 Hello. Welcome to the Open Education Conference 2021. I'm Angela Chiquiro. I'm a Research and Engagement Librarian at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library. I'm presenting my topic titled Conducting an Environmental Scan to Identify OER Needs at an Institution of Higher Learning. My brief agenda includes sharing brief profiles for UCSB and the UCSB Library, sharing the OER assessment in the form of an environmental scan that included two surveys, sharing the survey results, and the recommendations that came from the results. And I'll share my contact details for anyone who might have questions for me. The University of California, Santa Barbara is affiliated with 10 campuses in the UC system. We have undergraduates from various backgrounds. There are around 26,000. And sometimes this is a situation that warrants the need to look into affordable learning materials. We have the UCSB main library and the music library. We have various resources and services. This includes course reserves. Unfortunately, the textbooks are not always enough for all our students. Again, a situation that warrants the need to look into alternative affordable learning resources. The environmental scan that I did was part of the open the SPAC Open Education Leadership Program that I was in from 2020 to 2021. And I did an environmental scan to assess the prevalence and the awareness of open educational resources by our faculty at the UCSB. So I was looking at the OER usage patterns and the survey results resulted in me recommending 10 potential OER initiatives by the UCSB library. The Kepsen project for the SPAC Open Education Leadership Program ran from January to May. The timeline included the survey planning, deployment, completion, results analysis, report writing submission, and evaluation. The environmental scan had two surveys, one for faculty and one for the students in the Promise Scholars Program. The key questions driving the instruments included are faculty using OER? Are they open to adopting them if they're not using them? Are students aware of their existence? And would they advocate for their usage? If so, in what ways? On this page, I have links to the two instruments. If anyone wants more details on these instruments, please reach out to me at hicoero at UCSB.edu. But online when designing survey instruments for an assessment, you need to consult literature on surveys and environmental scanning, research for any available adaptable instruments out there. You don't always have to reinvent the wheel. If there isn't anything available that suits your study, consider building one from scratch. But you also need to be aware of your project goals. These will help you design a survey instrument that answer your questions. Now I'll share with you some key brief results. I'm not going to share all the results from the survey instruments. I'll start with the faculty survey results. I discovered that 48% of our faculty were not at all familiar with OER, but they were interested in learning more. 61% were saying they were not using OER, but there were 21% who were using them. And of those 21%, they say they were using either books, syllabus, lecture notes, or assignment. This was really interesting, fascinating that we have faculty who are using OER. 85% of our faculty said they would consider adopting OERs. 11% said they wouldn't consider and pointed to things like time and show of what's available, and that materials were not expensive in their area, or OERs are simply not available for their subject area. But 78% are saying the library can provide us with more material so we can learn about OER. 69% are saying providers with workshops and training on OER. 69% were saying providers with examples of how OERs are being used by other faculty. Going to the Promise Scholars, these are our students. They also indicated that textbooks were expensive. With the cost of textbooks influence the number of units they take each quarter. 37% even avoided taking certain courses because of the cost of textbooks. 80% said they took some courses even if they can't afford the assigned textbooks and had to rely either on their friends or just look for whatever they can get from the internet. And only 4% say they were not affected by the cost of textbooks. And going to the OER familiarity, the benefits and advocacy. The Promise Scholars students said, you know, or 80% say they were not familiar with OER. 75% even if they were not familiar say they would save on textbook costs if we were to look into OER adoption by various faculty in various subject areas. Please note that we provided a brief definition of OER for those who are not familiar. And on advocating, 44% of the students say they will talk to their professor, their fellow students, and share about OER. 33% say they were not, they were comfortable talking to their fellow students. So several results informed me on the 10 recommendations that I made to the UCSB library. One, for instance, was to develop OER informational guide for our faculty, students and staff, so they can start learning about OER, the different types of resources that are out there, and how they can start adopting them and using them for their classes. The OER informational guide is now in place. The recommendation, for instance, was to proactively follow up with all faculty who say they were using OER or who said they were interested in using OER and see how we could support them. Another recommendation was to plan workshops and training sessions for our faculty. The recommendation was to establish an OER community that will help to keep up with the trends in the OER environment and open pedagogy. And also look at programs to incentivize faculty who are looking to adopt OER and monitor OER initiative at other UC campuses for opportunities to collaborate and improve services locally at UCSB. Also, I'm going to point out the recommendation to consider an open education policy to guide the initiatives at UCSB and have an OER community to potentially help in crafting this policy. So, there is a lot that we can do as libraries to help our faculty who are looking at adopting alternative affordable learning resources for our students. And it all starts with an assessment to find out what's happening in your local environment. This is what I did for my campus, the University of California, Santa Barbara. If you're interested in conducting an assessment for your own institution, please do reach out at hquero at UCSB.edu. I'm happy to answer any questions, as well as to learn from you about the initiatives, the OER initiatives that you're conducting at your campuses. And I thank you for your time.