Open Education Resources OER at Ivy Tech: Saving Students Money while Teaching with Quality Content

Presentation Goals Primary Goal: Recruitment and Enrollment: Recruit and enroll Hoosiers from every demographic into high-demand, high-wage career pathways. Suggested topic areas: adult learner recruitment, 21st century scholars, serving adult students through partnerships, college connection coaching, targeted recruitment strategies, Achieve Your Degree, meeting the needs of working adults Secondary Goal: Student Success: Ensure every student persists towards their educational objective. Suggested topic areas: eight week classes, wrap around services, gateway courses, structured scheduling, mentoring and coaching, research on success, applied and co-curricular learning opportunities, advising, technology to drive instruction

OER Initiative The OER Initiative (GreenSource) began at the college in the spring of 2016 with one statewide online course that was developed using OER based on curriculum committee recommendation and partnership with a course developer and instructional designer. The purpose of the GreenSource Initiative at Ivy Tech is to dramatically reduce the cost of course materials for students while still providing quality content, to empower faculty to have more ownership of their resources (add to, take from, modify) in order to meet the needs of their students/discipline.

How does it work? The GreenSource Initiative is currently led by an OER Cross Discipline Team made of Ivy Tech Program Chairs, Department Chairs and Deans that was formed in 2016 to drive strategy around OER. This group of individuals also help to decide what OER materials will be developed for what courses. In most cases, members represent both their campus and their curriculum committees or are strategic within Systems Office. Ivy Tech currently partners with Lumen Learning, one of the leading OER providers on the content curation, creation, and delivery of OER content at the college. There are currently 18 existing courses that have an OER material option available. Each OER material option is added to the Follett book list as a GreenSource title. A handful of those courses are also fully built statewide online courses.

OER Benefits From the spring of 2016 and beyond, each semester has represented an increase in OER creation and adoption. This increase has led to more awareness across the college and has led to significant cost-savings for students. In the fall 2017 semester alone, at the average price of $100 per textbook, students saved over 1 million dollars. These cost savings can make taking OER courses at Ivy Tech more attractive and attainable for non-traditional learners or learners who are paying their own tuition and material fees.

OER Results Previous research done at other community colleges and four-year universities has shown that there is no significant difference in student outcomes when comparing courses that use OER as the core instructional material and courses that use traditional publisher textbooks. In a few colleges and universities, an increase in student success was identified in courses that use OER as the core instructional material. This indicates that the implementation of OER does not appear to negatively affect student learning outcomes. Additionally, this information suggests that the cost that students spend on traditional publisher material is not necessarily warranted in every academic course taken (Allen, Guzman-Alvarez, Molinaro, & Larsen, 2015; Hilton III, 2016).

The benefits of OER are the significant cost-savings for students, but also the ease of personalization and modification to the OER content by faculty and the fact that faculty would no longer be subject to edition changes by a publisher. In my experience, there is generally much more content than can be covered or should be covered with our student body in the Lumen Learning. In the Student Success content provided there is an overabundance of information for a 1-credit hour course. I can choose to make this content private that way it is not part of our text but I can come back and include it all or select parts of it instead of deleting it.

OER Development Process Once courses are identified for OER, interested faculty apply for a OER development position with the instructional design team. This faculty member reviews the material provided my Lumen Learning but also has the ability to go beyond this resource to curate a variety of materials. There are five milestones for the OER development. Three content reviewers are assigned to the project. At each milestone, an update is sent to the three reviewers as well as the curriculum committee. Feedback from all are welcomed at each milestone.

Milestones A spreadsheet is used to track the course objectives and learning outcomes in connected to the OER materials. The developer also includes any videos, resources, and materials that would also be included to supplement the reading. Milestone 1 focused on editing the provided Lumen content. Milestone 2 continued this but started adding in content to this existing text. Milestone 3 has been reached for the IVYT111 project I am currently working on. Besides the text, I am developing a course shell in IvyLearn that includes assignments to coincide with the reading. The OER content can be used individually or with this course material entirely or module by module.

Next Steps I will take the feedback from the IVYT curriculum committee and the OER reviewers to make adjustments to the OER content and the assignment suggestions in preparation for sharing a “final draft” of the OER content in milestone 4. This stage also includes infusing the material with Ivy Tech Community College specific information. In milestone 5, I will be sharing this OER content in the course shell along with assignment materials. Once links are loaded in the course editing cannot be done to the Lumen Learning material. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/ivytech-collegesuccess-lumen/

References Hilton III, J. (2016). Open educational resources and college textbook choices: A review of research on efficacy and perceptions. Educational Technology Research and Development, 64(4), 573-590. 10.1007/s11423-016-9434-9 Allen, G., Guzman-Alvarez, A., Smith, A., Gamage, A., Molinaro, M., & Larsen, D. S. (2015). Evaluating the effectiveness of the open-access ChemWiki resource as a replacement for traditional general chemistry textbooks. Chemistry Education Research and Practice, 16(4), 939.