What’s Open at Lane?

Jan 13, 2017 | News, OER

By Ian Coronado, Interim Dean of Academic Technology. Lane Community College, Eugene, Oregon

Victoria Koldewyn, "Exploring OER Into the Next Frontier" by Lane Community College is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Victoria Koldewyn, “Exploring OER Into the Next Frontier” by Lane Community College is licensed under CC BY 4.0

 

Humble Beginnings

2017 sees Lane Community College enter its 10th year of investigating and providing Open Educational Resources (OER).

OER were first introduced to Lane Community College in Spring 2007, when Lane faculty initiated steps that would bring Hal Plotkin to present at the Lane 2007 Spring Faculty and Staff Conference. As an OER pioneer from the Foothill-De Anza Community College District in California, Mr. Plotkin demonstrated to Lane faculty and staff the potential of OERs at college campuses in his presentation “Building and Using Public Domain/Open Education Resources as Substitutes for Commercial Textbooks.” (The Promise of Open Education, May 2010)

This enthusiasm for OER was picked up by students and faculty who laid the groundwork for the OER Faculty Fellowship. These pioneers of OER at Lane agreed to eschew traditional publisher textbook resources in favor of openly licensed materials. The OER vanguard made great progress, but as within a few years we saw interest in new adoptions fade. This in turn led to OER 2.0 at Lane that brought about:

  • the reformation of the OER Steering Committee which developed a multi-part work plan
  • the moving away from our traditional awards of iPads for making a class textbook free to offering faculty OER adoption grants and curriculum development hours.
  • a new focus on adoption of existing OER using Open Textbook Library workshops, peer-review grants, and integrating materials already licensed by the Lane Library
  • support for six instructors receiving grants through Open Oregon

These methods resulted in measurable increase of OER adoptions and sparked interest from a new community of OER practitioners

The Sustaining WIN

A big win for OER at Lane is the recent leasing of broadband spectrum (see Oregon WIN) to Sprint Networks. The revenue generated from this agreement has allowed Lane to offer faculty the aforementioned OER adoption grants as well as hire a full-time OER Librarian for a two year period. With textbooks making up the 2nd highest student expense, the OER Steering Committee’s goal is to continue to remove barriers to student access and success. If we can prove successful in this endeavor and show real assistance to students, we’ll look at making OER efforts sustainable by implementing a $1/credit OER fee. This will allow the OER Librarian position and the faculty OER adoption grants to continue once our initial funding source is exhausted.

Current State of OER at Lane

This Winter 2017, Lane is welcoming our first full-time OER Librarian with Meggie Wright joining our team. Meggie is joined by part-time support specialist Victoria Koldewyn, who has time dedicated to help faculty with the adoption and implementation of OER in their classes.

Current goals for OER at Lane include, get a better accounting of all the courses using OER at Lane, report those courses by becoming fully compliant with Oregon HB 2871, and increase the amount of OER courses offered annually.

We’re hoping that Meggie and Victoria can help us get a more complete picture of courses that are using OER and Low-Cost materials (LC) courses. By our current accounting there are more than 266 course sections at Lane offered annually that are OER or LC but every week we find new courses, either by new adoptions or by uncovering new data. We are looking at a newer approach to course building at the department level that gathers and reports this data. Simultaneously, we’re looking at how we can adapt our SIS and registration module (Banner XE) to display OER and LC. Our goal is to have this in place by Fall 2017. In the meantime, we’re publishing known courses using OER and pushing this information out to students.

 

Our driving motivations for increasing OER utilization can be summed up in two words Access and Innovation. Students, feeling the pressure of increasing tuitions have clamored for lower-cost resources since 2007 and have made their voices heard with each successive ASLCC administration. Faculty who have embraced OER value how it has the potential to reinvigorate their teaching practice. Lane has embraced it because it touches on each part of our core themes and has become part of our strategic directions. We look forward to discovering the doors it can continue to open for students and faculty alike.

Additional information about OER at Lane