The OCUL Context

About

This document summarizes findings from an Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) OER environmental scan and concludes with recommendations for OCUL as a consortium and for institutions locally in the areas of training, sharing of resources, and partnerships.

Survey Findings

In early 2017, the OCUL OER working group developed a series of survey questions intended to capture library and university-wide stakeholder activities in the area of open educational resources. The survey was divided into two sections: Questions for Libraries (13 responses received) and Questions for OER Stakeholders (14 responses, including 3 from one institution). In the Spring of 2017 a copy of the complete survey was distributed to each OCUL Director to forward to stakeholder units as appropriate, and responses were collected until the end of June 2017. The complete list of questions can be found in Appendix B.

The following sections summarize the survey responses as they pertain to overall issues of service, policy, technical and educational support, funding, institutional context, and the role of libraries and large organizations in offering support around OER.

General support

OCUL libraries currently provide various levels of OER support for faculty. Many provide guides for finding, developing, and using OER; or actively promote open scholarship through blog posts and FAQ on the library website.

From the survey results, it is evident that at least 40% of OCUL institutions – either through the library, another campus unit, or both – are committed to providing some level of faculty support, often via multiple channels:

• nine of the 13 OCUL libraries and 9 of the 14 campus stakeholders that responded to the survey offer OER research guides,
• eight libraries provide advocacy or educational materials for faculty,
• four libraries are striking working groups to evaluate their role in creating and housing OER,
• eight campus stakeholders provide funding, and
• seven campus stakeholders offer technology training workshops.

A number of Ontario’s universities are actively supporting the use and development of OER at an institutional level. Carleton University, for example, hosts a repository of Creative Commons licenced OER. The university also offers a Certificate in Blended and Online Teaching, for which all the materials are themselves open educational resources.

The University of Toronto promotes open scholarship and OER through its Open.UToronto initiative. The Open.UToronto site “serves as a hub to connect projects, people, groups and organizations interested in “Open” (University of Toronto, n.d.). The site includes links to locally-produced OER, current projects, and the Ontario Online curriculum.

University of Guelph, Ryerson University, UOIT, University of Waterloo, Western University, University of Windsor and York University all promote OER and open learning through their Teaching and Learning or Open Learning units. These activities range from workshops to online resources, blog posts and webinars. In some cases the library coordinates with these other units to provide specific information and resources through workshops or libguides.

OER policy

Eighty-five percent of OCUL library respondents do not have an OER policy while 15% of respondents indicated that a policy was currently in the making. This closely mirrored the stakeholder responses, indicating that libraries tend to align themselves with institutional direction in this area.

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Technical support

In their survey responses 3 libraries indicated that they provide technical support in the area of OER, while 6 said this work is done by the Teaching and Learning/Open Learning offices. Other libraries commented on lack of established processes on campus, with various offices providing support to faculty..

Libraries that provide technical support use institutional repositories, BePress, Dspace, Pressbooks, and other tools based on faculty needs.

Educational support

Survey responses indicated that educational support is provided by the library as well as Teaching and Learning/Online Learning offices, in some cases lead by students #textbookbroke campaigns. Educational support consists of providing awareness and technical training sessions to faculty and staff which often include technology demonstrations.

Funding

Three responding libraries indicated awareness of institutional funding opportunities specifically for OER available through various offices. Although not specifically offered for OER projects, 6 institutions indicated the availability of awards and grants that are generally broad in scope and could be used for this purpose. Ten libraries indicated that no institution-wide funding was available for OER projects specifically and 6 libraries said they relied on eCampus Ontario to fund OER projects.

It is possible that if prompted further, the libraries that mentioned lack of OER funding may have access to grants within their institution applicable to OER projects. Five of the stakeholder responses to the same question highlighted a number of grants which could be used towards the creation or adaptation of OER, although they were not specifically created for this purpose. These include: $5,000-$10,000 towards open resource development and open course development; $7,000-$20,000 offered through a Learning and Teaching Enhancement Fund; Instructional Technology Innovation funds ranging from $2,000-$20,000; and Teaching and Learning grants of up to $500 through one institution’s Centre for Pedagogical Innovation. More investigation is needed at the institutional level to develop a list of funds which could be used towards the development or maintenance of OER materials.

Campus context

Sixty-two percent of the OCUL library respondents indicated that they were involved in university-wide OER initiatives or working groups / task forces.

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These involve a range of working groups lead by different campus stakeholders such as,

• Teaching Support Centre,
• Vice-Provost & University Librarian, and
• Centre for Academic Excellence.

Faculty perspective

A series of questions in the survey for campus stakeholders collected information on the faculty perspective. One question asked how many faculty were publishing open educational resources. Eighty-six percent of respondents indicated faculty had not created or published OER materials, 7% said their faculty have created around 6-10 titles up to the present and another 7% indicated there were 21 or more OER titles created by faculty in the past few years.

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Regarding use of OER in courses, 93% of respondents were unclear as to how many courses on their campuses use OER materials whereas 7% indicated between 6-10 courses were using OER. Additional feedback explained that tracking this information was difficult unless faculty had worked directly with units responsible for supporting the creation of OER materials.

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When asked whether respondents saw a connection between OER usage and specific disciplines, 4 answered positively. They all indicated that usage was more significant in the sciences due to standardization of content, availability of resources, well-established practice around sharing resources within the discipline, and self-paced pedagogical models.

On the subject of how faculty feel about OER, a range of views were cited. On the supporting side, faculty were said to

• embrace the concept philosophically,
• demonstrate strong interest in the subject,
• be intrigued and genuinely concerned about the price of textbooks, and
• be sympathetic around issues of affordability and rising costs of education.

On the other side, faculty expressed a range of concerns that reflect the perceived barriers to adoption and use of OER.

When asked to elaborate on their perceptions of barriers to adopting OER from the faculty perspective, stakeholders offered a wide variety of responses borrowing from some of the topics seen in the previous questions. Many provided more than one response.

TABLE 1: Barriers to OER adoption

When asked, “what would encourage or facilitate creation and use of OER at your institution?”   campus stakeholders identified the following top four approaches:

• providing faculty with technical infrastructure, technology or platforms to create quality OER (13 of 14 responses);
• education about OER and open education in general (12 of 14 responses);
• curating and hosting (10 of 14 responses); and
• support for evaluation and curation of OER materials (10 of 14 responses).

Role of libraries

Campus Stakeholders were asked for their views on the library’s role in supporting OER activities on campus. The responses included:

• helping to promote resources for various disciplines and facilitate the improvement of OER;
• taking part in campus working groups to educate, advocate and devise a plan for supporting OER use and development;
• improving discovery of and access to OER;
• providing space in the library to create OER (inviting students and faculty); and
• raising awareness.

Provincial and consortial support

The final survey question for campus stakeholders asked how provincial organizations and ministries could offer OER support for OCUL institutions. OER funding was cited as a top priority, closely followed by access to technology or platform to create materials, with peer review and hosting both coming third.

When asked about priorities for consortial OER support, libraries’ highest priority was for the development of an OER Toolkit for Libraries, closely followed by the establishment of a community of practice to help build competencies, and providing education to libraries.

Additional Findings

In the Fall and Winter of 2016-17, Scholars Portal and OCUL staff visited member institutions across the province as part of the Scholars Portal Roadshow. OER emerged as a strategic opportunity for a number of OCUL libraries during the roundtable discussions of local priorities and potential opportunities for Scholars Portal and OCUL support.

Some institutions saw potential for an OCUL or Scholars Portal collaboration to provide services and resources that might otherwise be beyond their capacity, such as support for training and outreach tools directed at faculty, and publishing and design support in conjunction with Scholars Portal’s Open Monograph Press service. Discussions also identified potential campus partnerships such as the bookstore and student associations, and the integration of OER with institutional repositories, which are otherwise primarily focused on research output.

As a step towards knowledge sharing in this area, OCUL hosted an introductory webinar Open Educational Resources: Current Landscape on March 28, 2017, for attendees from Ontario college and university libraries. Speakers included experts from BCcampus, University of Victoria, eCampus Ontario, Ontario College Library Service (OCLS), and Scholars Portal.

During the webinar, attendees were asked about potential roles for Ontario library higher education consortia in facilitating a community of practice around OER. The most common responses were:

• training and education, including a toolkit and/or research guides on OER;
• coordination of efforts across library consortia;
• development of best practices and standards;
• facilitating collaboration, resource sharing and access;
• building a community of practice through special events; and
• funding.

Projects & Services Spotlights

Several OER Working Group members consulted with colleagues across OCUL independently of the survey to provide highlights of OER projects from several OCUL institutions. These highlights are presented below.

University of Windsor – Partnership with the Office of Open Learning

The Leddy Library at the University of Windsor is partnered with the Office of Open Learning (OOL), which has received grants to design and implement four fully open modules, one fully open textbook, fourteen online courses, and four programs which will include thirty-three courses. The library has also been responsible for awarding internal grants to faculty to help create three programs (providing partial funding toward the development of twenty four courses), fifteen courses, one MOOC, and four teaching resources. In all of these instances, faculty are encouraged to use Open resources, which has helped lead to the creation of the fully open modules and a fully open textbook.

The OOL and library work together when needed to find resources for the courses and start with Open resources. In each case, the faculty member is asked to clearly articulate objectives for each lesson and resources are found to match with each specific objective, whether it is a textbook chapter, video, handout, or other such resource, in order to help with proper lesson planning.

Open materials are created with whichever platform best suits faculty needs and desired teaching outcomes. Platforms and authoring tools used include: Articulate , Blackboard (with various export options to other programs), Scalar, and Pressbooks.

University of Guelph – Student Survey on Textbook Costs

The University of Guelph Library, in conjunction with its Central Students Association, conducted a brief survey of undergraduate students in the Fall of 2016, to learn more about students’ textbook purchasing behaviour and experiences.  The four-question survey was administered in October, just after students had completed their textbook purchasing decision-making for the semester.  More than 4000 students responded, submitting some 3200 comments which revealed a developing textbook crisis.  Students indicated that they were increasingly opting not to purchase textbooks, predominantly due to the excessive cost, but that the decision not to purchase came with significant consequences, including impacts on learning and academic success, as well as social, emotional and health effects. Many of the issues identified by the students were specifically linked to the traditional textbook business model, and could be mitigated through the adoption of more affordable and accessible course resources, such as OER.

One of the interesting findings of the survey was that students are actually spending less on textbooks than was expected, presumably because they are opting not to purchase some or all of the textbooks required for their courses. In fact, 57% of the survey respondents reported that they had opted not to purchase a textbook at least once in their student career.  When asked what they did instead, more than 70% of those students indicated that they tried to find an alternate means of accessing the required material – either by using a library copy, using a friend’s copy, or downloading a (presumably pirated) copy from the Internet. Only 28% of respondents indicated that they opted just not to use the textbook at all.  In the comments section, students noted other ways that they addressed the problem; some mentioned using an older edition, even though the paging was different, while some suggested they used a combination of approaches. One student even indicated that he had found it necessary to withdraw for the semester.

The UG survey also asked students how concerned they were about not having the required textbook. Eighty-seven per cent of the respondents indicated they were either “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned”. And perhaps surprisingly, even those students who had found alternate means of accessing the textbook content reported moderate to high levels of concern with having decided not to purchase the required text. This suggests that the alternatives were not generally acceptable substitutes for having one’s own purchased copy.  When asked about the nature of their concerns, respondents reported a range of issues, from insufficient copies in the Library to meet the demand, to the inconvenience and embarrassment of having to borrow from a classmate, to worry about the potential copyright implications of using an illegal copy.

All of the respondents (i.e., those who always purchase required texts, as well as those who do not) were asked whether they felt there was a downside to not purchasing a textbook.  Only 14% of respondents did not see a downside.  For the remainder (86%), an overwhelming list of negative consequences were submitted via the comments section. Respondents noted that the textbook crisis contributed to copyright infringement and piracy, had negative impacts for students with disabilities, and also had significant impacts on student well-being and mental health.

Even those students who purchased textbooks reported concerns – either because of financial hardship directly related to the cost of the textbooks, or because of frustration and anxiety due to indirect causes. For example, students expressed anger when they had made a difficult choice to purchase a textbook which was subsequently only minimally used by the instructor, or when they purchased an e-textbook which they were prevented from retaining once the course was over.  Also, it seems that some students who opt to purchase textbooks are sharing those texts with other students in the class in order to save on costs, a practise with its own set of challenges.

Carleton University – Planning for Blended Courses

At an eCampus Ontario eLearning Seminar and Showcase held in January 2017, Patrick Lyons, the Director of Teaching and Learning at Carleton University, talked about the variance in costs in supporting conventional courses as opposed to online courses and the allocation of institutional funds towards the production and delivery of online learning materials. He stressed that many Carleton students prefer blended learning environments where they have opportunities to take online courses in conjunction with conventional classroom-based learning. Online courses are growing in numbers in order to meet the increasing demand, reducing institutional costs pertaining to facilities and maintenance which amount to roughly $35/square foot. Lyons argued that university business plans for online learning need to incorporate startup costs for setting up new online courses and establish a protocol for channelling the savings from courses which might no longer be delivered in a conventional classroom.

Ryerson University – Open Authoring Guide

Ryerson University has been offering informational OER workshops since 2012, in partnership with the Learning and Teaching Office (LTO) and the Library. In June 2016 Ryerson adopted the open source publishing platform Pressbooks, and as the first project on the platform two librarians and a specialist in the LTO created the Ryerson Open Textbook Authoring Guide. This was developed to support faculty interested in creating OER at Ryerson. This work gives guidance on how to find OER, background on OER, how to adapt existing OER, how to create new OER, practical instructions on how to use Pressbook features and get an account at Ryerson, editorial guidelines, copyright issues, and accessibility considerations. This work was created in the free installation of the BCCampus Pressbooks open textbook plugin; however, Ryerson has purchased the ability to make the work available in downloadable formats including PDF.

Three works from BCCampus were adapted to create this work: BC Open Textbook Authoring Guide, BC Open Textbook Adaptation Guide, and BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit. Tony Bates, an OER pioneer and a Visiting Professor at Chang School, Ryerson, wrote the Introduction for this work. Some material was adapted as needed, or new material was added to make the work more Ryerson-specific. The project was useful as it both provided a resource for the Ryerson (and the Ontario OER) community, and gave the Ryerson team some expertise on how to use Pressbooks and develop familiarity with the processes needed to create a collaborative OER work. This work was completed and made public in March 2017. A poster on the project was presented at OLA Superconference 2017.

This project also assisted librarians and the LTO in developing training skills in Pressbooks. By the end of March 2017, approximately 60 Ryerson faculty or staff have received hands-on training in the Pressbooks platform. The guide has also been useful in supporting the two author teams at Ryerson that were successful grant recipients in a recent eCampusOntario call for Open Textbook projects. The next stage of this project is to adapt the guide to support the entire Ontario community.

Recommendations / Opportunities

The OCUL OER Working Group recognizes the diversity of OCUL membership and the rapidly-changing OER environment in Ontario and beyond. A host of factors – including but not limited to library staffing, local expertise, budget, political considerations, size, student and faculty engagement – contribute to the complexity of the OER landscape on individual campuses, and all will need to be considered when moving forward with OER both individually and consortially. It is not expected that all of the recommendations in this section will be feasible for all libraries. However, there may be ways for OCUL to move forward as a consortium, or for individual libraries to complement or begin their own OER efforts.

These recommendations are based on responses to the survey, findings from other informal environmental scans, and the personal experience of working group members in the area of OER at their individual institutions.

Recommendations for OCUL

Technical infrastructure for hosting OER

The Ryerson University project team has recently completed the initial prototyping phase of their Open Publishing Infrastructure project, which was funded by eCampus Ontario in order to expand the scope of the platform that currently hosts the Ontario open textbook library. There may be an opportunity to expand Ryerson’s prototype infrastructure across the province, and for OCUL and Scholars Portal to play a role in doing so. Therefore, it is recommended that OCUL strike an exploratory committee to gauge interest, costs, and grant funding opportunities for the consortium in taking on this pivotal role.

Training

Due to the emerging expertise in OER among OCUL library staff,  there is an opportunity for knowledge sharing. This can be accomplished through micro lessons, video-based learning, recorded lectures with accompanying slides, podcasts, and/or discussion boards to allow peer to peer learning for librarians across Ontario.

Many responses to the survey indicated that an OER startup kit for OCUL libraries would be a valuable resource. Developing such a kit could be accomplished through an OCUL working group, with resources provided by Scholars Portal.

Another useful resource suggested following the March webinar, is a “Voices of OER” webinar series that might be offered by OCUL in partnership with on-campus units to provide a platform for faculty (both within Ontario and beyond) to discuss their adoption of OER materials and how they are used in their classrooms. Having practical information from the faculty perspective could be beneficial to libraries that are partnering or hoping to partner with other units on campus, especially in the areas of education and outreach.

Sharing Resources

The OER Working Group has received several requests to develop models of campus collaborations to provide information to library directors who plan to set up OER working groups or who would like to get a better idea of how libraries participate in such groups on the university level. A shared inventory of skillsets, partners, and possible institutional models, could be useful for Directors and other library administrators across OCUL.

OCUL also has a potential role in facilitating the sharing of resources, such as instructional materials, that librarians and copyright specialists have already developed.

The Working Group recommends that a version of the white paper be published as an OER resource, inviting member schools to add resources and new content to develop a definitive OER Guide for Libraries. This would have the additional benefit of testing collaborative workflows and offering library staff a firsthand experience with OER creation and adaption.

Partnering

The examples of the OER Librarian Day events at Ryerson University and Centennial College libraries, and the newly-established Ontario OER LIbrarian listserv hosted at Ryerson, there are ways of sharing OER information across and outside of OCUL which may surface collaborative opportunities and klcommon challenges in this area.

Several consortia in Canada and the US are investigating or recommending ways to assist their member libraries with OER, as discussed in Section 2: Landscape of OER,  ‘Orbis Cascade survey: role of library consortia’. [link to the other part of the white paper where we elaborate on this]. If OCUL proceeds with supporting OER consortially, forming partnerships with these consortia may allow for more long-term and wide-ranging support. Partnerships may also enable OCUL and/or its members to monitor and take advantage of emerging funding opportunities for open scholarship and increasing awareness of OER and OER repositories.

Recommendations for Institutions

Contextualizing and Evaluating

Survey responses indicate that much of the OER activity in Ontario colleges and universities is happening outside the library community and is being led by eCampus Ontario, Creative Commons, and grassroots faculty and student efforts. It is important for libraries to effectively evaluate their current context on campus by identifying existing advocates, stakeholders, and funding to gain a better understanding of how to provide support without duplicating efforts already underway.

Information about faculty and disciplines already producing OER and how they are producing it, is helpful in evaluating how to allocate library staff and resources and to determine in what areas to develop staff competencies.

Once the library has found a role in the larger campus context, the next step is to establish clear library policies that provide guidance to staff, faculty and stakeholders looking for educational and technical support.  To establish clear channels of communication, it may be helpful to nominate an OER lead/champion who can act as a liaison with other stakeholders on campus, including accessibility and online learning offices.

Educating and Advocating

Education and awareness emerged from the survey as areas where libraries could define roles for themselves in the “open” movement. One respondent suggested that the library engage in advocacy aimed at students, perhaps by helping student bodies partner with other campus units to run a #textbookbroke campaign or other awareness raising efforts.

Libraries are also well placed to:

• develop educational guides about Open Access and OER,
• assist in evaluating the effectiveness of OER with respect to learning outcomes,
• coordinate training opportunities for library staff (or even more widely throughout the university), and
• serve as a communications hub by disseminating information about training opportunities, listservs and other communication channels, and upcoming events which staff might be able to attend to learn more about OER.

One of the OCUL OER survey respondents framed their library’s activity in the following way, reinforcing some of the recommendations for OCUL libraries,

“The library is leading this exploration because of its existing support for free [sic] access to online course readings, its scholarly publishing services and its interests in advancing open access and new forms of scholarly communications.”

Future surveys could capture ongoing OER engagement and projects across OCUL institutions to evaluate the level of engagement and support which might be useful at the consortial level. While current responses indicate that some libraries are not engaged in this work, the landscape is rapidly changing, due in part to the proactive outreach and financial support for projects provided by eCampus Ontario.