 There we go. Now we're recording. Hi everybody, welcome to our presentation today about OER and inclusive access. My name is Kelly Brotten and I am the Assistant Dean for Research and Education in the University Libraries and my colleague is... Hi, I'm Esti Major Roar, and I'm managing the Economic Technology team and service within OIT. So today we're going to focus on reviewing a couple of different options for research, selecting your course materials that are supported here on campus. I would encourage you to use the chat or unmute yourself if you have questions or anything to add along the way. So be relatively casual and we hope to have plenty of time at the end for additional conversations or questions. There we are. There's Esti and I with our contact information. Okay, so just to start off a little bit of information about why you might want to care about the cost of course materials for your students. Here are some bullets and some statistics from two very recent large surveys of students. The first two come from the National Association of College Stores, recent 1920 survey of students. And the second two come from a second edition of a research project that was published by USPRRGs. And something that we probably all know that the costs of textbooks have risen much higher than the rate of inflation, much like the rest of the costs of higher education, and that this has serious implications to our students. So 28% of students in the NAICS survey said they just didn't get one of their required pieces of materials, either a textbook or a code. 67% said that they were going to wait to find out if the listed material was really needed. In the PERG survey, 25% of students reported working extra hours to cover the costs of their course materials. 19% chose classes based on course material costs. That is, they selected which section or what course they were going to enroll in based on what was published as the cost of the course materials. Other statistics that came out of the recent PERG publication are that 66% of students sorry, I just lost my train of thought, 60% of students reported skipping, buying the textbook or the access code at all together just because of the cost, even though 90% of them knew that was going to have great implications. And 11% of them reported skipping meals in order to cover the costs of their textbook materials. So obviously this is a huge concern for the students and something that they pay very close attention to and impacts a lot of their jobs. And I think that's a huge decision making in their selection of courses as well as in their life. Thanks, Kelly. In the summer of 2019, I think, yes. This all seems like it has been 10 years, but it really hasn't been. Kelly, myself and Candy Morris started working together to start to explore alternative textbook options at Ohio University. Ohio University as a university has been putting task forces and efforts behind affordable learning content, but the three of our units really came together about a year ago. And this is when we started to dive into what options we could sponsor and support at the university. I wanted to quickly mention, again, from the same surveys as Kelly mentioned earlier, three main points as kind of a segue into talking about what those alternative options are, alternative textbook options are that the three of our units are supporting. The next survey reports that access codes resulted in higher publisher sales. So the publishers about four or five years ago started implementing a new business model. They started calling it the inclusive access model. This is not new to higher education. A lot of universities have used that model before without the specific branding of inclusive access. What that really means is students have access to course materials on the first day of class at a discounted rate as long as the university or faculty members in this case can guarantee a higher than 90% adoption rate of the material in the course. So it's no surprise that with the rise of those models, the publisher sales are on the rise a little bit as well. However, free materials are on the rise as well. 26% of students downloaded at least one free material last year per the survey, per the next survey. That's significant because as we have seen in the March timeframe with COVID-19 and the move to remote education, those students who had their course materials listed in the LMS or had that digitally available either through the library or other free links. They didn't have to worry about getting that textbook shipped to them or getting a version of the course materials that they left in their dorm rooms. A lot of the publishers and ebook companies came out at that time to offer free versions of their ebooks that were not available in the library potentially so students could read those. Those offers are going away this summer because it's no longer an urgency of quickly switching to remote education. So it is ever so important that we continue to explore online materials, links to library resources in the LMS. But that is on the rise. 55% of students reported they do have access to materials in the LMS. These are not Ohio University numbers, but they are relevant to our use case as well. With that, Kelly, if you could move to the next slide please. Oh, and you unmuted Kelly. Sorry. The focus today that SDNI are going to review are three alternatives to the traditional commercial textbook model. And the reason we're focusing on these three today are primarily because we have access. You have access to them in your classrooms, but also because each one of these options allows for students to have access to the course material content on the first day of class. So it seems rather intuitive and common sense, but there is a growing body of research that shows that students who have access to their course material content on day one of the class have better student success metrics. Their grades are better and their DFW rates are lower. And that makes common sense, but coupled with the idea that students often delay their purchasing or their or share access to content. These are options that you can use to make sure that your students have their course materials throughout the entire semester. So here are some definitions. Open educational resources are teaching, learning and research resources that are free of cost and access barriers. And which also carry legal permissions for open use. And these include open textbooks. So they're free of cost to the students. They're not free of cost to create, but they're free of cost for the user to the students. Open educational resources is a term that's used kind of big picture and often includes open learning objects, syllabi, assignments, lecture slides. And so open textbooks are just a portion of the larger idea of open educational resources. And then licensed library content. It's pretty straightforward. This is digital content that the library pays for. So usually university affiliates have access at all times that they're affiliated with the university to this content. Often this content is subscription based. Sometimes it's purchased outright by the libraries, but often it's subscription based, which is a slight nuance in terms of copyright and license contract law as to what you're allowed to use and when you're allowed to use it. And then the final group of materials that we'll talk about today as inclusive access, which is he just mentioned a little bit about on our campus we call it the digital course materials program. And this is commercial digital textbooks for which our institution or a group of institutions have negotiated deep discounts. And these are offered up in a student opt out model as Estie was sort of explaining previously that allows the publishers to have some assurance of large adoption and a large number of students while still allowing us to offer the students deep discounts on on their retail prices. Okay, so the advantages and disadvantages of we are an open textbooks advantages. Advantage is pretty obvious right there free to the student. They're customizable so you can pick and choose what parts of them you want to use if they have certain kinds of license or copyright attachments to them you can even change them and adopt adapt them to what your needs are in the classroom. They are digital. Their availability is increasing rapidly. The open textbook library has over 700 titles now and they have pretty restrictive requirements and criteria for inclusion in their library so they are even a small set of what is out there. Of course disadvantages is they can be hard to find there's a no ultimate mega Google catalog of all of the we are. They can be limited in number especially as you get into very niche classes upper level courses it's you might not find a and we are that meets your criteria. I think one of the biggest stumbling blocks for a lot of instructors is the fact that they often don't come they're increasingly they are coming these are being made open to but they typically. Don't come with the ancillary so you need a slide deck you need test bank you need these other things they're not created and attached to the open textbook itself. So you may need to customize or create your own supplementary supplement materials and we have a comment in the chat Kelly. Yeah OK Mike Mike has concerns that the we are materials are out of date at least in dynamic fields. Well I think that's always a concern right even for a textbook even for commercial textbook that. The additions need to be produced faster and faster. The thing with we are that one could say is an advantage is that often they're licensed with the ability for anyone to change. Right. So if it has a license attached to it that says all you have to do is attribute to the original author then the next person who uses it could update it and offer it back to the world with the updated version. So there is some argument there that perhaps we are maybe more flexible in terms of being able to be updated in a more quick manner than the commercial textbooks. Arguably though like all we are there. The production of those is funded in different ways and with a different model and that's really where the crux of the matter lies on whether or not something's going to get updated. OK. License library content also pretty obvious. The advantage is there. It's already been purchased by the institution so it's free to the student. Librarians are pretty savvy at using it finding it and helping you incorporate it into your classroom. So there's a lot of robust help available. License library content is always digital and by multiple formats. I mean there's movies. There's maps. There's data. There's articles and books about any type of information resource you can imagine the library is purchasing. Wide access options and by that I mean students can access the content through whatever mechanism you send them information whether it's inside of Blackboard or a link on your syllabus or whatever tools you use to interact with your class. And at our institution we also have an integration tool inside of Blackboard. So if you are a Blackboard user you can search for and create reading lists right inside of the Blackboard course shell for your students. Disadvantages right. It can be difficult to find as all pay for information is but you do have those librarians to help you. It definitely requires more effort in the design of your course because you're not going by chapters in a commercial textbook. You have to cobble together things that make sense for your learning outcomes. You definitely are not going to get ancillaries with that so you will have to create your own slide decks and your own test banks. And disadvantage of course copyright and licensing does apply. It is not open in the way we are is open. So now at last we arrived at the publisher content. The digital course materials program the inclusive access program kicked off. I think spring 2018 as a pilot program at that point managed by the Office of Instructional Innovations and ever since spring of 2018 it has grown quite significantly. At this point for fall 2020 we have 340 about 340 course sections who have signed up for an inclusive access model. What this really means. The state of Ohio through Ohio link has negotiated contracts with the major publishing companies McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Cengage, Sage, Macmillan, Wiley and Norton. For deep discounts for an inclusive access model which means that faculty members who sign up for this model will put the link to the course material in their courses. Students can have a chance then to access the materials if a student doesn't actively proactively opt out of accessing those materials they will be billed for that price point. These price points are usually at least 50, 55, 60% cheaper than the list price of the course material. So it does save students money. If we do the math that way arguably it's not necessarily the best way to do the savings calculations but that's how the industry does it. So the industry calculates savings of course material expenses spent in an inclusive access model versus the print physical new list price. If we follow that math we have saved about 3.2 million dollars so far since 2018 spring for students who are in this model. Again this means that from a $200 access code they end up paying maybe $65 which is a significant saving. The advantages, these materials are available for students on the first day of class so as soon as they log into the LMS they can access the course material. It is lower than the list price all of them are exclusively digital and students can access all of this through Blackboard. Now the disadvantages they do need internet to access this. For a traditional ebook they can download an ebook reader on their phones so they can read those ebooks when they are not connected to the internet. But about 85% of the adoptions in this program currently is not just an ebook it's an access code it's courseware so it's something that's a bit more enhanced than just an ebook. Those softwares typically require internet access from students and we know from the last spring that that's a concern in many cases. The access codes and the ebooks in general students cannot resell. I honestly haven't followed exactly how popular the book buyback programs have been lately. I know they have been on a decline but that's just one of those items that these are the access codes especially for courseware expire after the semester once a student is done. I think that's pretty much the summary of the inclusive access model. Thank you. Now the advantages for digital materials usually. When ebooks as a product I would say first came around, goodness 10-15 years ago they have been around for a while. One of the primary selling points were the cost. Many of the companies promoted ebooks, course smart, vital source, all of the ebook readers that have been merging in and out of the industry that ebooks are at least 50-55% cheaper than a new print book. One of my comebacks to that previously was that they are still not always cheaper than a used version of the book or going to the library but undeniably they are cheaper than a print book. They are usually more accessible. Our partner currently is vital source for Ohio University and they are one of the premier ebook readers who have spent quite a bit of investment in becoming fully ADA compliant for our students. That goes for digital course materials available through the library as well. They can often be cheaply printed. Print on demand books can range for 10-15 dollars sometimes if that's something that students need. They are often designed responsively so that they are working on mobile devices equally as well as on a computer screen. That's a good development because that has been a concern for a while. They can be delivered through Blackboard as Kelly mentioned that there is a library integration within Blackboards to embed content right away into your course. The vital source ebook reader is also available as a tool within Blackboard so the students can just click on it and find themselves within the ebook that they are trying to read. We find that those are important steps for students so that they don't have to find login information and links to where they need to go when they read course materials. And most of them of course allow the highlighting and interaction with faculty and peers if the faculty members so allows. Okay I am going to send in the chat a link to a document that SDNI put together and then I'll try to share it on my screen as well. Can you see it on my screen now? Okay. So this document is kind of goes through the from a low bandwidth way all the way up to creating your own course materials at the bottom of different things that you can do or consider doing in order to help your students with the costs of their materials. So for example the very first option listed there is to put your complete textbook information in the university's textbook database. So that's the database that integrates with course offerings that students see when they're registering for classes. So and if you think about how early students register for the next semester's classes especially if you think about when they register in spring for next fall's classes. This can be a big hurdle for instructors to know their textbook materials that early but that does allow students to have the full range of options about purchasing. This earlier they know the required textbook the better chance they have of getting a discounted copy if that's available. And some studies have been done on Amazon's pricing of textbooks and of course the pricing of those textbooks rises as you get closer and closer to semester start and more and more students are purchasing the same materials. The next option there is asking you to consider placing a physical copy of your textbook on course reserve in the library. Now during COVID times this is not as useful as it typically is because we are probably not going to be sharing a single textbook every two hours with a different student. But typically this is actually a real a pretty good way to assure that if you have a student who can't afford the textbook at least they have access for a few hours at a time whenever the library is open to your assignments your assigned readings. And we can also put other things on reserve as well. We now have a large collection of bone models and huge collection of DVDs as well as microscope slides and other things. Another tactic that is actually super valued by students when you are using an expensive commercial textbook that's in multiple editions is to tell them that if it's okay to use a previous edition. And if it is okay to use a previous edition help them figure out how to use the previous edition. So if the page numbers have changed but the chapter headers are the same on your syllabus use chapter headers instead of page numbers so they know. The library can also scan and make electronic electronically available portions of books for you and we can use our electronic course reserve system or we can give those to you to put in blackboard. We already talked about linking to the library's electronic content or choosing a book that the libraries have available electronically. And then here's using OIT's digital course materials program and includes this includes the current list of publishers that are available through that program and a link to the program on the website. And then the bottom two are about OER right adopt something that is already been created for you to use in class or adapt something or create your own to use in your class. So that's a quick look through our textbook options and now I will attempt to switch back to the PowerPoint. I think I did it. All right I will also now send a link to the slide deck for the PowerPoint so that you have access to all the links that we sent in that are in the slides to. And if you have any questions feel free to speak up or type in the chat and SD feel free to also add anything I missed or anything you think we should bring up. I think we are open to any questions. It looks like it's taken a minute for that to load. There we go. Thank you Kelly. Yeah so these links here on the slide that are on the slide deck that I just sent include links to libraries websites that you can identify the subject librarians. Information on different services we have that many of which I just ran through in the affordability checklist as well as a web page that we have to help you learn more about open access and to find OER materials. And in the information technology section is a link to the digital course materials section of their website and maybe you want to mention Top Hat's relationship to OER. Yes I was just thinking about that too so Top Hat has a repository of low cost course content that is living in the Top Hat reader so it's fully accessible. Most of the times Top Hat has available assessments with these course content options or can embed assessments in these course content options. We have a partnership with Top Hat to leverage their low cost or free if it's an OER content course materials and use them in our classrooms in addition to their attendance tracking and assessment platform. It's called Top Hat Marketplace the course material list that they have and I would say course material prices they'll range again between three to like 50, 55 dollars per student. I guess I mentioned one last thing and then I definitely leave it up for questions. The inclusive access program with publisher content the only thing we need from faculty members is before the student registrations are starting for a given semester. We would like to know what course material they would like to use with what publisher partner. We will then confirm with the publisher that the content is indeed available in the program. Usually they all are except potentially older additions that are not currently available digitally from the publisher. We then work with our publisher partners to make sure the price points are appropriate and are set up in the system. We set the links in the LMS up for faculty members or they can do so so that the Opt Out link and the course content access links are available when the students are first coming through the experience. From a student standpoint they will first have access to the course materials on day one of the course. They will have a chance to decide if they want to opt out of receiving the course material during the ad drop period of the course. So that's typically about two weeks for spring and fall semester courses about a week for summer one and only a few days for summer two. So it just depends on the ad drop periods that are given course has. After the ad drop period if a student opted out of the course content they will no longer have access to it so they will have to decide if they want to buy it on their own or are going to go without. If they did not opt out the Bursar's office will be charging their student accounts for the appropriate fees. These fees are available on our website by federal law. We are required to list every course section and corresponding costs, student costs and the list price of a course material. So those are on the OIT website I will share with you currently. I think summer is up because that's the running semester very soon fall will be up there as well. So you can take a look at how many sessions are using this program and what students are paying in each. Over. Thanks Asti. This link will work. I grabbed it from our website. I think it is okay. Looks like it works. Okay. I appreciate everyone's time. Thanks for coming. Oh here's a couple of references to our big surveys if you'd like to read more. Hot off the press. Thank you. Please don't hesitate to reach out to anyone if you have more questions. Thank you very much. Thanks Asti. Bye everyone.