 Thanks for joining us for our presentation on OER creation as scholarly practice. My name is Amber Deer King. I'm an arts and humanities liaison librarian. Hi, I'm Matt Rowell. I'm a scholarly communications librarian. Hello, I'm Steve Schlicker. I'm a professor in the Department of Mathematics and we're all at Grand Valley State University. We'd like to start with some brief context about our institution. GVSU is located in Western Michigan, the main campus indicated on the map here, and we have about 22,000 students, largely undergraduates. We fall into the new Carnegie Category for professional doctorates, and we've also included our mission statement from our latest strategic plan Reach Higher 2025, which shows our focus on teaching and scholarship broadly defined. With that institutional context in mind, we'd like to talk about our project and why OER is scholarship matters. We were part of a CNU Institute on OER this past year, and one of our goals has been to get OER that meets the criteria to be eligible to be recognized as the highest tier of scholarship at Grand Valley. As we've been working towards this goal, we've been asking what are the benefits of connecting OER to the evaluation of scholarly or creative activity. We've defined several areas where those benefits can be seen. First, OER is newer than our systems of recognizing scholarship. Since these systems were built before OER as we knew it today existed, they weren't designed to handle OER, nor should we expect them to. Rather than artificially constraining our work to fit into these systems, let's imagine how we might update those systems to better handle the realities of modern scholarship. Second, tying OER to our scholarly and creative activity means being able to recognize the work, effort, and time spent on OER in our annual reviews, as well as tenure and promotion processes. Third, as faculty, we are required to create scholarship. If OER fits clearly into that scholarship requirement, it will become easier to dedicate time to OER or justify the time we spend as part of our regular workload rather than something extra or supplemental that we volunteer our time for. An additional area where we see significant benefits is how this connection makes it easier to draw on pre-existing supports, grants, sabbaticals, course releases, etc. All exist as supports for scholarly and creative activity. If we are able to get OER recognized as top tier scholarship, more faculty will be empowered to take full advantage of the resources at hand to support their work. And hopefully this will also lower barriers to entry and encourage more faculty to engage with this work. Grand Valley's official policy on evaluating faculty scholarship uses a framework established in 1990 by Ernest Boyer, which describes four equally valid types of scholarly activity. The scholarship of discovery, developing new knowledge or products to answer a question, which is often what we think about with the phrase scholarship or research. The scholarship of integration, which involves combining knowledge across disciplines. The scholarship of application, which applies existing knowledge in an area of expertise to societal and professional problems. And the scholarship of teaching, sometimes the scholarship of teaching and learning, which focuses on the study and improvement of teaching and learning. With Boyer's model in mind, Grand Valley then recognizes three tiers of activity for any kind of scholarship corresponding roughly to the degree of peer review, disciplinary impact and reach of the work. Faculty face more pressure, explicit and implicit, to produce work in the first category, which is required for tenure and promotion, more encouraged by departments and disciplines, and is eligible for more university support in terms of sabbaticals, release time, or grants. When our policy was last updated, OER were explicitly listed as an example in category two. This was a good and important step in terms of OER awareness, but nearly all of our incentives push faculty to invest the most time in category one work. As a result, it's a lot easier for faculty to justify the time and effort spent on journal articles or scholarly book chapters than on creating OER. We seek to reframe OER as potential category one scholarship to open up that full range of incentives, explicit and implicit, to faculty who might create OER, and to make it easier for them to see their work as worthwhile scholarly effort. The first step in our argument is connecting OER to Boyer's model. We argue that OER can fit well into three of Boyer's four forms of scholarship. As a scholarship of integration, OER can bring together knowledge from multiple disciplines or synthesize specialized information into more general patterns. For example, a sustainability textbook might bring together engineering, sociology, and political science scholarship. As the scholarship of application, OER have tremendous potential to apply existing specialized knowledge to societal and professional problems, and OER might apply mathematical concepts like linear independence and span to the challenges of cryptography. As the scholarship of teaching, OER can model and share effective teaching and assessment practices, as in a textbook sharing an innovative approach to writing instruction. Good OER embody the idea that you do not truly understand a topic until you can teach it, communicating complex disciplinary knowledge and transforming it through the author's pedagogical expertise. Of course, our criteria already acknowledged the potential scholarly character of OER. The bigger challenge is arguing that at least some OER should be eligible for consideration alongside more established, familiar forms of scholarly output, like journal articles and scholarly monographs. In order for a product to qualify for this top tier of scholarship at Grand Valley, it has to be publicly accessible and disseminated outside of Grand Valley. Now, in theory, dissemination should be easy for OER because that's the whole point you want to disseminate your OER. But in reality, this is a challenge because there's no central system in place for people to post OER and for others to discover your OER. Some potential venues for sharing OER include institutional repositories like ScholarWorks, which is one we use, Canvas Commons, because anybody with a Canvas account can access that material. There are places where you can create and publish free coursework like OpenLearn Creator, Wikimedia, OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. There are discipline focused collections and you can use a place like GitHub to store OER. But again, the difficulty is in people finding your OER. The other piece to qualify for this top tier of scholarly work is that a product has to undergo a process to judge its quality. And this is maybe a bigger issue for OER because there's no standard process of peer review for OER. There are some places that do peer review or validation. For example, the Open Textbook Library features post-publication reviews of around 60% of the OER it includes. Some of the items in the Merlot OER repository receive post-publication peer review and endorsement. There's a contributor marketplace in the readers community that hosts frequent calls for peer reviewers for OER. And there are discipline-based organizations. For example, the American Institute of Mathematics reviews and endorses OER as part of its Open Textbook initiative. But perhaps we think a more effective measure of the quality of the OER is who uses it. For example, the textbook that's shown here, Active Calculus, it's been adopted by over 30 different high schools and colleges across the country. And so it reaches a very large audience. Of course, that case of widespread adoption is exemplary and shouldn't be considered the standard. But we believe that widespread adoption should be considered a significant form of peer validation and should qualify an OER for our highest category of scholarship. With all these ideas in mind, we wrote up a proposal to get OER considered as our top tier Category 1 scholarship and submitted it to Faculty Senate. It's been made a charge with FPPC, which is our Faculty Personnel and Policy Committee for the academic year, and we are waiting to hear the outcome. If you'd like to read it, it's been made available in our institutional repository, and you can access it via this link. In closing, we'd like to offer some possible next steps for you. Questions to ask if you're interested in advancing the idea of OER as scholarly work at your institution.