Summary
This initiative provides a means for instituting and promoting the integration of Open Education Resources (OER) across the curriculum at Mt. San Antonio College with an emphasis on Career Education courses. Numerous studies have found that implementation of OER initiatives on college campuses leads to significant benefits to instruction, student learning, as well as cost savings for students. Adoption of OER is spreading beyond clear issues of student affordability to the less obvious issues of access, completion, reducing time to degree, decreasing debt, advancing equity, and rethinking pedagogy. To launch and sustain this work, it is vital to create a process that supports the use of OER by faculty. Funded by the CVC-OEI Improving Online CTE Pathways Grant, this pilot provides preliminary steps towards creating such an environment at Mt. SAC.
OER Integration Plan
This initiative is predicated on the understanding that faculty hold the academic freedom to select their learning materials. It is not the intent of this plan to undermine those principles, rather, to offer more innovative sources of learning materials for consideration. This plan recommends institutionalizing faculty incentives to grow the use of OER on campus.
Faculty Support: Provide faculty with incentives to adopt, adapt, or create an OER.
- Adopt: Redesign a course using an existing open textbook and compline any needed ancillary materials that might not already exist.
- Adapt or Remix: Adapt or remix a number of OER together to create a customized set of course materials.
- Create: If an exhaustive search did not yield sufficient OER content in a subject area an original textbook would be authored and shared under the creative commons license.
For the selection of these materials, we used a rubric with the following selection criteria:
- Impact (the number of students)
- Accessibility
- Savings
- Innovation and creativity
- Quality of proposal
We selected 15 proposals from departments across campus including Audio Arts, Biology and Nutrition.
Overall, faculty had a positive experience in moving over their courses to use OER. There were, however, challenges including the changeover to online classes due to COVID-19. Nevertheless, 93.8% of faculty in this program said it was “very likely” that they would recommend OER to a colleague. Quotes from Mt. SAC faculty can be found here. With these OER awards, we estimate a potential savings of $104,834.69 to 647 students for the Spring 2020 Semester. Since the faculty participants agreed to use OER for two semesters, the potential savings across the two semesters is $209,669.38.
Additional Information
Authors:
Romelia Salinas
Associate Dean, Library & Learning Resources
Monika Chavez
Career Education Librarian
Esteban Aguilar
Electronic Resources Librarian
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District or those of the California Community College Chancellor’s Office.
