Launch and sustain an OER program without significant grant or government funding.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

• Step 1: Define leadership for the program. Generally, self-funding programs are initiated by faculty members and administrators who are passionate about the project, but are not receiving additional stipends or time releases for the project. It is important to be realistic about the time available and is often to have more than one individual leading the work.
• Step 2: Identify an executive sponsor. Self-funded projects need to explore possible funding options and it is helpful to have a sponsor who understand institutional budgets and fee structures.
• Step 3: Explore funding possibilities. At this step it is important to focus on approaches that are realistic, and within your control. Often, seeking grant or philanthropic funding seems appealing but can lead to months or years of waiting with no real progress. The three common areas for funding include:
  • An institutional budget item targeted at improving student success that can be reallocated
  • A course-based OER support fee that is added to OER sections of courses at the time of registration, similar to a lab fee
  • A direct student payment model, similar to the course fee but paid by the student without the institution’s involvement
• Step 4: Create a budget for the OER program. Please see the budget template in the helpful resources section for more detail. The budget should capture any stipends or mini-grants that will be awarded to faculty members, what revenue that will create to fund future mini-grants, as well as costs like travel and professional development for the program leads.
• Step 5: Engage key supporters to implement the plan. For course fees in particular, student support has proven to be extremely helpful. Student associations will often lobby in favor of a course fee in order to support greater savings. In many institutions board approval may be required, making it important to align goals for the program with key institutional metrics and strategies.

Note: The budget template assumes that there is an initial program budget of $5,000 and a $5 fee applied to OER courses. This generates funding for all future faculty stipends with some additional budget for travel and professional development, while saving students $500,000 over three academic years.

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Develop a policy framework to support broadening use of OER at your institution. Identify where and how institutional policy can reinforce and sustain your success with open educational resources.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

Even the most disorganized team can score an occasional touchdown, but to sustain the win with OER you’ll need to establish policies that ingrain the use and promotion of open educational resources within your institution’s culture. Here are key steps:

Understand what OER Policy is and why it’s important.

This “Free to Learn” guidebook, developed for higher education leaders, provides a helpful primer about open educational resources and the role of campus leadership in creating an environment that supports their use by faculty and students. This Policy Development Video Series from Open Washington provides video segments from OER experts along with and supporting materials to help you through the process of assessing, reviewing, formulating, and enacting an OER policy at your institution.

Use simple, best practices-based tools to start creating your own OER Policy.

The OER Policy Development Tool can help you quickly get started developing OER-friendly policy for your institution. This freely available, interactive policy-builder tool was developed by Amanda Coolidge (Senior Manager Open Education, BCcampus and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow) and Daniel DeMarte (Chief Academic Officer, Tidewater Community College and Institute for Open Leadership Fellow). Designed for college and university governance officials and those with responsibility for leading OER initiatives, it walks through various dimensions of OER-related policy and provides sample language institutions can use to define and implement these policies.

As you go through the tool, you may select policy positions and components relevant to your institution and your goals for promoting and scaling effective OER adoption. After you’ve selected the policies that apply to your context, the tool generates a policy document for you based on your selections. This process allows you to easily draft a policy framework that suits the needs of your institution, and get the ball of sustainability rolling.

See what others are doing with OER-friendly policy.

More and more institutions are finding ways to build OER-friendly policy into how they operate and support teaching and learning. Wikieducator provides a curated list of institutions with exemplary OER policies.

We also recommend looking through other helpful resources curated below.

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Students use the familiar bookstore purchasing process to pay for printed materials, platform or other support fees associated with reliable, effective OER.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

While open educational resources are freely available, there may be justifiable costs associated with services and technologies that make OER reliable and effective for faculty and students. When this is the case, your campus store can be an easy-to-implement path for funding ongoing use of OER.

Use these considerations to determine if the bookstore funding model is a good fit for your campus.

1. Determine which OER course materials your faculty members want to adopt, and whether they carry added costs.

As faculty members identify OER course materials to adopt, you should confirm whether they carry an added, justifiable cost, versus whether they are completely free to students and faculty. Consider not only the cost of a textbook, but also any supplementary tools instructors plan to adopt to make the learning experience with OER more effective.

For example, virtually all math teachers who adopt free OER textbooks also require students to use an online homework system for machine-graded assessments and immediate feedback. Professionally-supported online homework systems generally carry at least a nominal cost to students.

Work with faculty members to identify the resources their students need and tally the cost to students.

2. Confirm there is an option to go through the campus bookstore to pay for OER courseware / services / support.

The campus bookstore is a well-established way for students to pay for course materials. When your faculty members plan to use OER course materials that carry an added cost, you should confirm whether the providers offer payment options through the bookstore (typically in the form of printed textbooks, access codes, or a similar mechanism).   

A huge advantage of bookstore payment is that it collects any added cost for OER course materials directly from students, so you don’t have to find other pockets of funding to cover these costs. Also, students may use financial aid dollars to purchase course materials through the bookstore.

3. Identify what markup your bookstore will add to the cost of the OER course materials, if any.

Before you finalize any payment terms, be sure to discuss the markup or administrative fee your campus bookstore will add to the cost of OER. We have seen this range widely, from 0% to 40% or more. Often the markup is based on existing contract terms with the campus store operator so there may be no room to negotiate.

In any case, understanding the markup will give you a complete picture about what’s happening with textbook affordability and your OER initiative. For example, an OER option that finds students paying $40 for online homework access and $50 for a printed textbook starts to look very similar to the cost of traditional course materials. In this situation, both faculty and students may start to wonder what value OER actually provides, and this sentiment can undermine the success of your OER initiative. On the other hand, students are delighted when they can pay $25 for an OER option instead of $150 for traditional publisher’s textbook-plus-access-code package.

4. Confirm the OER course materials offer clear value to students.

Students are usually comfortable paying for course materials through the bookstore when the materials are reasonably-priced and when they offer clear value to strengthen learning.

In Lumen’s work with students, we find they are most interested in affordable, effective course materials, rather than demanding zero cost. Students typically have little concern about paying for low-cost (e.g. $40 or less) course materials when these resources offer clear value supporting the learning process.

Students may see value in a variety of ways:

• Is the content up-to-date, high quality and error-free?
• Can they retain their own copy of the content after the course ends?
• Are there interactive learning tools to help them master the content?
• Are the course materials convenient and easy to access?
• Are students well-supported throughout the learning process? Etc.  

When we ask students to shoulder external costs associated with OER through the bookstore or other funding mechanisms, we have a responsibility to make sure their investment in these course materials is both affordable and worthwhile.

5. Recognize some students may choose not to purchase course materials.

Even though bookstore payment is convenient and familiar and value-adding OER options may be affordable, some students may choose not to pay. This can lead to the same problems we encounter with traditional course materials: when students don’t have access to complete learning content, their academic performance usually suffers.

Discuss this eventuality with your OER provider to see what options are available to remedy this situation. For example, Lumen uses a model that provides students with complete access to instructional content at no cost throughout the term. Students are cued to enter an activation code to retain access to machine-graded assessments for the duration of the term. This creative approach encourages more students to comply because it asks students to pay a nominal cost for learning tools that add clear value on top of the freely-available OER.  

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Sustain ongoing support for OER adoption by allocating institutional budget from existing budget sources (e.g. technology fee, etc).

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

Teamwork is key to the success of this play. Given the organizational will-power and stakeholder alignment that need to come together to set aside funding expressly for OER, this approach can be a doozy. But when an institution or group of institutions can band together and allocate budget funding to support OER adoption, it’s a huge win for the campus community. This funding may be used for a variety of things:

• Professional development, mentoring & training (for faculty, librarians, instructional designers, etc.)
• Mini-grants and other incentives to encourage faculty adoption of OER
• Technology (e.g. platforms, integration)
• Learning tools to make OER a better or more effective learning experience for students
• Services and support around learning design and learning effectiveness (e.g. instructional design, learning data analysis, etc.)
• Project management to direct OER adoption

The primary advantage to this approach is that students incur zero additional course materials costs, since costs are covered by the institution. Institutions using this approach should track what happens with student outcomes such as cost savings, passing rates, retention rates, and term-over-term enrollment levels. Often OER initiatives help drive improvements in these student outcomes, and this can help campus leaders tell a compelling story about return-on-investment for budget allocated to OER. This play also gives an institution some great fodder for marketing their programs as affordable. 

Student government can be a powerful ally lobbying institutional leadership for this type of funding approach because it directly impacts affordability, an issue many student leaders care about deeply.

A primary disadvantage to running this play is that sustaining ongoing funding can prove difficult when there is a lot of turnover in the executive sponsor role. Also, when budgets tighten (for whatever reason), funding for innovation-related initiatives is often at higher risk. If there is uncertainty about political support for funding for OER initiatives over the longer term, this approach becomes inherently risky, since OER supporters will have to re-fight the funding battle over and over again. 

Below are a few examples where institutions and systems have pulled together to make it happen:

• Virginia Community College System. VCCS was successful in funding costs for system-wide OER efforts by pulling from the technology budgets of each of their community colleges based on institution size).
• South Texas BASOL Program. South Texas’s Bachelor’s Degree in Organizational Leadership utilizes OER and has wrapped up textbooks costs as part of tuition so that students do not incur any additional fees.
• SUNY & CUNY Systems: Under leadership from the state’s governor, the State University of New York and the City University of New York systems received significant funding for open educational resources, earmarked specifically to address affordability and making quality educational resources available to all students. Both systems are exploring how to use this “windfall” funding to create structural, sustained support for OER.

Resources

Example: Tidewater Community College Z-Degree. Tidewater is part of the Virginia Community College system, and they have used OER to create several zero-cost degree programs.

Example: South Texas BASOL Program. South Texas’s Bachelor’s Degree in Organizational Leadership is the first competency-based bachelor’s degree from a Texas public institution,

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Sustain and expand OER initiatives by adding a low-cost OER course fee to cover courseware and other program support costs.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

Timing is the biggest threat to the success of this play. Many institutions decide too late in the game to tag courses, so beginning early will be key.

1. Verify ability to add a course fee and connect with key players to identify institutional timelines. Some institutions are unable to offer a course fee option, and those that do must adhere to strict deadlines and complex administrative processes that often occur months in advance.
2. Make the case! To support adding a course fee, Invite students to help advocate for affordable course materials and make a strong case around benefits of OER:

• • Affordability: Cost savings for students
  • Access: Day one access to course materials
  • Ability to pay with financial aid, versus finding cheaper options via third parties but being unable to pay with financial aid dollars.
  • Ownership: Ability to retain materials after the end of the semester, and print without fear of copyright violation.
  • Control & Editability: Ability to make changes to content so the materials can exactly fit the needs of the course.
  • Success: Passing rates and retention improve.

3. Keep faculty informed. Maintain a regular schedule of communication of upcoming deadlines.

4. Collect data! Ensure growth and ongoing success by tracking key metrics for OER courses (drop rates, completion, passing), and consider triangulating this data with a student satisfaction survey.

Examples:

• Odessa College uses a $20 course fee to support courseware, professional development, and faculty mini-grants to continue expanding their OER efforts.
• El Paso Community College employs a $20 course fee for each OER course using the same mechanism for identifying courses with Lab fees:
• Salt Lake Community College communicates course fee guidelines, including submission deadlines, here on their website.

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Develop partnerships with outside entities to increase your capacity, support faculty success with OER, and help you achieve your goals.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

Some OER initiatives are fortunate to have sufficient internal resources and expertise to support them as they grow, typically drawing from the library, the center for teaching & learning, and other parts of the organization. Others struggle to provide all the support their faculty members need, either because internal resources are stretched, or because interest in OER adoption outpaces the capacity of the teams tasked with supporting it.

Fortunately, there are great “plays” in the realm of partnerships. You can partner with a variety of organizations to increase your capacity and support for OER adoption. Here’s how:

Identify where you’re seeing gaps, bottlenecks, and pain points.

Where are your gaps and blind spots when it comes to supporting OER adoption? Do your faculty struggle with where to find OER? Not understanding how open licensing works? How to bring it into the learning environment technically? How to approach course design using OER? How to assess quality? As you identify areas that outstrip your internal expertise and bandwidth, it provides guidance on what types of partnerships could be beneficial to build your capacity and support your faculty more fully.

Identify potential partners with solutions and/or expertise to fill your gaps.

A variety of organizations provide worthwhile products and services to help you remove barriers to OER adoption for your faculty. These might include companies, non-profit organizations, advocacy organizations, other educational institutions, and individual experts.

Conduct research and make inquiries about who’s doing the kinds of things you want to achieve – and doing them well. Keep in mind the open education community is doing a lot of things that have never been done before. This means some of the most valuable partners might be those you trust to help you figure out something new.

Get to know potential partners and how they work.

Use the internet, conferences, webinars, and other information sources to check out partners and request getting-to-know-you meetings. Find out how they typically engage with organizations doing the types of things you want to do. How do they work with faculty members? Talk to their current partners and customers, to learn about their experiences and whether the partner’s approach would be good for your project.

Inquire about costs and payment models for the type of partnership you’re exploring. Different organizations have different models for how to engage with their people, products, and services. Payment models range from totally free to “donation requested” to membership fees, subscriptions, and charges per student or per service engagement. What will work best for you, given your administrative structure, budget, and what you’re trying to accomplish?

Select and develop partnerships to help you remove barriers and achieve your goals.

Once you find a partner that is a good fit, commit to developing this relationship so you can realize its full value. Fruitful partnerships require attention, time, and collaboration. Make the effort early to set partnerships up for success based on common goals and milestones.

Bringing in a new partner is a tremendous opportunity to raise awareness and build momentum around OER adoption. When you take advantage of this opportunity, you’ll make quicker progress towards accomplishing the things you want to see from both OER and the partnership itself.

Potential Partner Organizations

The following list is a sampling of organizations working actively to support OER adoption and faculty professional development related to OER in higher education. 

• BCcampus – Support for innovative teaching and learning practices
• CCCOER – Consortium for collaboration and professional development around OER adoption among community colleges
• Cengage OpenNOW – Digital courseware designed using OER
• Creative Commons – Open licensing and related advocacy
• Intellus – Digital courseware designed using OER
• Lumen Learning – Digital courseware designed using OER, faculty support, and adoption expertise
• Merlot – Searchable OER library, repository, and creation tools
• OER Commons – Searchable digital OER library, repository, and network
• Online Learning Consortium (OLC) – Faculty professional development
• Open Textbook Library – Search for and review openly licensed textbooks
• OpenStax – Open textbook publisher
• SPARC – Library and librarian support for OER
• TopHat – Digital courseware designed using OER

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Seek grant funding to support broadening use of OER to impact affordability, access, and improved student outcomes.

Grant funding can be an excellent way to attract funding in support of OER adoption. In higher education, grants often focus around teaching and learning innovation, as well as initiatives that improve student outcomes. Fortunately, OER aligns well with all of these objectives.

Grant funding often brings publicity and a higher profile for your OER initiative. Grants may also introduce new incentives to attract supporters and adopters.

Of course “free money” from grant funding isn’t usually totally free. Grants nearly always have some strings attached, involving tracking progress and accounting for what you’ve created with the funds. But grants can help kick-start or turbo-charge the change you’re working to make with OER.

Here are points to consider with this path:

Finding Potential Grant Opportunities  

Look for grant opportunities at the local, system, state, national, and even international levels. Many education-focused grant opportunities can easily incorporate an OER element, even if the grant program itself doesn’t focus expressly on open educational resources. Grants are available from private foundations, government, and educational institutions themselves.

A good rule of thumb is: Identify grant opportunities that are a great fit for the kinds of things your department / system / institution is trying to accomplish. Then brainstorm how OER might be part of what you’d like to propose to win the grant. Are there ways OER can give you a special competitive edge for your grant proposal? Consider how using OER might strengthen the overall project design, pedagogy, and the value of the outcomes your project generates for others to use and benefit from.

Writing a Strong Grant Proposal

The key to a strong grant proposal is to write directly to criteria judges will use to evaluate your project. While you’re still in the project design process, take time to look over the scoring criteria so you know which parts of the grant application count most. Give those items due attention to ensure you’re maximizing your point totals.

When you bring OER into the grant application, make sure you’re providing an appropriate level of explanation so the reviewers understand what you’re talking about and the benefits OER offers to the project.

Being Smart about “Free Money”

When you receive grant funding, it usually comes with stipulations about what you can or cannot do with the funding, as well as accounting for how you spend the money. Create realistic budgets as you’re preparing a grant proposal, and then stick to your budget when it’s time to get the work done.

You should also plan ahead for reporting and compliance with grant terms. These elements of grants can create administrative headaches, especially if you’re scrambling to do them after the fact. When you go into a grant with a big-picture plan for these parts of the project, you have more flexibility to anticipate what you’ll need and to design the project (and its funding) with these goals in mind.  

If your grant involves administering stipends or other incentive payments to members of your campus community, consider a payment schedule that aligns well with the work they will deliver. For example, award faculty an initial payment when you select them for the work, and then pay remaining funds based on them achieving designated milestones, such as starting to teach an OER course, or sharing student outcome data at the end of a term.

Diligent project management will help you run an effective, efficient initiative with your grant funding.

Plan for the Post-Grant World

Grant funding is awesome, but you don’t want the fabulous work you’re doing with a grant to evaporate when the grant ends. With this in mind, start early to think about how you will sustain the change you’ve created.

Some grants ask for a sustainability plan as part of the initial grant application. Even if this isn’t the case, you should plan for how you’ll keep the goodness going, assuming your project is worthwhile to continue. Some projects shift nominal costs to students so they can carry forward. Others find institutional funding sources or end up getting housed and managed as part of the library, teaching and learning center, or other entity.

Thinking about these options in advance may help you structure your initiative in a way that capitalizes on grant funding while it’s available and then rolls easily into an ongoing funding mechanism.

Examples

Examples of OER initiatives that got rolling with grant funding include:

• Achieving the Dream OER Degree Initiative: A 2016 grant program for community colleges focused on developing full degree programs using OER.
• Virginia Community College System: Initial funding to help expand OER adoption came from the Hewlett Foundation; after grant funding expired the VCCS system shifted to providing some internal funding to support OER adoption.
• University System of Maryland: The Maryland State Legislature approved the Textbook Cost Savings Act of 2017, allocating a grant of $100,000 to support adopting, adapting, and creating accessible OER. Administered by the Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation, this funding was used to build momentum for the Maryland Open Source Textbook (M.O.S.T.) Initiative. It provided an interim step towards long-term, self-funding sustainability for this program.

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Establish a team to encourage collaboration and provide support services for scaling OER adoption across multiple institutions or an entire system.

As OER initiatives scale up across a system or state, it can be strategically valuable to establish a team that focuses on coordinating work between institutions and provide a range of common support services.  These teams often include instructional designers, librarians, educational technologists and project managers.

Teams do not need to be very large, particularly if you follow a train-the-trainer model and if you have flexibility in team organization. Centralized, de-centralized, and hybrid models can all work to provide efficient organizational structure for a multi-institution support team.  

1. Identify signs that system-level support services are needed. Establishing such support services, given the cost involved, before they are needed can be counterproductive as it can drain limited resources and thus erode senior level support.  Some signs that it may be time to create such services include:
   1. Duplication of effort – If faculty or departments at different institutions are working on the same OER courses without knowing about each other’s work.
   2. Similar workshops are being run – if the same workshops are being developed and run without coordination between institutions or campuses.
   3. Institutions are engaging with the same vendors – if institutions are contracting with the same vendors independently without coordination.
   4. Limited awareness of initiatives at the system level – if system level administrators start to find that they were unaware of existing initiatives on individual campuses.
2. Determine support and staffing needs.  Conduct a light-weight needs assessment by surveying OER champions and institutional leaders to identify common needs around support services, strategic planning and coordination.
3. Determine the best organizational model.  The organizational culture of the system often factors into how to best organize the team.  In some cases it may make sense to have a very centralized team based out of a system office while in other cases a more distributive model with staff based at institutions working within a region is best.  Hybrid models in which a small team that is centrally based then coordinates with staff and liaisons on individual campuses can also be very effective.
4. Determine how to best fund staffing. Finding funding for new staffing can often be a major challenge in creating a system-level support team.  While there is no one panacea solution, effective approaches include:
   1. Leverage new revenue from scaling OER adoptions – Evidence, such as studies at Tidewater Community College, suggests that institutions will realize a boost in revenue as they scale adoption of OER as a result of fewer students dropping courses.  This new revenue can be used to fund new staff lines.
   2. Seek grant or foundation funding – Given the impact that scaling OER adoption will have on student success there may be state, federal or private foundation grants and funding that can be sought to fund staffing.  Such funding is often temporary so its best to uses these to cover initial “start up” costs to get a team in place but to then have a longer-term funding model ready once grant funds run out.
   3. Establish a sustainable revenue stream – Implementing a small OER course fee, increasing an existing fee (such a tech fee) or even establishing an endowed fund can create a new revenue stream that can support staffing.
   4. Consider repurposing staff lines that are no longer needed – While changing staff lines can often be politically challenging, it is worth assessing existing positions to see if it makes sense to re-task them to focus on OER.  For example, a staff member who might have previously supported faculty on copyright clearance of instructional materials might get retrained on Creative Commons licenses.
5. Consider a train-the-trainer model. Rather than creating a very large team is can be more effective to implement a train-the-trainer model in which system-level staff train those at the institution level and then provide them with the resources needed to support faculty more directly.  In addition to be cost-effective, this approach results in developing institutional knowledge over time and avoid long-term dependence on system resources.
6. Recognize that staffing may not be needed forever.  Over time, especially if you use a train-the-trainer model, system-level staff may no longer be need or at least needed at the same levels as faculty become more knowledgeable.

Resources:

• Multi-institution Support Model: SUNY OER Services
• Multi-institution Support Model: University System of Maryland Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation

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