1. Tim Boto & Debbie Herman Manchester Community College (CT)
Creating a Curriculum-Aligned OER Discovery Tool: A Twist on Faculty Mini-Grant Incentives
Tim Boto & Debbie Herman
Manchester Community College (CT)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

2. Campus OER Adoption Efforts
Campus Working Group dedicated to promoting Open Educational Resources and affordable course materials use
Develop statement of purpose
Conduct OER faculty needs assessment
Clarify use of faculty “additional responsibilities” time for OER projects
Oversee and promote systemwide and local mini-grant opportunities for OER
Faculty/Staff professional development
Local campus efforts to promote OER have been driven by faculty and staff, not administration!
Biggest adoptions to date: All sections of Intro. to Sociology are using OpenStax Sociology (Spring 2019). All sections of Public Speaking (Fall 2019) using OER textbook (Stand Up, Speak Out)

3. Faculty Needs Assessment Survey
Academic Year
53 responses received 67% (n=30) were full-time and 33% (n=15) were part-time.
15 departments and programs responded to the survey.
English/Humanities, Biology and Psychology/Anthropology departments most heavily represented in the responses.

4. Faculty Mini-Grant Programs
Professional Development
OER Adoption
Course conversion
OER Creation or Adaptation
Open Pedagogy
Goals: To promote campus conversations about OER and textbook affordability, promote greater adoption, and develop a useful tool that addressed needs identified by the faculty survey.

5. Project Timeline Fall 2017 Spring 2018 Summer 2018 Fall 2018
Faculty complete their work and contribute reviews via a submission form. Out of 13 recipients, 9 completed their reviews by the start of the fall semester. Faculty required to devote at least 7 hours to the project. Number of completed reviews ranged from 1 to 14.
Fall 2018
Faculty Needs Assessment instrument developed to help establish priorities and guide work of the OER Working Group. Survey was distributed to all full and part-time faculty at MCC. First discussion of Gen. Ed. focused repository project.
MCC Foundation offers annual fund grant opportunity for projects < $5,000. Grant requirements and application/completion procedures established. Funding approved to offer twelve $ grants to faculty to select and review Gen. Ed. aligned OER.
OER Working Group apprised of progress made over the summer. Library and Educational Technology staff review options for hosting completed reviews. Ability to browse by resource type, course numbers, and outcomes/competencies deemed important.
Spring instructors selected from English, Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy, History, Anthropology and Environmental Science.
Summer - Met with participants individually as needed to clarify procedures, etc. Sent midsummer to check on their progress. Some concerns from union and HR about payment of stipends, even though faculty were technically off-contract and funding through Foundation.
Fall Platforms we considered: LibGuides, OER Commons Group/Hub. Very small budget to work with.

6. Other Grant Requirement OER Commons Review
Grant recipients were also required to contribute to OER Commons by adding and/or evaluating resources in OER Commons. Secondary project goal to strengthen the OER movement by contributing additional resources and reviews to OER Commons. Faculty evaluated each resource according to the Achieve rubric and were encouraged to add tags and comments. Several new resources were added to OER Commons through this project.

7. Why Gen. Ed.?
High enrollments - Accounted for 58% of all credits in the academic year (58,000 credits, or 19,000 seat registrations). Many with expensive textbooks
CSCU Transfer & Articulation Plan - Framework 30 Gen Ed. Most are required courses for seamless transfer to CSCU senior institutions and transferred as a block
Textbook content in some disciplines doesn’t change as much (Math, Biology, History)
OER content/supplementals are mostly established for general education courses
Adjuncts teach a lot of the Gen Eds so if we get the dept chairs/full time faculty we could flip a whole department into using OER

8. MCC’s OER Database Plugin for WordPress Benefits
Custom fields, post types and taxonomies
Custom layouts via visual editor
Build custom searches
No programming (though knowledge of HTML and CSS helps)
Add CSS and JS to views (No need to edit the theme)
Cheap! $69/year or $149/yr for “interactive” version with forms
No institutional repository. Other options considered: LibGuides, Google apps

9. MCC’s OER Database - Data Entry
Taxonomies
Wordpress custom fields & taxonomies created via Toolset

10. Demo Time!
Advanced search example: KW: “grammar” filtered by Framework 30 “written communication”.

11. Full Resource Description Page

12. Next Steps 1 Address Disciplinary Gaps 1 Vestibulum congue tempus 2
Since participation was voluntarily there are gaps. For example, no math, chemistry, physics faculty participation. 2
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Repository entries don’t include copyright or licensing information. It would be nice to include and be able to search/browse by license type. 2
Additional Field for Rights Info 3
Migrate Repository to MCC Website 3
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MCC website (also Wordpress!) scheduled to be moved to off-campus host over the summer. Discussions with webmaster to move OER repository once this is completed. 4
Offer Other Incentives to Contribute OER 4
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Develop marketing plan and other incentives for faculty to contribute resources to the repository.
It’s also possible to create forms via Toolset for faculty and staff to contribute OER directly, but we haven’t explored this yet. Also, general education curriculum consolidation could potentially make this useful system wide resource.

13. Links to Resources
Mini-Grant Application Form -
Sample Letter to Faculty Participants -
Mini-Grant Submission Form -
MCC OER Repository -
Toolset Wordpress Plugin -

14. Thank You!
Tim Boto
Assistant Director of Educational Technology & Distance Learning
Manchester Community College
Debbie Herman
Director of Library & Educational Technology