With Marilyn Billings, UMASS Amherst.
This presentation will make the case for how open textbooks and OER can foster collaboration between instruction librarians, scholarly communication librarians, and faculty in order to advance access to course content, improve student learning, and continue the crusade for saving students money on course content.
Savings are nice, but learning is nicer: Libraries linking open textbooks with instruction, pedagogy and assessment
1. Savings are nice,
but learning is nicer.
Libraries linking open textbooks with
instruction, pedagogy and assessment
Marilyn Billings, UMASS Amherst
Sarah Faye Cohen, Open Textbook Network
2. “This presentation will make the case for how
open textbooks and OER can foster
collaboration between instruction
librarians, scholarly communication
librarians, and faculty in order to advance
access to course content, improve student
learning, and continue the crusade for saving
students money on course content.
3. “Open education is about increasing
student achievement, inspiring passion
among faculty, and building better
connections between students and the
materials that they use to meet their
educational goals.”
– Quill West
6. The average borrower owes more than
$28,950
in student loans (class of 2014).
Institute for College Access and Success
http://projectonstudentdebt.org/files/pub/Student_Debt_and_the_Class_of_2012_NR.
pdf
7. Cost of Attendance
• Tuition and Fees
• Room and Board
• Books and Supplies
• Personal Expenses
• Transportation
8. Cost of Attendance
• Tuition and Fees
• Room and Board
• Books and Supplies
• Personal Expenses
• Transportation
10. The
Academic
Impact:
Purchase an older edition
of the textbook
Delay purchasing the
textbook
Never purchase the
textbook
Share a textbook
Pirate a textbook
“I figured French
hadn’t changed
that much.”
- UMN student
11. 63.6% Not purchase the required textbook
49.2% Take fewer courses
45.1% Not register for a specific course
33.9% Earn a poor grade
26.7% Drop a course
17.0% Fail a course
http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org/pdf/2012_Florida_Student_Textbook_Survey.pdf
In your academic career, has
the cost of required textbooks
caused you to:
17. Babson Report
• Faculty not aware of OERs
• Faculty appreciate OER
concepts
• Perceived quality of OERs
• Lack of time to find and evaluate
OERs
• Faculty are key decision makers
for OER adoption
http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/openingthecurriculum2014.pdf
18. Libraries have an important role to
play in driving awareness and
pedagogical innovation and support
student learning in this space.
19. Libraries have an important role to
play in driving pedagogical
innovation and supporting student
learning in this space.
Here are four ways we
can do that:
20. Way 1: Integration into current
and new instruction
ACRL Framework: Threshold Concepts
Open’s potential to address many of the TCs:
Format as process
Authority as Constructed and Contextual
Information as commodity
Assessment opportunities:
Creation and modification with students using open
content would allow libraries to provide direct assessment
/artifacts of student learning and achievement in these
TCs.
21. Way 2: A focus on rights issues
Instruction focused on:
What if we started asking students to identify how content
fits on the spectrum of open?
Fair use of others' content, Creative Commons licenses,
applying CC licenses when creating our own (faculty,
students, librarians) new content.
22. Way 3: Collaborate deeply with
faculty and across all areas in the
library.
Actualize librarians’ deep interest in
creative and innovative pedagogy.
Realize the potential of the 5Rs.
Use OERs in the flipped
classrooms, as well as inquiry
based learning, problem based
learning, active learning.
The “Outernet”
https://www.flickr.com/photos/littledebbie11/5028737162
23. Way 4: Contributing our unique
skill set to the problem and the
solution
Improve discovery, access, and distribution of this
“new” OER content.
A new era and opportunity for libraries to offer our
mind set and skill set—curation, categorization,
metadata, archiving.
Use our IRs as "homes" for OER content as an
additional way to exploit that relatively new library
service / infrastructure.
24. How does Open fit into what
libraries already do?
Scholarly Communication
Institutional Repositories
Information Literacy Curriculum
Instruction and Outreach
Access Services
Interlibrary Loan
Reserves
Collection Development and Collections Management
Electronic Resources Management
Cataloging, Indexing, Metadata
25. “Actually” build connections to be
made to:
ACRL's strategic direction for
libraries:
expressing the value of
libraries, student learning,
and active participation in
the research and scholarly
environment.
ACRL Framework
CritLib movement
Other open initiatives (OA,
open data, knowledge
commons, etc).
https://www.flickr.com/photos/chuckthephotographer/3614450900
26. More needs to be done.
How might we further engage our libraries focus in
pedagogy and assessment to advance the use of open
educational content?
The crowd says….
OER as knowledge management document collaboration
Librarians as instructional designers
Weaving together research and teaching (not mutually
exclusive)
Hardlinked to globalization strategies
Bringing OA into the scholarly comm family
Bringing together IL and digital literacy
Rethink our role in course materials
Potential in supporting student inquirities
27. “Administrators and faculty members overwhelmingly
say textbooks and other course materials are too
expensive, and that instructors should seriously
consider costs when assigning readings.”
Key finding :
West, Quill & K. Jensen. (2015). Open educational resources and the higher education movement: a leadership opportunity for libraries. C&RL News, 76(4), 215-218.
Because the way higher ed is funded today is different than ever before.
2 main sources of higher ed. What the state provides, what I provide through tuition.
What is included in Cost of Attendance.
What is included in Cost of Attendance.
3x the rate of inflation. Economist: No consumer product has risen in cost at this rate.
20000 students in Florida.
This is the problem we are addressing.
This is not the point of higher ed idealistically, or in terms of the business of higher ed—graduation and retention rates. Textbooks as the impediment.
Thanks to @dernst, @johnhiltoniii for slides 14-16 and notes.
Across eleven academic studies that attempted to measure results pertaining to student learning (with 48,623 students participated) none showed results in which students who utilized OER performed worse than their peers who used traditional textbooks.
Allen, G., Guzman-Alvarez, A., Molinaro, M., Larsen, D. (2015). Assessing the Impact and Efficacy of the Open-Access ChemWiki Textbook Project. Educause Learning Initiative Brief, January 2015. See also this newsletter. Bowen, W. G., Chingos, M. M., Lack, K. A., & Nygren, T. I. (2012). Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials. Ithaka S+R. Bowen, W. G., Chingos, M. M., Lack, K. A., & Nygren, T. I. (2014). Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from a Six‐Campus Randomized Trial. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 33(1), 94-111. Feldstein, A., Martin, M., Hudson, A., Warren, K., Hilton, J., & Wiley, D. (2012). Open textbooks and increased student access and outcomes. European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning. Retrieved from http://www.eurodl.org/index.php?p=archives&year=2012&halfyear=2&article=533. Gil, P., Candelas, F., Jara, C., Garcia, G., Torres, F (2013). Web-based OERs in Computer Networks. International Journal of Engineering Education, 29(6), 1537-1550. (OA preprint) Hilton, J., Gaudet, D., Clark, P., Robinson, J., & Wiley, D. (2013). The adoption of open educational resources by one community college math department. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 14(4), 37–50. Hilton, J., & Laman, C. (2012). One college’s use of an open psychology textbook. Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, 27(3), 201–217. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02680513.2012.716657. (Open Repository Preprint). Lovett, M., Meyer, O., & Thille, C. (2008). The open learning initiative: Measuring the effectiveness of the OLI statistics course in accelerating student learning. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2008 (1). Pawlyshyn, Braddlee, Casper and Miller (2013). Adopting OER: A Case Study of Cross-Institutional Collaboration and Innovation. Educause Review. Robinson, T.J. (2015). Open Textbooks: The Effects of Open Educational Resource Adoption on Measures of Post-secondary Student Success (Doctoral dissertation). Robinson T. J., Fischer, L., Wiley, D. A., & Hilton, J. (2014). The impact of open textbooks on secondary science learning outcomes. Educational Researcher, 43(7): 341-351. Wiley, D., Hilton, J. Ellington, S., and Hall, T. (2012). “A preliminary examination of the cost savings and learning impacts of using open textbooks in middle and high school science classes.” International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning. 13 (3), pp. 261-276.
Hofer, A., Townsend, L., & Brunetti, K. (2012). Troublesome concepts: Investigating threshold concepts for information literacy instruction. portal:Libraries and the Academy, 12(4), 387-405.
For years, librarians have focused their instruction on types of materials (eg. popular v. scholarly article). In the age of Open, what if we started asking students to identify how content fits on the spectrum of open?
An invitation to focus on learning.
TIMES ARE CHANGING. We need to help everyone be ready. Phil Hill’s keynote: the questions are not the same. Example at PSU (SFC)
2015 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology released Oct. 15, 2015
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/survey/partial-credit-2015-survey-faculty-attitudes-technology