OER Initiative Expanded Overview

This initiative is designed to help faculty reduce students’ course materials expenses and maintaining course quality by expanding the use of high-quality open education resources (“OER”). The initiative contributes to Cal Poly's efforts to improve graduation rates as well as to make the campus more diverse campus and more inclusive by reducing the cost of earning a Cal Poly degree. The initiative melds the purposes, goals and resources of the CSU's Affordable Learning Solutions ("AL$") and the AB798 programs at Cal Poly into a seamless, integrated program for the campus. The initiative includes funding support for (1) OER adoption projects, (2) related workshops, and (3) MIDAS, a OER document accessibility remediation service. 

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Background

The Chancellor’s Office has been providing CSU campuses with encouragement and opportunities for funding to promote ways to make college degrees more affordable. The support has been in the form of, initially, the Affordable Learning Solutions (“AL$”) and later followed by the AB798 program. Cal Poly has participated in both: The AL$ program for several years and the AB798 program starting in 2016. Both programs have the same goal but had different origins and so had variations in funding amounts and purposes, project guidelines and procedures, expectations and reporting responsibilities.

Both CSU programs have contributed to Cal Poly’s efforts to increase the use of more affordable or no-cost course materials. However, now that both programs are established and the campus partners have joined the initiative, this is an opportunity to design an integrated student affordability program that maximizes the contributions of each program toward the common purpose. This initiative describes the overall OER and affordability program and details how each funding source contributes to the whole. 

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Initiative Overview

The program melds the purposes, goals and resources of the AL$ and AB798 programs for implementation at Cal Poly. The combined programs' core purpose is to support faculty in reducing course materials’ expenses for students while maintaining course quality. It is a component of Cal Poly’s efforts to make the campus more diverse, more inclusive, and more academically engaging by making it more affordable to earn a Cal Poly degree. It also contributes to Cal Poly’s Graduation Initiative 2025 by reducing barriers to student progress toward degree completion.

This program uses the terms as defined by the CSU:

• “Affordable Educational Resources”: Replacement materials (e.g., textbook) that reduce cost to students by minimum of 30% from current costs of comparable materials.
• “Open Educational Resources” (OER): Include, but are not limited to, full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, faculty-created content, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (see: California Legislation Bill AB-798 College Textbook Affordability Act of 2015). These resources are by definition “open” and made available for use by anyone.

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Goals

The intent is to make the two CSU programs (AL$ and AB798) at Cal Poly transparent to participants but enhance collaboration and coordination of program collaborators while maintaining each program’s distinct responsibilities and reporting requirements. The melded program goals are to:

1. Support faculty to:
   • Find and adopt existing no-cost or reduced-cost educational resources and/or,
   • Develop open educational resources that reduce or eliminate costs for students through curation and adaptation of OER and revision of supplemental course materials to support adoption.
2. Create a sustainable and scalable program by designing a pipeline that offers multiple pathways for faculty to engage affordable course materials, from modest-scale, short-term initial forays to major-scale, long-term projects.
3. Provide support for, and require adherence to, accessibility and copyright/attribution standards for all projects developed through this program.
4. Provide support for infusing information literacy, critical thinking, sustainability and diversity principles and practices into courses that use affordable course materials.
5. Provide institutional support for a platform to store and distribute digital versions of course materials to students and colleagues.
6. Develop a comprehensive online presence (i.e., an OER/Affordability website) to recruit new faculty participants, provide resources, and highlight faculty accomplishments for students and their families.
7. Develop a database that compiles data on savings attributed to faculty participation in these programs, and that allows periodic reporting of achievements for individual faculty, departments, colleges and the university.

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Program Collaborators

This program functions as a collaboration and partnership among the following units:

Academic Programs and Planning (APP)

• Amy Wiley, AB798 campus coordinator

Disabilities Resource Center (DRC)

• John Lee, Information Technology Consultant

Center for Teaching, Learning & Technology (CTLT)

• Luanne Fose, Instructional Designer and Affordable Learning Solutions ("AL$") campus coordinator
• Pam Dougherty, Instructional Designer
• Patrick O’Sullivan, Director

Robert E Kennedy Library (REKL)

• Adriana Popescu, Dean
• Tim Strawn, Associate Dean (interim)

University Bookstore (Follett)

• David Watts, Director

It also benefits from the contributions of participating faculty and cooperation of academic department and college staff from across campus.

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Definitions

While open education resources may be defined in various ways, Section 67423 of California Education Code, as amended by AB 798 (Bonilla, 2015) describes a range of educational content that can be adopted in the program. The basic requirements for all the course materials supported by this program are that the course materials must be FREE to students and the students (and faculty) have the proper permission (e.g. license) to use the material in the courses. Within the legislation, the requirements are defined as "high-quality teaching, learning, and research resources that:

1. Reside in the public domain or
2. Have been released under an intellectual property license, such as a Creative Commons license, that permits their free use and repurposing by others, and
3. May include other resources that are legally available and free of cost to students. [These "other resources" can include your campus' electronic library resources that all students in the course would have legal and concurrent access to use for the entire term of the course]

Open educational resources include, but are not limited to, full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, faculty-created content, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge."

"All new open educational resources developed and available that are adopted as course material pursuant to this program shall be added to the California Open Online Library for Education established in Section 66408."