 So today I want to talk to you about open educational resources and what the Sailor Academy has been doing is certainly a wonderful example of open educational resources but I really want to talk about the fact that if you really dive down open educational resources are about access but they're also about quality and they're also about student success and retention and we we take all of those very seriously at UMUC. UMUC for those of you who don't know is a large predominantly adult serving predominantly online institution. We did start in 1947 to serve veteran students who were coming back from World War II because the traditional campuses did not want to offer courses at night and do some of the things that you need to do when you're teaching adults who have complex lives and so since then we've you know also branched out into a lot of civilian students as well so we're about 50-50 at this point but predominantly this is a story about serving the needs of students and I want to start with that because people are you know they often want to know how we did this why we did this etc and we really try to start with the student not with the institution needs not with the faculty need but what the student needs and let me tell you what we did so if you trace if you know about the cost of textbooks and I actually talked to a few people here who not only know about it because they work at an educational institution but they're paying for their kids textbooks now if you have kids in college right you know these are very very expensive now a friend of mine last night good colleague we had a really good conversation about textbooks so since we each have a little bit of extra time until they can find Wayne I'm gonna I'm gonna insert just a little a little piece here and that is that sometimes it sounds like I am just completely bashing publishers textbooks and to some extent at this moment in time we are but so however if you look back into the 1950s and 60s publishers really filled a need for us as my colleague reminded me that was the time when especially state institutions were really opening their doors after World War two classes were becoming bigger those of you who went to state universities you know you had 500 students in introductory psychology faculty had a very hard time gathering all the material that they needed for this lot these large numbers of students as well as the ancillary materials so I'll give publishers a lot of credit for helping our industry I think in today's world ed tech is sort of the you know the next example of that where we have issues out in the world that we have to solve and so we need vendors to help us the problem is publishers became very strong and and really worked with institutions at a time when knowledge itself was scarce when it was difficult to access that knowledge when there weren't a lot of alternatives out there there was no Sailor Academy there were no OER repositories there was no internet and so it was really useful to have some vendors asking faculty to write these textbooks gathering it all together and then we would have students by them but it was that also at a time when the textbooks while they were never cheap there was a period of time when they weren't that terribly expensive relative to the cost of an education however over time the cost of textbooks has absolutely tracked at the same accelerated rate of change as the cost of tuition and it's probably not an accident and so we now know that many students can't afford tuition even at some public institutions that used to be you know quite affordable and they can't afford to buy the textbooks and I'm gonna tell you more about that as we go on textbooks are a big business and that's great if you're a textbook publisher that's what you want to do you want to sell textbooks nothing against that but there's been an 800% rise in the cost of textbooks over the past 30 years 65% of students in many surveys have said that at some point they have not purchased a textbook because of the cost 65% we find that at UMUC by the way not 65% but we know because we've tracked it for many years that probably between 30 and 40% of students actually in in many cases never buy their textbooks they try to sort of fake it okay because they can't afford it the average college student spends about $1,200 a year on textbooks and if you look at say community colleges and I think there's some folks here from the community college sector if you have scholarships and you know financial aid for college community college students sometimes it'll cover tuition etc but it might not cover textbooks there many students in community colleges are actually paying more for textbooks than they have to pay for tuition so there's something really changing here and it's kind of going topsy-turvy and it really needs to be addressed so I want to tell you about a typical UMUC student and why that model is not working well for our students anymore in terms of the typical publishers and textbooks about 57% of our students are female most of our students are parents of children of some age they're often first-generation in college and they are paying out of pocket or through a Pell Grant or through some form of tuition assistance or military tuition assistance there are many military students in their families and for the most part these are enlisted military students who they don't have a lot of extra money you know you don't enroll in the or enlist in the military to make a huge salary and so what I want to do is tell you somehow the picture got shifted but I want to tell you a two stories one is about a diner and one is a meeting in Vegas and I figured the Vegas one would really you're gonna wonder about that so one Saturday morning I was having breakfast with my partner we were sitting in Saturday morning and we were listening to the people next to us talk to our waitress and clearly they knew her it looked like they had come into the diner you know like every week and they were asking her about well what courses are you taking and and then they said and what are you doing about your textbooks so clearly they had this is an ongoing conversation and she started this long story about well the one textbook I think I can go without buying and then the other textbook two of my friends and I are gonna buy a used version and we're gonna like you know share it there was this complex calculus of how she was going to get the resources that she needed and my heart was starting to sink because that first I thought oh I'm sure she's not one of our students but then it was very close to where you know my campus is etc so when she came back over to us I said I heard you talking to the folks in the next day at the next table but we're ready to go to school and I was like praying for College Park Towson she's like oh I'm at UMUC oh my god what are we doing to these students and so we asked her about herself and she has two kids she's single mother actually she had three kids single mother lives with her parents works at this diner like for 12-hour ships shifts three or four days a week at especially over the weekend to make enough money during the week takes whole days off so that she can do her education and so she has very little money left for books and that hit me and I went back and really started to talk to my folks about you know here's an example of one student of our 85,000 can you imagine all of the wasted time and an inefficient learning that is occurring because this is the reality of our students a couple of months later a number of us were at a meeting called CCME in Las Vegas it's for the military folks and we were talking about UMUC also has our overseas contracts to teach students on base in across Europe and across Asia and you have to bid for those contracts and the only thing that the contract gets you is that you can show up and teach but the students the military students are not guaranteed you have to entice them and so it used to be of course very easy to get a lot of students because in the days of face-to-face the students had no choices but today they do so military students could sign up for any number of online courses they could go to Thomas Edison as many of them do they're there are fewer and fewer of them doing face-to-face so we always like to try to figure out ways to serve them better and I said to my president it's always dangerous by the way when you like pitch an idea to your president because presidents love new things and and so I said you know I think we're at a point with open educational resources that we might be able to redesign all of our curricula all of our programs with OERs so that students have to pay nothing out of pocket and he was like can we really do that and I said well let me go back and check it out I think so before I knew it it was a feature in our new contract and so we had to do it that was actually really good with me though because I really wanted to do it and once it's in a contract like that you really can't say no so the solution was OERs now OERs if you don't know but I would imagine most of you are you're all the converted here the Hewlett Foundation does a lot with this these are these are resources that are for teaching learning research they're every they're full courses just like the sailor courses but they can also be court just course materials modules textbooks streaming videos tests software there's a range of these things these are not just some you know written sheets of paper or case studies it's really if you don't know what's out there what is out there that's being developed and curated is pretty amazing and there's even more to come so there's five hours that you need to know about open educational resources and this is what I think is so exciting this is not just a walk through Wikipedia OERs you can make an own a copy okay that's that's easy you can use them and reuse them in a number of different ways you can adapt modify and improve them you can combine two or more remix rehash and you can share it with others and that's I think many of us are are focused on the great we can get to this because they're open and free and then we don't charge our students now of course there's always a cost to redesigning and keeping them up to date but we don't pass that on to our students but it's the reuse the revision the remix the mashing the the changing like any faculty member can take one of these OERs and change it to their to feature whatever it is that they need which is very different from remember with textbooks if you'd assign a textbook chapter there was always that one chapter that you were like I hate this chapter on the brain but the rest of the book is okay and so I just make do with this chapter you don't have to do that now you can actually change it if you have an OER so you know again we had faculty you know accusing us of all sorts of things a walk through Wikipedia this is these are just cheap low quality kinds of things and none of that is true so we made sure that we had our librarians who are experts at search of all kinds of materials identify as many of these OERs as we possibly could for various subject matter areas and also our instructional designers followed a kind of rubric that the librarians created so that we found the right resources and then we had our we had faculty teams curate them and link them to learning outcomes in our courses and and then we embedded the OERs in the course so each learning outcome now had x number of materials connected to it so that the students have their materials on day one they don't have to order a textbook they don't have to go buy a textbook they just get into the course and so between fall of 2013 and fall of 2016 we either adopted adapted or developed OERs for over a thousand courses we impacted in the undergraduate school 67,000 students and in the grad school 18,000 students and more we have saved them out of pocket more than 19 million dollars total and that just keeps going up over the the various years it's pretty phenomenal isn't it now that 19 million dollars is if they all paid for brand new textbooks so in reality it's probably a little less but it's still in the many millions of dollars that we're saving our students from and we want an award from the open education consortium and this was we didn't even apply for it we were very excited to get this because as far as we know we still believe we might be the at least the only US institution that has gone to all open educational resources but we'd like to not be alone so go back and try to get your folks to adopt that who else is using OERs well it used to be that you could just say there's you know three places now everybody not everybody but a lot of places a lot of big-name schools Harvard has some OERs now they're not converted the entire curriculum of course but people are starting to adopt these and there's excitement among librarians and certain groups of faculty and I think you'll see more of this happening so but people still ask me do the students learn how do you know that they're learning well there was just a very large study I have to update this because there's even a newer study but the biggest study to date was in 2015 Fisher Hilton Robinson and Wiley and they found in a national study of over a thousand students and they compared students who were learning various topics using OERs versus traditional textbooks that relative to courses with the publisher textbooks students using OERs completed courses either at the same number the same level or even greater so either the same or more positive their grades were the same or slightly higher which is also what we found at UMUC they took more credits in the following semester in the subsequent semester and they had greater levels of passing courses now we don't know for sure why but you could speculate if you have many of our students live they could be in Afghanistan by the time they get their textbook it could be a three or four weeks into an eight-week course and so they're going without the material for a very long period of time the more you can get them the material right at the very beginning the better for those students and so better grades they don't have to take so much money out of pocket so they can actually sign up for more courses I think you're going to start seeing because this this new study that came out learning outcomes are getting better because the material is right there so that is the story of what we did at UMUC and I thank you for listening and if you have any comments or would like to catch up this is my email address thank you so much for your attention