LIBRARY CURRICULUM SUPPORT In Economics at Utah State University Thank you all for having me here. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the subject librarian for ____. Today I’m here to talk to you about two new services the library is offering that will enhance teaching and learning at USU.

Introducing two new services OER Support Reading Lists Identifying Open Educational Resources to replace course textbooks or readers Building reading lists of journal articles in Canvas The first service is OER support. The library’s OER support team can help you identify relevant, high-quality OER to replace/supplement commercial textbooks or readers, and the second is a tool in Canvas for creating customized reading lists of articles we own through the Library's subscriptions.

Immediate and unlimited access So to get started, let’s first delve into open educational resources. How would it change your teaching if every student had immediate and unlimited access to course materials, day 1 of class? One way to do this is to use OER. It means that instead of waiting on students to buy their books from Amazon or waiting for their financial aid to come in - every student has the book in their hands, starting day one of the course. There is no need to put off teaching or learning because most of the students don't have access to their books. 

Open Educational Resources? Free & unrestricted access Ability to modify and adapt learning materials So what exactly are Open educational resources? OER are high quality teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. They are authored by faculty members and mostly come out of universities.  OER can include textbooks, videos, lecture notes, syllabi, exams, additional readings, and presentations to course shells/frameworks. What sets these materials apart from traditional materials is that they are released under an open copyright license that grants blanket permission for open use. Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Creative Commons licenses. These licenses support the 5 Rs which are Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute. They are essential for open access content. What this all means for students is that OER... are free for students to read and download digitally can typically be printed at cost (for example, a hardcopy of an open textbook can be sold in the bookstore and costs $20-40). What this all means for faculty is that OER... allow for more academic and learning freedom.  can be curated and tailored by instructors to fit the needs of the course, so that YOU, the professor, not textbook publishers, decide what will be included in your curriculum can be posted anywhere online or directly in Canvas

DIRECT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TEXTBOOK COSTS AND STUDENT SUCCESS 65% of students said they had skipped buying a textbook due to price A 2014 Student Research PIRG report quantifies the ways high textbook costs affect student persistence and success. Here we see a direct relationship between the costs of textbooks and student success. Because textbook prices are so high, students can’t always afford them. Often students have to forego taking a required class due to the high textbook costs.  Research: http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org/pdf/2012_Exec_Sum_Student_Txtbk_Survey.pdf 50% chose not to register for a course Source: Center for Public Interest Research, 2014 http://studentpirgs.org/sites/student/files/reports/NATIONAL%20Fixing%20Broken%20Textbooks%20Report1.pdf

28 hours working a minimum wage job to purchase a $200 textbook So we all know that textbooks are expensive. Over the last three decades, college textbook prices have risen more than three times the rate of inflation (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014). The College Board estimates that the average student in this country spends around $1,200 a year on books and supplies. Often a single book can cost as much as $200. US PIRG notes that a student would have to work 28 hours at a minimum wage job to afford each $200 textbook they purchase. This is an unsustainable model for many students. While we don’t have control over tuition costs and other external factors, we do have control over which textbook we adopt for a class http://www.uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/National%20-%20COVERING%20THE%20COST.pdf

Subject Current book price Number of students Potential Savings TEXTBOOK PRICES Subject Current book price Number of students Potential Savings Anatomy & Physiology $249.95 1,000 $249,950 Statistics $149.95 $149,950 Macroeconomics $277.95 $277,950 Locally, these are prices from our bookstore for fall ‘16 classes.

What about quality. And, where are all of these OER coming from What about quality? And, where are all of these OER coming from? They are mainly coming from universities and non profit organizations. They are authored by faculty members like you who chose to publish using a creative commons license. Development costs are paid for by philanthropic organizations, individuals, and individual schools who believe in the mission of OER. Just like there are good and bad textbooks out there, the same goes with OER repositories. That’s why the librarians at USU have identified the top content providers like OpenStax (out of Rice University), OpenSUNY (out of SUNY NY), Open Textbook Library (out of Univ. of Minnesota) and so on. We know quality matters. Many of these platforms offer high-quality professional peer-reviewed texts that are comparable to publisher texts. Open Textbook Library, for instance, features Amazon-like reviews from other faculty members, which allows you to quickly assess the quality of the text.

replace this slide with customized department OER examples

OER at USU Finding the right OER for your course may be challenging, but you don’t need to go it alone. The library’s OER support team can help! Meet with your subject librarian and the library’s OER specialists Identify potential textbook replacements Evaluate promising textbooks Announce change by bookstore deadline (Adoptions for Spring 2017 are due October 10th and for Fall semesters on March 10th.) Integrate into syllabus and course materials http://Oer.ou.usu.edu There is campus support for OER - Mention campus level OER committee? Provost’s office

BUILD A READING LIST Instructor setup in Canvas Student access through Canvas High-quality scholarly content Easy to reuse and adapt existing reading lists WHAT is a Reading List? And WHY do we/you care?

The problem: Finding, accessing, and sharing articles are disconnected processes Multiple steps for both instructors and students Untrackable PDF usage can result in journal cancellation You may find articles in many places. Then you have to download them, keep track of the files, and set up a way to share them with students. Then, there are multiple ways for students to access required course materials. And finally, depending on how you provide access, the Library might cancel our subscription to a journal that you use often, because we don't know that it's being used. If you download a PDF and then share it in Canvas, where it's downloaded and read hundreds of times, we still only see that one download. But if every user accesses the article from the publisher's site, then that usage is tracked and taken into consideration.

Example of course reading list Here is what students face. Your reading lists may be in PDFs, they may be part of the syllabus, or they may be set up as Canvas modules. You can upload files to Canvas, but then you have to remember what you named the file, and then do it again for your next course. You can set up links to library resources, but isn't there some trick about making the link work off campus? (The JSTOR links above, for example, would only work on campus.) Or you can give students the list and expect them to locate each article on their own. We aren't taking any of these options away from you. Build a Reading List is simply a more convenient way that you can provide readings for your students.

Example of Build a Reading List – Professor view Build a Reading List in provides an easy, accessible way for you to create and update reading lists for particular courses. Here we are in Canvas. As shown in short tutorial videos that we've created, you can enable the Build a Reading List feature in the Modules section of Canvas. Then you can search multiple library databases for articles right within Canvas.

Example of Build a Reading List – Student view Here's what students will see once you've selected readings for the course. As you can see at the bottom, you can also add notes that students will see before going to each reading. These links will work off campus without any special work on your part. You can set up links to websites or even to files you've uploaded to Canvas in the past. And in future semesters you can reuse or revise a list you create now. 

Why use Build a Reading List? Upload Files to Canvas Set up Links in Canvas Student access from home Library can track usage Built-in Authentication Find content and make it available in a single step High-quality subscribed content Easy to reuse lists Single-site management

Getting started with Build a Reading List Link to tutorials: http://libguides.usu.edu/readinglist Contact your subject librarian for help

The Library is here to support you by: Providing customized research help in your courses (regardless of format) Guiding your students through the research process Making your research available to a wider audience Keeping you informed of developments in research-data management Building book and journal collections to meet your teaching and research needs Locating high-quality OER to replace/supplement textbooks! Cut? Or at least end w/this slide if there’s time. Spend 30 seconds on this slide - Subject librarian could focus on one or two of these and share quick examples of how they’ve supported department in the past. Ideas for images: Making research available – Digital Commons logo? Research Data Management - ? Book/Journal collections – image of stacks or teacher at a white board Customized Research help – image of Research Help tab in Canvas Guiding students through research process – book a librarian image? (potential handout that covers all of this stuff instead?) subject librarian info included? Maybe we don’t even need this slide?

? Name Phone number Email address Contact us for questions regarding OER, reading list, new subject librarian, etc.