Item Detail
-
James Madison University
-
Located in Harrisonburg, VA
Suburban
Public -
21496
-
1888
-
Governing/managing body: Library
Program partners
• Instructional designers
State consortium: VIVA, Virginia’s Academic Library Consortium, sponsored by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) -
Library Scholarly Communications group
Workshops
• Open Education Network Membership
Leveraging library resources
VIVA Open Grants
Publishing support - Pressbooks -
In addition to the workshops based on the OEN format for reviewing an existing textbook, they “created an asynchronous course where there's some formative assessment where instructors are just checking in. It's about making sure that they understand the materials and things like that. And then once they've completed it, we were able to go ahead and select their textbook and write the review.”
Leveraging library resources is an important aspect of the affordability piece of the program.
VIVA started to explore working with the campus bookstores, to provide access to electronic books that match instructors’ course lists, their adoptions. And so we volunteered to be a pilot institution for that, and we were able to work with our bookstore and get a list and to identify some. They have to be the ebooks that are available for course use so it's not like a one user ebook The license has to be for unlimited simultaneous users.An interesting metric is measuring the “number of students and number of instructors that could have potentially been impacted.” This is a twist on the normal number of adoptions that could give a better idea of real impact. “Student cost avoidance” is another measure that helps understand the impact of OER use.
There is no official committee or group that meets about OER or affordability. However, “we have a couple of instructional designers and a couple of liaisons that are coming together monthly and talking about the projects that we're working on and the people that we're talking to and bringing forward any concerns or any places where we might need additional support.” This informal piece seems to work well to address campus needs surrounding OER and affordability.