Open SUNY Affordable Learning Solutions (ALS) SUNYLA June 5, :15am - 12pm

What is Open SUNY Affordable Learning Solutions? A State University of New York (SUNY) initiative to provide affordable educational alternatives to traditional textbooks A service to assist SUNY faculty, librarians, instructional designers, and staff to identify lower-cost, electronic, free, and Open Educational Resources (OERs) A California State University-MERLOT partner benefit service

opensunyals.org

Right Now – Focus on OERs Open SUNY ALS currently offers tools and support for: Finding OERs Evaluating OERs Advocating for OERs Cataloging OERs (repositories) Showcasing SUNY OER Initiatives Learning about OERs

Finding OERs A recent Babson Survey Research Report, finds that "The time and effort to find and evaluate are consistently listed as the most important barriers by faculty to the adoption of open education resources." Instructions for finding OERs starting with the MERLOT repository and branching out to multiple resources es.html

Evaluating OERs Instructions for evaluating OERs ources.html

Advocating for OERs Advocacy materials for campus-based OER initiatives

Cataloging OERs Support for storing and cataloging SUNY OERs in the SUNY Digital Repository

Cataloging OERs

Showcasing OERs Showcasing for OER initiatives across SUNY

Learning About OERs A self-paced Open Course: Introduction to OERs

Learning About OERs A facilitated version of Introduction to OERs is also available via the COTE professional development offerings Participants in the April – June 2015 offering: 7 librarians 2 instructional designers 2 faculty 1 other

Support for IITG Support for OER-based IIT grant projects There are several new IITG OER-based projects underway

What Open SUNY Affordable Learning Solutions is NOT a SUNY “skin” on MERLOT a solution for the challenge of finding and evaluating OER an Open Access publishing tool

Future – Creation, Community, Affordablity In the future, Open SUNY ALS plans to support SUNY-wide efforts for: Creating OERs Building an OER Community of Practice Pursuing affordability contracts Expanding Educational Offerings

Future – OER Support Applications There are rapidly developing services and applications to support faculty in locating, managing, authoring, adopting and adapting OERs (and other digital content): Ace Learning - Lumen Learning - GinkoTree - PanOpen -

Why is Affordability Important?

Cost Affects Completion

The Kaleidoscope Project was a national collaborative that built 20 open courses using OERs, Tompkins Cortland Community College was one of 18 participants. At TC3, from , 698 students saved an estimated $69,800 on textbooks costs and there was an 26.7% increase in passing grades accompanied by a 15% decrease in withdrawal rates in the Psychology courses developed by Kaleidoscope (savings estimate is based on an average cost of $100 per book; taken from the presentation OPEN and ONLINE TC3 Uses OER to Improve Student Success and Saving Students Big $’s by Tony DeFranco and Marty Christofferson, Tompkins Cortland Community College, September 2013) TC3 instructor Sophia Georgiakaki adopted an open textbook and states: “We went from $120 to $0 [in textbook costs] and we offer the same content.”

Cost Affects Completion “Nearly half of all students surveyed said that the cost of textbooks impacted how many/which classes they took each semester. Students attend college seeking job preparation and/or degree attainment. Careful course selection is often necessary in order to yield the results that a student is seeking within the timeframe they are prepared to study. It is especially concerning that this process may be being undermined by high textbook costs.”

What are OERs? OERs are teaching, learning, and research materials that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.

Free is Not Always Open

SUNY Librarians can: assist instructors in narrowing down the vast array of OERs by using effective search strategies and applying multi-level evaluations support OER incentive initiatives on their campuses (the librarians at SUNY Geneseo created the Open SUNY Textbook initiative ) OERs are stored in a wide variety of repositories, and, although metadata standards exist, there is little consistency between how open learning objects are cataloged and retrieved. SUNY librarians can help implement metadata standards for both campus-specific and SUNY- wide OER repositories Librarians and OERs

At other universities, libraries are leading the way in launching OER initiatives, for example: UMass Amherst – faculty education with financial initiatives University of Minnesota – faculty incentives and education; LMS integration; bookstore partnerships Oregon State – an RFP was issued to faculty; faculty get royalties and sales revenue AND a one-time lump sum educational-resources

Future - Affordability

SUNY Campuses bookstores are run by Follett, Barnes and Nobles and independent vendors (the majority are independents). Cal State University, our Affordable Learning Solutions partner, is supporting us in the investigation of SUNY-wide initiatives

Questions? Thank you so much for attending our session! Any questions? Feel free to contact Laura K. Murray, for more