What Happens When the Funding Dries Up? Sustaining OER Through Community-Building
Channel: Open Education Southern Symposium
Date: 2021-09-22

Textbook savings are more important for students than ever, but so is conserving money at an institutional level. How can an institution continue to foster OER adoption when the financial incentives used to entice faculty to consider OER are taken away, or were never an option in the first place? In this session, librarians involved with OER and affordable learning initiatives at the College of Charleston will discuss lessons learned from a now-discontinued, 2-year pilot program that awarded grants to faculty converting courses to OER.

Building a community of practice around OER was a major goal of the pilot program’s faculty development component. To accomplish this, librarians built and led a course in the college learning management system (LMS) that facilitated collaboration, discussion, and a sense of community among instructors receiving OER course grants.
Although that course ended along with the grant program, this community-building effort remains central to OER outreach. Faculty value pedagogical flexibility, but they also work closely with their departmental colleagues. Encouraging collaboration can help alleviate faculty concerns about the time involved in transitioning to OER. Working together also helps faculty identify connections between OER and priorities such as student performance, pedagogical goals, and professional development. In some cases, entire departments decide to adopt OER materials together, which impacts a much larger number of students than individual faculty adoptions.

The presenters will discuss strategies they have used to encourage community-building and collaboration around OER, including partnerships with institutional technologists, workshops, and campus-wide discussion boards. In the spirit of building our own community, session participants will be invited to discuss how OER community-building efforts have gone at their institutions, and to share successes and pitfalls.

Presenters:
Gretchen Scronce
Kayla Kipps