Supporting OER adoption through a grant program

Overview

The use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in teaching and learning in higher education can benefit both students and academic staff. Just as there are many places to find OER, there are just as many ways in which OER can be incorporated into teaching and learning activities. The Deakin University OER grant program enables academics to explore OER available in their discipline or to develop new resources, and to use these in their practice. Although the program also supports academics to develop new OER, the purpose of this case study is to demonstrate the various ways in which academics can be supported by a centralised program to incorporate adopted OER into teaching and learning. While developing a new resource can be rewarding, reusing and adapting resources can be similarly rewarding as these open practices can deliver significant cost savings for students with a lesser time commitment.

Key stakeholders

An OER Grant Program requires collaboration from key stakeholders across the institution. The successful delivery of high quality projects results from collaborative partnerships between faculty staff, library staff including the Open Education Librarian and the Copyright Team, and other third space practitioners such as learning designers. While the staff are main collaborators in the OER program, the key stakeholder group at the centre of the OER adoption projects are the students. Students can benefit greatly from an OER adoption projects. Research has shown in addition to decreases costs for students in purchasing textbooks, moving to an open textbook improves access to resources increasing student retention (Bol 2021) and success (Colvard 2018).

The grant program

The Deakin OER grant program commenced in 2021 to support staff to develop capability in open practices that remove barriers for diverse learners (Hamilton and Hansen, 2024). OER can be used in units and courses in many ways from including an individual resource such as a section of text or an image into learning resources, to converting all resources in a unit or course to OER. Moving to open resources can require substantial amounts of time and work. Locating suitable resources and including these in the learning environment to achieve the required pedagogical outcome can require time, as well as learning design expertise and technical skill.  Providing support to academics and professional staff to complete this work can increase the movement towards greater OER usage while supporting the skills development required for open practice and increasing positive experiences for students.

At the commencement of the program, the library team had a steep learning curve in program development.  At the time, in the library there was minimal understanding of the Australian open educational environment. Identifying this need, environmental scanning of other institutional programs was conducted and numerous resources were consulted to understand the process of establishing and conducting a program. Of particular relevance was the OER Adoption Pyramid (Trotter & Cox, 2016) that demonstrated the complexity of implementing an OER program at an institutional level. As the program proceeded, individuals’ awareness and capacity levels increased as anticipated in the OER Adoption Pyramid but as an Institution, multiple infrastructure questions and development needed to be addressed. These were resolved through collaborations and internal development.

Adoption examples from the grant program

Through the grant program, Deakin has supported academics in locating, adopting and adapting OER for use in units, in addition to OER creation projects. This case study focuses on adoption with three exemplar projects to showcase the considerations for these practices. Adopted resources may need to be altered to fit the teaching need and so also included here are some additional ideas involving adaptation of OER.

Example 1 – Moving from a commercial textbook to an open textbook

A common project type supported by the grant program involves assisting an academic to move from a commercial text to an open textbook. Drivers typically associated with these projects include saving students’ money, limited library access to commercially published texts and the suitability of commercial texts to the teaching need. Commercial texts may be too complex or too simple for the unit content or may contain too much content to cover in a unit. With OER texts, the resource can be adapted to suit the needs. While making the change from one textbook to another may sound easy, modern higher education learning management systems and educational practices can influence the complexity of change. Additionally, commercial publishers often provide ancillary resources to accompany a textbook such as slides, videos or question banks. These may need to be created when changing from a commercial to an open textbook, expanding the scope of the project.

Through the grant program, academics were supported to locate an open text (if they did not have one in mind already), make changes to unit sites and develop supporting resources. Often the grant was used to fund academic hours or learning designer participation in projects to complete the work. Library support provided as part of the program for these projects has included capability building in searching for OER and providing copyright advice.

Example 2 – Including content from an open textbook into a unit site

With similar motivational drivers to example 1, another type of adoption project supported by the grant program includes the incorporation of OER content into a learning management system. These projects can benefit from aligning an OER conversion project with a subject review or upgrade. As an alternative to setting an OER as a textbook for a unit, the content is included directly into the unit site as permitted by the Creative Commons licences with appropriate attributions. This integrates all of the learning content in the one location, removing the need for students to move between different resources.

Through the grant program, academics are supported to locate suitable resources and map these to the topics and learning outcomes, identifying where the sections of the OER can be used in the unit site. Similar to the example 1, library support for these projects includes training on searching for OER, reusing content, developing attributions and copyright advice.

Example 3 – Remixing open texts for a large science unit

An extension of the adoption of OER involves the adoption and subsequent adaptation of OER. In cases where there may be more than one relevant text or where the unit involves cross-disciplinary learning, a single text may not fit the needs of a unit. Projects of this type can include the assembly of chapters into a resource or the more granular incorporation of OER content such as images or paragraphs into a resource. These projects can be complicated and involve the tracking of where content has come from, and reworking to assemble content into a coherent resource. Different OER have different writing styles and original content is also required to provide linkages between the adopted content. Projects of this type may be more time intensive and through the grant program, funds are commonly used for additional academic time.

As part of the grant program, these projects require extensive copyright advice alongside additional library support with training on searching and reusing content.

Other project types

The grant program has also supported additional adoption projects including the sourcing of resources other than textbooks for inclusion in a unit site.  Library support for these projects involves searching advice, training and copyright advice.

Increasing OER usage through an institutional program

If an institutional program supports adoption projects, an awareness of project types and flexibility in program processes can contribute to a successful program. Adoption projects can be smaller projects such as reusing learning activities requiring a lesser time commitment or larger projects such as adopting an OER textbook. For academics considering the conversion of an entire unit or course to using OER resources, this can be strategically included as part of a subject review, course review or initiation of a new course. Understanding the unit and course review cycle at the institution can inform program coordinators of suitable times to seek grant or project applications.

From our grant program experience, some techniques for encouraging the move to OER can be:

• When searching for resources at any time in the unit lifecycle, check out the OER repositories and search engines first – you may find the perfect resources, saving the time and effort of developing the resource. Existing OER may also provide additional ideas for activities or learning experiences from a different perspective that may increase the inclusiveness in the course.
• Focus on a particular section or problem. By breaking it down into smaller sections, the task doesn’t seem as overwhelming. Using a mapping document for the course and curating a list of OER that may suit your need.
• Get help! Approach your librarians, learning designers or learning support team for help. Librarians are expert searchers for resources and can assist in locating suitable resources.

Grant program support services

Adoption of OER can save academic time and students money, but there are barriers to OER adoption including:

• Awareness of OER – OER advocacy and awareness raising activities can be incorporated into grant program objectives
• Unavailability of time in work allocation of academic staff – a grant program may support the hire of additional staff to enable an academic to focus on OER project work
• Skills required to incorporate or adapt OER – the grant program may facilitate collaborations between areas of the institution, developing connections between those that can help with projects.

As part of the Deakin OER grant program, services provided by the library to address these barriers included:

• Training on OER basics and OER searching
• Format and platform advice
• Accessibility information and advice
• Checking the copyright and Creative Commons licence compliance
• Specialist skills required for project work including video and image editing or the development of interactive content.

The library also conducted a Community of Practice (CoP) for staff on grant teams. The CoP enabled connections to be made between practitioners, provided an avenue to ask questions of the group and to receive advice on any issues, or just to talk through what they were doing to get feedback from the group. The Community of practice was attended by the grant teams and representatives from the library including librarians, learning designers and the copyright team. As the grant program progressed, some of these sessions were open to past years’ grant recipients. By introducing the voice of experience, issues similar to those previously experienced and questions such as impact measurement could be discussed.

Measuring program impact

As with any program, the impact needs to be measurable to ensure the program’s sustainability. OER adoptions can provide numerous data points to develop a narrative on the impact of the program including:

• Student cost savings if moving from commercial text
• Student feedback
• Student surveys
• Academic testimonials.

Further resources

• The OER Adoption Journey (CC BY NC)
• Adoption Guide – 2nd Edition (CC BY)

Image descriptions

About the author

name: Angie Wiliamson

institution: Deakin University

Angie Williamson is the Open Education Librarian at Deakin University. In this role, Angie coordinates the Open Educational Resources Grants Program at Deakin, supporting project teams and advancing the discussion of Open Education at the university. Angie has been involved in the wider open community through the CAUL Enabling the Modern Curriculum OER Advocacy project team.

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