Item Detail
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Grand Valley State University
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Located in Allendale Charter Township, MI
Public
Suburban -
19239
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3027
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Governing/managing body: Library
Program partners:
• Teaching and Learning Center
• Student Senate
• eLearning Technologies division (instructional designers, educational technology support)
Funding
• Teaching and Learning Center
• President’s Office
• University Libraries -
Grants
Publishing - Institutional repository
Workshops
Leveraging library resources
Campus OER taskforce -
Part of the program’s success is due to “enthusiastic support from the library administration.” The “bookstore does a lot about talking about affordability” which helps spread the word about reducing course materials costs for students. In addition, support from campus administration is evident in that for the “open access week symposium last year, which was our kind of open access week event, the Provost gave some remarks as the introduction to that. And that was--it was very focused on open educational resources and also open access.”
There is not one person who leads the OER efforts but rather the Scholarly Communications team, consisting of three librarians. However, OER is specifically in the job description for the Publishing Services Manager. This has led to being in an enviable position that there are “more faculty involved in publishing OER than have chosen to adopt OER.” Thanks to an internal grant, the team expanded in 2021 to include a student editorial assistant and OER curator.
The student senate has been helpful in spreading the work about open. Their help is “specifically around open access week in October to talk about what's happening on campus. And that's focused a lot on OER because that's very relevant to students.” Despite this, one of the challenges is that “student involvement and energy is very much a wave.” Recently there has been good energy from students, but that could change. Maintaining the energy just in the library is more difficult when student energy is not there.
Some funding is provided by the Teaching and Learning Center for “grant opportunities related to innovative teaching.” Some faculty apply for these funds to develop or adapt OER for their courses.
In Spring 2021, the University Libraries received a two-year grant from the President’s Innovation Fund, for an Accelerating OER Initiative to expand OER programs and support. Central pieces of this initiative include a student editorial assistant for OER, faculty grants for creating or remixing OER, and an adjunct librarian position focused on curating potential OER for instructors.
A big challenge is to spread the word about OER and affordability. Much of what happens on campus “has come from our elearning and emerging technologies” centers. Other methods are just word-of-mouth, sometimes through unexpected means. For example,
We had a faculty member who heard his lead subject liaison talking about the repository and then came to her and said, "Hey, I've got these materials that I've assembled. No commercial textbook publisher is interested in them because we use them for a dozen students a year here maximum. So there's no profit in it. Um, can the library help me publish it?" And we said "Yes, yes, we would very much like to help you publish that." And so that was the first OER that we published.
The online education programs instructional designers “first encountered and got interested in OER as a potential for worry free material to incorporate into an online course.” This type of interest has spurred program development even though “they wouldn’t be recognizing that term ‘OER’.”