Are you considering providing publishing support to faculty who want to author their own open educational resource? In this presentation, we’ll discuss some of the lessons we have learned so far when it comes to working with faculty to publish open textbooks. These lessons include the importance of providing early education about Creative Commons licenses, setting clear expectations with authors, and clarifying the spectrum of support around OER and publishing that your library offers.

The Open Education Working Group at Millersville University was formed in 2017 by a group of instructional designers, faculty members, and librarians to explore an interest in open education resources. Their first collaborative effort was a series of webinars during Open Education Week 2018, a practice that has become an annual event. The efforts of the OER working group have since evolved and expanded by improving course material accessibility and affordability for students through increasing awareness and creating a system to support faculty members as they replace commercial textbooks with OER. We will discuss Millersville’s Open Textbook Initiative (OTI) which supports adoption of open and library supported resources for course materials, Millersville’s participation in the OpenStax Institutional Partnership program, and other activities.

An overview of a textbook affordability initiative run by the College Library in conjunction with the student government and including various outreach events, faculty affordability awards, a faculty survey on course materials and OER, and a student survey of textbook spending and the impact costs are having on academic success.

This session will feature both student and librarian perspectives on Lafayette College’s OER and Textbook Affordability Initiative. We will discuss the initiative’s beginnings, the impact it has had at Lafayette to date, and how we hope to grow in the future. Particular emphasis will be placed on efforts underway to gauge students’ impressions of OER at the college and the ways in which students and librarians are working together to improve affordability outcomes for Lafayette undergraduates.

Raising and maintaining campus awareness about the pedagogical and financial benefits of open educational resources can sometimes feel like running a marathon. Finding partners to aid efforts is key as is having a robust and creative outreach campaign. The presenter will discuss how libraries can engage faculty to help spread the word, influence potential adopters, and build community, taking your OER initiatives to the next level. Examples from one library’s faculty incentivization project, Open Education Week events, and the #OER4Covid initiative will be shared.

This presentation will describe our experience establishing an Open Educational Resources fellowship for allied health and health sciences faculty in the middle of the novel coronavirus crisis. We will describe our prior work with OER, our experience applying for a grant from the Network of the National Library of Medicine-Middle Atlantic Region, and how we have started our grant project and plan to continue with it through the uncertainty of the coming months. Additionally, we will provide tips from our own experience about how to advocate for OER and how to position OER as a permanent solution to an emergency teaching situation.

Student government leaders from across Pennsylvania will discuss how students at their institutions are responding to the textbook affordability crisis. Panelists will respond to a series of questions about the difficulties that students face, their experiences with using OER, and the work that they are doing to promote open and affordable educational resources on their campuses. Audience members will also have the opportunity to ask questions.

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group revealed that 65% of college students have forgone buying a textbook due to its high cost, and 94% of those acknowledged that they suffered academically as a result.1 The Florida Virtual Campus survey (2018) identified five consequences of the high textbook cost: not purchasing the required textbook (64%); taking fewer courses (43%); not registering for a specific course (41%); earning a poor grade (36%); and dropping a course (23%).2 Babson Survey Research Group found that 46% of faculty were aware of open educational resources (OER); however, only 16% of faculty had adopted OER and 23% of those taught introductory level courses.3 Studies on OER and student performance have shown equivalent or better4, 5, 6, 7, 8 outcomes in psychology,9, 10 physics,11 statistics,12 and business.13 Furthermore, OER decreased DFW (D, F, and Withdrawal letter grades) rates for all students.14 The present study explored whether (1) students’ final grades in the OER class can be on a par with those in the traditional textbook (TT) class; and (2) OER equalize student learning and performance and; (3) OER increase student engagement. Participants were from two classes, one using OER (n[open textbook users fall 2018] = 72) and the other adopting a TT (n[traditional textbook users fall 2017] = 66). Student engagement is operationally defined with components consisting of (1) the number of page views, (2) on-time assignment submissions (OTAS) (excluding late and missing assignments), and (3) attendance. Data were downloaded from the Learning Management System (LMS). Results show no differences in final grades between the TT and OER classes. However, the OER class had a much smaller standard deviation indicating when every student had access to a textbook the class performance distribution narrowed. Students in the TT class had marginally higher numbers of page views (p = .055), while attendance trended higher in the OER class (p = .070), but with no difference detected in OTAS. Attendance was the single best predictor of final grades, despite the fact OTAS were significantly correlated with final grades and attendance for both classes. Variations in page views in the TT class were more extreme resulting in a large standard deviation. This suggests that students who lacked the TT and did not utilize the course reserve at the library relied on the instructor’s LMS notes. OER demonstrably elevated the performance of students who declined to purchase the TT resulting in a much smaller standard deviation in their final grades. About 35% of students who forgo required textbooks do so for non-financial reasons. The characteristics of students who purchase the textbooks were unclear. Students who had all the required course materials had better attendance. When students attended classes regularly, they were more likely to submit their assignments on time. The fact that distributions were clustered closer to the means in the OER class than the TT class for all four variables examined indicates that OER equalize student learning and performance. OER are critically important in supporting broad student academic success.