Open SUNY Affordable Learning Solutions (ALS)

CIT June 2, 2016 3:30 - 4:00 pm Flagg 102

presented by Karen Gardner-Athey SUNY OLIS Professional Development Coordinator

What is Open SUNY Affordable Learning Solutions?

• A one-stop overview of OER and Open activities in SUNY

• One of the initiatives in SUNY to provide affordable educational alternatives to traditional textbooks

•A service to assist SUNY faculty, librarians, instructional designers, and staff to identify lower-cost, electronic, free, and Open Educational Resources (OERs)

•A California State University-MERLOT partner benefit service

opensunyals.org

The Focus is OER

Open SUNY ALS currently offers tools and support for:

• Connecting Campuses with SUNY OER Services• Showcasing SUNY OER Initiatives• Learning about OERs• Finding OER• Evaluating OER

What are OER?

The SUNY OER Success Framework uses the Educause definition:Open educational resources (OER) are any resources available at little or no cost that can be used for teaching, learning, or research. The term can include textbooks, course readings, and other learning content; simulations, games, and other learning applications; syllabi, quizzes, and assessment tools; and virtually any other material that can be used for educational purposes. OER typically refers to electronic resources, including those in multimedia formats, and such materials are generally released under a Creative Commons or similar license that supports open or nearly open use of the content. OER can originate from colleges and universities, libraries, archival organizations, government agencies, commercial organizations such as publishers, or faculty or other individuals who develop educational resources they are willing to share. http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELi7061.pdf

What are OER?

SUNY also uses the brief and memorable version, authored at Tompkins Cortland CC (TC3):

Open Educational Resources are teaching and learning materials that may be used and reused, at low cost or without charge. OER often have a Creative Commons or GNU license that states specifically how the material may be used, reused, adapted, and shared.

Why are OER Important?

Cost Affects CompletionThe famous Florida Virtual Campus survey

Cost Affects CompletionThe Buffalo State College textbook affordability survey is even more dramatic:

http://www.uspirg.org/reports/usp/fixing-broken-textbook-market

Cost Affects Completion

“Nearly half of all students surveyed said that the cost of textbooks impacted how many/which classes they took each semester.

Students attend college seeking job preparation and/or degree attainment. Careful course selection is often necessary in order to yield the results that a student is seeking within the timeframe they are prepared to study. It is especially concerning that this process may be being undermined by high textbook costs.”

Cost Affects Completion

•Since Fall 2013, Dr. David Usinski at Erie County Community College has used open textbooks, Open Learning Initiative's Concepts in Statistics, and MyOpenMath in two courses to save 440 students $120 on textbook costs, totally $52,800.

Pass rates increased from 67% to 87%Fail rates decreased from 22% to 11%Withdrawal rates decreased from 11% to 2%

Connecting Campuses with SUNY OER Services

Open SUNY ALS connects campuses to Open SUNY Textbooks & SUNY OER Services (http://textbooks.opensuny.org/suny-oer-services)

Open SUNY Textbooks (OST) announced a new service model, SUNY OER Services, to support SUNY faculty and SUNY campuses with their efforts to scale up open educational resources (OER) adoption, adaptation, and creation initiatives.

Open SUNY Affordable Learning Solutions both promotes this ground-breaking program and serves as a resource in its suite of services.

Showcasing OER FacultyOpen SUNY ALS also celebrates OER faculty on campuses across SUNY, for example:

• Kristen Munger, Ph.D., Associate Dean in the School of Education at SUNY Oswego edited and co-wrote the open textbook Steps to Success: Crossing the Bridge Between Literacy Research and Practice

“The book includes chapters related to scientifically-based literacy research, early literacy development, literacy assessment, digital age influences on children’s literature, literacy development in underserved student groups, secondary literacy instructional strategies, literacy and modern language, and critical discourse analysis. ”

Finding OER

•The goal of SUNY OER Services is to give faculty and instructional•designers easy access to curated, modularized, OER content.

•But so much OER is in repositories that require the tenacity and skills of librarians and other information professionals.

Finding OERsA Babson Survey Research Report, http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/oer.html, finds that "The time and effort to find and evaluate are consistently listed as the most important barriers by faculty to the adoption of open education resources."

Finding OER can with the MERLOT repository and branching out to multiple resources.

http://opensunyals.org/libraryresources.html

Evaluating OERs

It doesn’t stop after you find the OER!

•Open SUNY ALS provides Instructions for evaluating OERs

http://opensunyals.org/libraryresources.html

Advocating for OERs

Open SUNY ALS offers advocacy materials for campus-based OER initiatives:

http://opensunyals.org/whatis.html

Learning About OERsTwo self-paced Open Courses are now available:

Introduction to OERs

&

Intermediate OER Topics (adopted from OER 101)

http://opensunyals.org/learnmore.html

Learning About OERs

Facilitated versions of Introduction to OERs and Intermediate OER Topics are also available via the COTE professional development offerings

http://commons.suny.edu/cote/

IITG and OERInnovative Instructional Technology Grants (IITG): launched Open SUNY Textbooks

Current OER projects underway are:•SUNY Open Educational Resources: Improving Faculty Discovery and Adoption•MVCC Open Physics Lab•Open Media Lab – Old Westbury•Quality by Design: Strategies for Effective Teaching and Quality Course Design. An online faculty development course and Open Educational Resource (OER) – University at Buffalo

http://opensunyals.org/iitg.html http://commons.suny.edu/iitg/

SUNY Faculty are at the heart of the OER mission

• Open SUNY ALS is one of the MANY supports that SUNY OER Services offers to guide and empower faculty in the adoption, adaptation, and creation of OER

Faculty and OER

SUNY Librarians can:

•assist instructors in narrowing down the vast array of OER by using effective search strategies and applying multi-level evaluations http://opensunyals.org/libraryresources.html

•support OER incentive initiatives on their campuses (the librarians at SUNY Geneseo created the Open SUNY Textbook initiative ) http://opensuny.org/omp/index.php/SUNYOpenTextbooks)

•OER are stored in a wide variety of repositories, and, although metadata standards exist, there is little consistency between how open learning objects are cataloged and retrieved. SUNY librarians can help implement metadata standards for both campus-specific and SUNY-wide OER repositories http://opensunyals.org/searchotherrepositories.html

Librarians and OER

SUNY instructional designers can:

• include OER instruction in faculty workshops teaching online course design http://commons.suny.edu/cote/course-supports/

• include OER tools in the faculty resources provided in the campus learning management system

• assist faculty with the transition from a traditional textbook to open alternatives

Instructional Designers & OER

Questions?

•Thank you so much for attending this session!

•Any questions?

•Feel free to contact Laura K. Murray, laura.murray@suny.edu ATIS OER Coordinator