NASIG 2019

The topic of providing Open Educational Resources, OERs, as an alternative to costly textbooks for students in higher education is on the minds of educators, administrators, librarians, publishers, and faculty these days. All are eager to ease the cost burden of higher education by providing students with freely available, openly licensed learning materials, but each constituency faces specific barriers and has specific questions to be resolved.

At Emporia State University, faculty, librarians, and administrators are at the beginning of an exploration of the advantages and disadvantages that are part and parcel of creating, adopting, storing, maintaining, and licensing OERs. A task force has been formed to "establish a baseline for current OER efforts at ESU and to initiate a process of discovery to evaluate resources and infrastructure necessary to enlarge our OER efforts beyond the current baseline" (OER Task Force charge). Some of the topics that the Task Force may consider are

* Weighing the strengths and weaknesses of including OER as a strategic plan initiative;
* Analyzing faculty work conditions within an OER environment;
* Determining the need to adjust institutional intellectual property rights policies;
* Assessing student attitudes toward OER as well as preferences for digital or print resources;
* Exploring faculty incentives for assessing/adapting/authoring OER;
* Assessing the financial impact of OER to the bookstore and the Memorial Union;
* Developing an information campaign to educate faculty, students, and staff about OER;
* Exploring software systems, like Intellus, that might facilitate OER access;
* Cataloging ready-made resources, like Open Stax, for faculty availability.

One thing that is clear is that the collaborations among ESU constituencies, among institutions of higher education in Kansas and the Midwest, and among educators, administrators, librarians, publishers, and faculty are necessary to the success of an OER project at ESU. In this presentation, I propose to present the experiences of the OER task force, particularly their collaborations with both internal and external stakeholders, as well as the results of their work as a case study. I will focus on sharing how collaborations with stakeholders influenced the process, the choices, and the outcomes of the work of the task force; particularly those that are transferable and may have benefits for other institutions of higher education.