three public post-secondary systems namely the 8 campuses of the University of California, the 23 campuses of the California State University, and the 112 California Community Colleges.

Join us for this session to hear about faculty collaboration between the three academic senates to identify the peer review process and the establishment of an OER repository to provide ready access to high-quality open textbooks and case studies to support faculty adoption of OER. Student feedback and support for OER adoption will be solicited at key milestones to ensure that the project is meeting the needs of both students and faculty.

The legislation first established a faculty OER council appointed by the academic senates of the three public higher education systems. The council is tasked with determining the 50 highest impact courses for students and a process for reviewing open textbooks and open educational resources that are aligned with learning outcomes and transfer agreements between colleges and universities.

Secondarily, the legislation established the creation of an OER repository to house the peer-reviewed and recommended open textbooks and make them highly available to faculty and students. The OER repository will be managed by the California State University system and will build upon the existing MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) database.

The legislation further required matching funds from an external donor to release California state funds to begin the project. The California State University, administrator of the Open Textbook initiative, graciously acknowledges the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for their initial funding to launch the project.

Session focus: Designers for Learning, a volunteer service-learning initiative for college students in instructional design programs, recently facilitated a pilot project to increase the adoption of open educational resources (OER) for adult basic education, an area unserved by existing OER models. This session will examine the tremendous untapped opportunity for OER adoption to support adult basic education, particularly by those outside of traditional educational settings. In addition, the collaborative instructional design process employed within the 100% virtual volunteer service-learning project will be reviewed, and recommendations for further OER adoption in this area will be discussed.

Target population: Adult basic education programs support those over the age of 18 who have not attained a high school diploma, a population of over 30 million adults in the United States alone. A central goal of adult basic education is to help learners achieve high school equivalency, often through successful completion of the General Educational Development (GED) test. In 2014, the requirements for the GED test were revised to align with the 2013 College and Career Readiness (CCR) standards released by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Vocational and Adult Education as a guide for adult education programs that prepare learners for post-secondary college and career training. While the CCR standards align with the K12 Common Core State Standards, the CCR standards are bundled into only five grade groupings.

Informal instructional setting: While adult basic education programs are offered in community colleges, learners pursuing their GED also receive support outside of traditional educational settings within community-based nonprofits and other social enterprises. In these nontraditional settings, learners often study independently, or with the support of volunteer tutors who may not be trained educators.

OER service-learning project overview: Working as volunteers for a drug and alcohol rehabilitation campus for homeless adults, 22 college instructional design students collaborated with the guidance of 19 faculty advisors and other volunteer subject-matter experts to complete five different instructional design projects to support those pursuing high school equivalency. Student designers in one project were responsible for mining and mapping existing OER to the CCR standards, including an analysis of existing OER designed to align with the K12 Common Core State Standards. Three project teams designed and developed a unit of instruction that aligns with one anchor CCR standard. These tutor-supported units of instruction are prototypes for future instructional design and development. In response to the new GED computer-based testing requirements, the fifth team produced instruction that introduced learners to the use of computers for learning. A central goal of all projects was the adaptation of existing OER for this adult basic education focus. In addition, all work produced for this project was licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

This presentation will discuss system-wide OER adoption initiatives in the University System of Maryland and Virginia Community College System.

By Fall 2014, 50 percent of all undergraduate courses at University of Maryland University College (UMUC) will use electronic resources at no cost to the students. As we approach the first milestone of this initiative, we examine the lessons we've learned along the way that will influence our approach to the upcoming milestones – 100 percent of all UMUC undergraduate courses using electronic resources at no cost to the student by Fall 2015, and all graduate courses by Fall 2016.

Adoption of Open Educational Resources (OERs) by faculty who currently use expensive commercial textbooks has a great potential to generate cost savings for students and allow faculty to experiment with new forms of innovative pedagogy. One successful model for kickstarting adoption of OERs on campus is developing library-led faculty incentive programs for creating and using OERs. Temple University Libraries' Alternate Textbook Project and University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries' Open Education Initiative award faculty mini-grants of $1000-2000 to faculty who adopt OERs in their classes. Both of these initiatives have been extremely successful, popular with faculty, and saved students hundreds of thousands of dollars in textbook costs.

In Fall 2013, we proposed a $10,000 grant program to our Libraries administration to create a similar faculty incentive program to promote mass adoption of OERs at North Carolina State University. University of North Carolina system-wide budget cuts in the same fiscal year resulted in a significant cut to the Libraries, making justifying spending on this project extremely important. Our Alt-Textbook Project was successfully funded in full and will begin awarding grants in Spring 2015. In this presentation, we will share our successful proposal for funding and the strategies we used to make the case to our administration to help libraries that may be considering their own OER initiative.

We believe that promoting OERs is a natural fit for many priorities of academic libraries, even in a time of declining library budgets. Developing an OER initiative has allowed us to create and expand strategic partnerships with many other campus units, including our Office of Faculty Development, Distance Education Learning Technology Applications (DELTA), and Campus Bookstore. NCSU Libraries currently purchases a reserves copy of every textbook for every course on campus, so, broad usage of OERs also has the potential to save our Libraries money in our collections budget.

Libraries can also make the case for an OER faculty incentive program by tying their request for funds to pending legislation. On November 14, 2013 Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Al Franken (D-MN) introduced The Affordable College Textbook Act. This legislation is intended to control the costs of textbooks for students by making high-quality textbooks easily and publicly accessible for free. This bill would create a competitive grants program through which universities and colleges could obtain funding to support the creation of open textbooks.

We also emphasized the extremely high return on investment of existing faculty incentive programs in making our case to funders. We expect to realize hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings for students who are able to use free OERs, and for faculty members to continue using OERs in semesters after the grant funding has ended, based on the early success of our Open Physics Textbook. In 2010, the Libraries purchased the site license for an introductory physics textbook and made it available for 1,300 NCSU students who take introductory physics courses each semester as a free e-textbook or inexpensive print-on-demand textbook. The textbook is still in use today in our introductory courses and very popular with students.