 Hello, I'm Leanne George, Coordinator of the Spec Survey Program at the Association of Research Libraries, and I'd like to thank you all for joining us for this Spec Survey webcast. Today we'll hear about the results of the survey on affordable course content and open educational resources, and these results have been published in Spec Kit 351. Before we begin, I have just a couple announcements. First, everyone but the presenters has been muted to cut down on background noise, so if you are part of a group today, feel free to speak among yourselves. You won't be disturbing the presentation. But we do want you to join the conversation by typing questions in the chat box in the lower left corner of your screen. We'll answer as many questions as possible at the end of the presentation, and I will read the questions aloud before the presenters answer them, because I realize you all won't be able to see the questions yourselves. The webcast is being recorded, and we will send all the registrants the slides and a link to the recording in the next week. Now, let me introduce today's presenters. Christy Jensen is Program Development Lead for the E-Learning Support Initiative at the University of Minnesota Libraries. Joe Salem is Associate Dean for Learning, Undergraduate Services, and Commonwealth Campus Libraries at Penn State University. Anita Walts is Open Education and Online Learning Environments Librarian at Virginia Tech Libraries. So use the hashtag ARLSpecKit351 to continue the conversation with them on Twitter. And now, let me turn the presentation over to Anita. Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for attending today. We're really excited to share some of our observations from the survey. First, before we get started, I want to present a roadmap and some brief definitions. In this presentation, we'll discuss why we took on this research and survey findings related to institution-wide initiatives and library involvement, including the focus, origination, governance, and common functions of affordable course content and open educational resource initiatives. We'll discuss faculty initiatives, tenure and promotion realities, and the types of faculty practices and library activities common in this work. Then we'll end with everybody's favorite topic, the future. We're especially interested in your questions, so as Leanne mentioned, please post questions via the chat during and after the presentation, and we'll address as many as we can at the end. So very quickly, two definitions are important in this webinar, affordable course content, and open educational resources. We defined affordable course content, or ACC as we like to call it, as including materials that are library licensed or available at low additional cost to students. While there may be cost barriers, the direct cost to students are either zero or very low. So that is ACC, no or low cost materials. The other term that you'll hear frequently in this presentation is OER, Open Educational Resources. We defined OER in line with the Hewlett Foundation's definition as any type or format of content or software that is freely available and either in the public domain or licensed with an intellectual property license that allows modification and redistribution. Some common examples of open educational resources would be four of the six Creative Commons license, those that allow modification and redistribution. Academic institutions are increasingly realizing that access to and affordability of learning materials are problematic for students, and are a contributor to students dropping, failing, or withdrawing from courses. These institutions and the libraries within them are developing programmatic approaches to support creation, adoption, and adaptation of affordable course content and open educational resources. We see this occurring at all levels of education from K-12 to university, while our research covers only ARL institutions. We want you to know that many other institutions are actively exploring these topics as well. Regarding the spec survey, we wanted to know what libraries are doing. So we intentionally cast a wide net on the access, affordability, and student success initiatives related to course learning materials including both affordable course content and OER. And we focused on identifying collaborative campus-wide partnerships that are influential in starting and implementing such initiatives. So let's talk about the survey. The survey ran for six weeks in March and April 2016. Over half of ARL member institutions responded to the survey. Of these 46 or 70 percent of the respondents either have or are planning an initiative, and nearly 20 percent plan to investigate ACC and OER initiatives in the near future. We could have looked at only purely OER approaches but knew that some libraries, though not all, are formally leveraging library subscriptions, OER, and more in support of student learning. So we broadened our scope to include initiatives which utilize many types of potential course content including library license materials and materials with a low direct cost to students. There are various philosophical and pragmatic reasons for each approach which we won't get into here. We learned that 70 percent of respondents focus on a combination of openly licensed and library subscribed resources. Somewhat surprising was the finding that only 26 percent of institution initiatives indicated that they focus exclusively on openly licensed content. The campus-wide initiatives reported in response to the survey included open coursework initiatives, creation of digital course packs, interactive course companions, open or low cost textbook adoption, creation, and use of public domain openly licensed library subscribed materials. So who is initiating, implementing, and leading these kinds of initiatives? We're happy to say that libraries are very involved. Campus-wide ACC and OER initiatives tend to involve multiple members of the campus community both in origination and governance. We asked survey respondents to identify all of the entities that played a part in originating their initiative and those involved in implementing it. By far, and in both categories, libraries were the largest group. 64 percent of respondents indicated that their library was involved in originating their campus-wide initiative. And 73 percent indicated that the library is involved in implementing the initiative. For contrast, the second most frequent originators and implementers were upper level administration at 38 percent, and the campus teaching and learning group at 36 percent. While not I was involved, libraries are frequently involved and were nearly twice as likely to be involved than other groups. Other members of the campus community often involved included instructional design groups, student organizations, academic departments, and bookstores. Several respondents also mentioned collaboration among local, state, or province-wide library consortia. Organized governance of ACC OER initiatives appears to still be emerging with fewer than 40 percent of respondents indicating that they have a standing committee, limited term task force, or working group dedicated to the campus-wide ACC OER initiative. For those with a governing body, though, libraries were very well represented. 89 percent of respondents indicated that the library participates. Sorry, 89 percent of respondents with a governing board, governing group, indicated that the library participates in that body. And 40 percent of those indicated that the library leads that governing body. Now we'll hear from Kristi regarding program funding. I add my thanks to Anita for joining us today to talk about this topic. I'm going to talk a little bit here about what we learned about how ACC OER initiatives were funded. As you all probably know, academic libraries have been turning their attention to many new areas of support on campus, data management, publishing, interdisciplinary research, and more. And they frequently have to decide among these various competing priorities when determining how to allocate or reallocate funds and personnel. Despite these many competing priorities, numerous libraries have provided significant funding to support affordable course content and OER efforts we found from the survey. Over half of the responding institutions have utilized funds from their general operating budgets and about a quarter use special project funds. Less than a third of responding institutions indicated that external grants provided funding for their efforts. Once new efforts have been initiated, plans for continued support often indicate the perceived value and impact to date. In our survey we found out that three-fourths of institutions indicated that they have funding continuation plans in place for ACC OER on their campus. And it appears that the results then of these efforts are significant and valued. And this bodes well for continued growth both at participating institutions and those that are planning new efforts in this area. When asked what items funding covered, the most common use was to provide direct grants or stipends to faculty with almost three-fourths, evidently the magic number when it comes to this area of the survey, providing incentive grant programs. Given the interest in incentive grant programs and perhaps the perceived importance based on this interest, we wanted to highlight more information from the survey in this area. If you harken back to our early slides that Anita presented, you'll recall that 46 institutions have or are planning an ACC OER program. Of those 25 institutions, they indicate that they offer financial incentives as part of their program. The varying amounts might be tied to a number of factors. If you look at the data, you will see groupings in the $200 to $250 range. I suspect this might be related to institutional participation in the Open Textbook Network Workshop where faculty can earn that amount for attending and then writing a review of an open textbook. The next grouping ranges from $1,000 to $1,250 which would match up with many of the incentive programs aimed at helping faculty move from a traditional high-cost textbook to other alternatives, digital course packs, open textbooks, or OER contents and more. Finally, the very large grants are likely tied to the publication of open textbooks at several institutions. The promising thing about this wide variance in funding incentives is that you can begin small if needed and eventually move on to bigger projects as your program gains traction or more support in your library or on your campus. One final area of note, over half of the institutions offering incentives also provide instructional design support. This may be an expanding area for library interactions with faculty at some institutions and a little bit more on faculty incentive grants. The final thing we wanted to touch on related to faculty incentives are the types of requirements that are included with the provisions of the grants. Those who are thinking about implementing new grant funding programs might be interested in these requirements. Grant providers frequently had more than one requirement but these varied widely across institutions. You can see that there is broad interest in affordability savings data with over 60% of libraries requiring course size and textbook cost and 50% requiring continued project updates. Openly licensed content both development and use and sharing of content as well as assessment were other areas that demonstrate where we could expect to see additional impact with potential downstream use as well as savings to students. And now I'm going to hand the phone back to Anita when she'll talk about institutional policies and practices. Great. At many ARL institutions, tenure and promotion are primary faculty motivators. While several respondents indicated that selected departments look favorably on the ACC OER efforts and that faculty could argue for OER as a form of scholarship, exactly zero respondents indicated that adoption, adaptation, or creation of ACC OER is a formally encouraged tenure and promotion activity. Tenure and promotion policies do not formally encourage faculty adoption, adaptation, or creation of ACC OER. Yet, nearly all institutions, this is another area of institutional policy, that nearly all institutions have intellectual property policies that specify ownership and rights to original works including research works, curriculum, learning materials created as well as software. At times, IP policies pose a barrier for authors of instructional material who wish to affix an open license and share their work beyond the institution. A majority, 21 of 33 of respondents, fortunately reported clarity regarding faculty ownership of teaching material which implies for those faculty that it might be easy to openly license or share their original learning materials. However, other respondents described their institutional policies as complicated, dependent on how heavily university resources were used, determined by the class of employment, dependent on whether or not the university could monetize the original works created by the faculty or that the curriculum resources are owned jointly or exclusively by the institution. Faculty ownership of original learning software is even more murky than policies surrounding faculty ownership of original learning materials. So we have a ways to go here. Next, Joe is going to talk with us about current faculty ACC OER practices. Joe. Thank you, Anita. And thank you, I want to join everyone else in thanking you for participating today, especially so close to the beginning of the semester. So this is really focused on what current faculty practices are around ACC and OER at responding institutions. One of the benefits of ACC and OER adoption is an expansion or a potential expansion of the types of materials used in these courses. While current faculty practices at responding institutions look pretty traditional, there is some evidence that their portfolio of resources is expanding. The majority of faculty at responding institutions have adopted or created textual course content with the textbook at the top of that list. These data make supporting and using resources like OpenStacks and the Open Textbook Network a very good way for libraries interested in ACC and OER to get started. Majorities also use library license content and multimedia. I think we were all pleasantly surprised to see that so many institutions reported that faculty had created their own OER. The interest is there among many of our colleagues, and this opens up opportunities to help them share that content or to reuse the work of others before creating their own. On assessment, at the risk of assessment shaming, which is something I think that we as a profession in general and people like me with an assessment background in particular often do, it was clear from the results that assessment of these initiatives is an area of opportunity among respondents in particular and within libraries in general. Only 17 institutions were currently assessing their initiatives and another 19 planned to assess. The most common metrics used among the respondents were student savings and numbers of students using these resources, likely reflecting the focus on access and affordability as objectives for their initiatives. Obviously program objectives drive assessment, so the metrics selected at libraries interested in getting started with ACC and OER may differ. For those programs seeking to deliver pedagogical innovation through ACC and OER, adaption or creation, assessment of student learning or user experience with the generated resources are recommended metrics. Recent studies suggest that overall students in courses that use OER perform at a similar or slightly better level than their four-fee counterparts, so local assessment would focus more on locally developed resources and their impact. By combining cost reduction and pedagogical innovation, these initiatives also make student retention a potential objective, so metrics aligned with student retention may have interest in those cases. The survey then focused on overall library support services for ACC and OER. Institutions were asked to select all of the ACC and OER support services that they provide. As you can see, there was some variability, but a very nice suite of services available at many of the 42 institutions responding to this question. The surprise to me was the high number of libraries providing copyright and licensing consultations. For those interested in getting started, any of these services would serve as a good starting point. So finally, with regard to the services provided around ACC and OER, we asked respondents to indicate to the staff who support ACC and OER initiatives. Respondents were asked to select all of the departments in which ACC and OER initiatives were supported. Overall, initiatives have not found a single home, but in some ways these results reinforce the services that we just discussed. The four departments indicated above make good sense with scholar of the communication, likely providing the intellectual property and licensing and publishing services just discussed. Depending on the institution, liaisons can be doing outreach or serving and consulting roles. The same can be said of teaching and learning departments and public services and reference, likely helping to identify existing resources. In many ways, the multi-departmental mode within many libraries fits the model at the institutions where the library has the opportunity to partner with many units to administer these programs. There was great variation in the number of staff involved, likely depending on the model. At the low end of the range is a single open education or scholarly communication librarian. And at the high end of the range is an approach to ACC and OER that is fully embedded with the liaison or public service program. The median seems to be to be fit that multi-departmental model. So with that, I will transition to Chrissy and she will talk a little bit more about future library roles with ACC and OER. Thank you. So finally, we just want to talk a little bit about what we heard from our respondents about the future of library in this area. Future of libraries in this area. As you might expect, Anita, Joe, and I, with our interest in this, see many areas of potential growth for libraries going forward. Luckily, our survey respondents seem to confer with those leanings as well. It is clear that libraries have opportunities to provide, did I go forward? There we go. I went too far forward on the slides. It is clear that libraries have opportunities to provide strong leadership for ACC, OER programs and efforts. Libraries are often the sole leaders on campus but also are out and about working on campus with a variety of partners and collaborators. ACC, OER specialists and library liaisons can provide a voice for strong advocacy, promotion, and awareness raising about these topics and issues. The recent Hewlett sponsored Babson Report indicates growing faculty awareness of OER, but adoptions have not increased significantly. Also, tenure and promotion systems do not typically include or value work related to teaching with affordable open content or publishing the same. There is definitely more work to be done in this area, as Anita mentioned. Library participation spans both traditional roles like discovery and systems that provide ease of access and new roles including publishing and hosting open textbooks or other open content. Many institutions are making use of existing systems like institutional repositories, while others are installing and utilizing new systems like press books. And finally, OER ACC efforts provide opportunities for libraries to continue their historic collaborative behavior across institutions. In order to be strategic and effective, we do not want to be all be publishing the latest OER work and basic social work. Instead, we need to devise methods for communicating and sharing information that allows us to expand the breadth and depth of quality OER material available to our faculty. Finally, creating and sharing sustainable models for funding ACC OER will be needed if we hope to continue work in this area in the future. Along with sustainable models, robust assessment with standards that allow comparison across institutions will be needed as well. Overall, we were pleased to see the number of libraries that raise investing in ACC OER efforts. We believe the survey provides a blueprint that others can modify to fit their circumstances as they consider and implement new programs to fit the needs of their faculty and institutions. And that is the end of our presentation, and we welcome your questions. And thank you for taking the time to listen to us, but we'd really love to engage a little bit in conversation with all of you and find out what you're thinking about the survey and what questions you might have. So yes, please join the conversation by typing questions in the chat box in the lower left corner of your screen. We do have one here from Kim who asked if you got any further breakdowns on the sources for library funds. Any funds coming from collections or IT or other sources? So this is Anita. Kim, thanks for your question. The survey was essentially in two parts, and the questions about funding were directed toward the institution-wide initiatives. We're seeing sometimes funding coming from libraries, but funding sometimes coming from the provost office or coming from other units around campus. So we didn't dive deeply into how libraries themselves are funding this. Actually, Christy, you might have... No, I think that might not be correct. Well, I agree with Anita that we... When we were writing the survey, we had to make determinations about how much detail to go into. And I would say that we weren't able to provide that level of detail in this particular survey, but I do anecdotally know from many conversations that Anita and I and Joe have had with others that I think that when you ask the question in the chat box, you mentioned like collections or IT. I do know that some institutions have been using money from collections in order to support these efforts. And so I think when you look at the number of people involved in the departments and where they're coming from and you see how varied it is across the different institutions, as Joe was pointing out, I think the same thing just anecdotally, based on what we know from conversations with people, the same thing would be true for where libraries are pulling money to fund these sorts of efforts. So that doesn't give you an exact answer, but I do think it just varies. It's another one of those areas that varies widely. So for reference... Go ahead. Sorry. So for reference, this is question number eight when you have access to the full tax, there's a breakdown of everything that all of the comments and responses to that, but they're not library specific institution-wide. And the follow-up question is what kinds of grant sources are the universities using? So to my knowledge, the most common grant funding that was used were by institutions. So again, they didn't specify but just based on the institutions that I'm familiar with, one of the most common grant resources was early on the Open Textbook Network grant when that was the model that was available. I'm not familiar with a lot of other grant resources that are external to the universities that others have been able to get. It's a question that arises frequently. People ask where they might be able to get external funding, but I haven't seen any indication that folks have been able to get that kind of external money from other places. So this is the one thing I would add. It wasn't in our results quote, one emerging area for external funding just from the Gates Foundation. This seems to be an area where they're interested, but not at a single institution level. They seem to be really interested in what can be done at scale and looking at multiple institutions. So if you have the ability to partner with institutions, especially somewhat peers, but with differing maybe student profiles or different staffing factors, they seem to be interested in those types of programs as well. This is Anita again. I will say if you're wanting to look really broadly at lots of institutions, community colleges have benefited greatly from the Department of Labor grants, there are several foundations that are actively involved in supporting these kinds of initiatives at two-year institutions. So while those funds are not available for four years, there are good reasons why community colleges and junior colleges, two-year colleges, however you call them, are very active as well in this area. Karen asks, what did you find out about the appropriateness of the current type of library resources to serve the needs of the OER ACC initiatives? Karen, that's very controversial. There are people who are of two minds about this. One is to really prioritize affordability and then there are some with a strong philosophical commitment to try to not take on the cost of those things, take on the cost of resources, but to provide open alternatives that can be edited and freely shared without copyright restrictions. I think I would defer to Christy and Joe because you're more familiar with the nuts and bolts of actually using those materials. Would you like to comment? Could you clarify what you mean by appropriateness, Karen? I'm not sure that I... Is it that tension between affordable versus OER, or do you mean like do libraries own content that's appropriate for the classroom, or is there another nuance there? I'm not sure if I understand that part of the question. And if it's the latter, whether libraries have material that's appropriate for the classroom, I think we didn't ask that specifically, but if you look at responses to the middle section, the middle section is really hard to indicate, but there's a section on ACC and OER resources that indicate the types of resources that faculty are using. Just after that, there are questions related to where the library resources, licensed content fit into that mix. I think it varies a bit. One of the things also in the supporting documents, we were looking at the even repositories that libraries might support for OER content either created or used at the institution. And those vary. There are only a handful among the respondents that were really focused entirely on OER. In some ways these resources are embedded in other subscriptions or there are parts of other programs. The repository is a good example where there might be OER in the general institutional repository and not necessarily an OER repository. And so it's not necessarily the case that there's a lot of resources specifically for teaching and learning or for the classroom, but they're part of overall packages or other subscriptions in general. I guess I would add, this is Christy again, I would add to what Joe's saying by, and kind of commenting on what Anita was saying about there being philosophical differences. So both related to the survey and in the work that I do on a day-to-day basis, there's not OER available for every person who comes to me who's interested in doing something more affordable for their students. And I think that that is demonstrated by what Joe was talking about, the portion of the survey that indicates that faculty are embracing a wide variety of things that they're vetting and choosing the things that are best for them in the classroom. Adding on to that, again, I don't think that the survey addresses whether or not library collections in general have the sorts of content that work in the classroom, but my experience has been that it is the case that we do have a wide range of things that faculty are surprised to find out about and that help them customize the content, especially when they've been dissatisfied when the commercial textbook wasn't meeting their needs. And the last thing I would point out is I think one of the lessons from all the work around this particular survey and OER in general for me is you'd be surprised at how much is already in our collections or our resources. So Minnesota, because you could talk much more to this, but they do a really great job working with their bookstore of generating lists of what is being adopted in the classroom, running it against current licensing and then dropping that into course reserves. And it's a great model that if you can work with your bookstore to get those lists or just get those adoption lists or even target that, you'd be surprised at how much you're already licensing that's being used in the classroom and that can be pretty automatically dropped into the learning management system. Yeah, I think we had 400 courses in the spring semester that we had a multi-user ebook for. And we weren't on the forefront of this other, we learned about this from other institutions that were already doing this. But those kinds of partnerships, I think that's another thing that the survey emphasizes is the importance of the partnerships on campus to creating successful pieces that add up to a complete program. And I think the other thing that is kind of hopeful with regards to when you look at the survey information, if you haven't started work in this area, you don't have to do everything. You can pick and choose the things that are strategic for your institution and you don't have to implement things at full scale. You don't have to install press books and be publishing open textbooks that way. You can be creating open textbooks or modifying open textbooks and publish them via an existing institutional repository. I agree with... Go ahead. No, go ahead. I'm changing the subject here. Okay. I wanted to agree with Christie with regard to the realities of libraries already doing some of these things in various departments. And one of the early challenges that we had was trying to understand how we should ask questions to flesh out libraries who are in a very, very early stage of thinking about affordability and we're doing some of the regular things, reserves, multi-user e-books, things that are easier but might not be thought of as an initiative. So we really wanted to capture a lot of those and we think those are good places to start and to start looking at what you already do and is this something to build on? So, Leigh Ann. I was just wondering if there's anything more you can say about tenure and promotion and ACC, OER, there seems to be some interest in that. Sure. So right now, tenure policies don't seem to explicitly support creation, adoption, adaptation of openly licensed resources or public domain resources. We know that some faculty are getting departmental support. We know that some faculty are presenting their work in that area as a work of scholarship. And one of the other thoughts we had was this is one of the major distinctives between adoption, creation, adaptation at an R1 institution or a comprehensive university or an institution that's much more focused on teaching. So it's a barrier but it's also an opportunity. It'll be interesting to see if there are changes in the next few years or if we just learn to communicate with faculty about the importance or the value of these kinds of efforts. So I would add also that even though it's not explicit in most of the policies it seems to be a really significant area for opportunity. Things like the faculty incentive programs that we saw in the results, those types of programs help because obviously they can be competitive. Even if it's small, it's a small grant. Really the outcomes related to that, the reporting that is related to that can result in scholarship about teaching and learning for the faculty member. So even in an adoption, if those are the goals of a program, those incentive programs are a good way of getting faculty something out of it even in a traditional tenure and promotion environment. To change the topic again, Jennifer has a pretty nitty-gritty question of how do you get the books into the catalog and is it different if you have a shared catalog with other libraries? So I would just... I can't answer the catalog question but I think it's in the supporting documentation. I think it's the University of Hawaii who has an OER repository. And one of the things that they're doing there, they're using that as kind of a one-stop shop for anyone who's using OER even if it's not locally generated or created. And so if it's an open-fax textbook or anything from one of the other major services or programs or a neighboring institution, they will get it into that repository with some of the course information. Students can check there to see if their open content is available for their courses. And so that might be a model to explore. The other thing you'll see are these referatories where they won't necessarily grab a local copy of the resource because they change and that's one of the benefits of OER is that they can be updated but they will create stable links to whatever that resource is. But we'll do it outside of the cataloging because some of the flexibility that has to be involved in some of that. It's my understanding that some new mark records have been released. Anita, did you know anything about that from I thought the open textbook network was releasing some mark records? Yes, they have created through a partnership I believe with Colorado State. They've created a number of mark records. I assume that it's a large percentage of the collection. So those might be available for people to get a hold of if they want to get those books into their catalogs. So on the open textbook library website there is a link for our textbooks and underneath that it says Discovery and you can download the mark record batch which is really exciting. The other thing that I would point out and it's kind of anyway this isn't related to the surveys related to my experience but a lot of the work that I've done with faculty related to OER involves mediation. So discovering quality OER that my faculty have been willing to consider requires a bit of vetting on the front end. So I'm fine with introducing them to the open textbook library because that's a limited set that's been vetted but sending them to look for OER in general can be kind of precarious I think because there are so many different things out there that maybe don't meet the quality standards of the faculty and so I would prefer to go through the material and give them things to vet rather than have them unable to locate things that they think are worthwhile and then becoming discouraged and thinking that there's nothing that they would like to consider and kind of developing a negative attitude towards open educational resources. Sort of the difference between fishing in the ocean versus a smaller pond. The more we can curate and direct faculty to places where the more appropriate material more complete material is available is really helpful. It's really easy to get lost in trying to find what you're looking for. And there's quite a bit of dated material sometimes as well in some of the resources and so you have to decide whether dated material is okay. But you can update it. You can. Sometimes it looks like 1980s web pages. Yeah. Well, I'd like to thank you all for joining us today to discuss the results of this survey on affordable course content and open educational resources. We have recorded this presentation and all the registrants will receive the slides and a link to the recording next week. So join me in thanking our presenters today and I hope to see you on our next webcast. Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much.