In Short

A top concern of students in the 2023 Inside Higher Education Student Voice Survey was course materials affordability^[1], and it’s not just about having a little extra money: more than half of students in the latest Florida Virtual Campus student survey on textbooks indicated that the high cost of course materials led them to not purchase the materials at all, while over 40% chose to take fewer courses due to the cost of course materials.^[2] Open education and open educational resources (OER) are a sustainable and instructor-centered approach to affordability, aiming to put free and highly-relevant course materials in the hands of students on day one of a college course through a connected community of subject matter experts and open education leaders. Since 2014, Affordable Learning Georgia has been addressing the cost of course materials for USG students through enabling faculty to transform their courses using affordable materials, many of which are OER, leading to over $140 million in total student savings on textbook costs while improving or maintaining the same efficacy and throughput rates. This article will give leaders an introduction to open education, organizations to check out, our own program as a case study, and some key takeaways for getting started on an OER program.

Why Open Education?

In the 1950s and 1960s, the creation of new software largely took place at academic institutions, and new developments in programming were distributed transparently across the burgeoning computer science field.^[3] The result of this sharing was a nationally connected and eventually globally connected community of theorists, experimentalists, programmers, engineers, business owners, military leaders, communications specialists, and enthusiasts building the future of computing together.

The reason why this free and open sharing of both academic and corporate researchers existed, supported with funding and expertise, was clear: to collectively build and improve the computer science field and computing itself as quickly as possible. Other priorities exclusive to various participants in computing research existed: academic institutions wanted to be the premier location for this new and soon-to-be-necessary academic field; academic researchers wanted to discover new knowledge and, through sharing this knowledge, gain recognition within the institution and field; companies saw opportunities for profit on the horizon; governments saw opportunities for efficiency and military use.^[4] All of these priorities existed under the original, though: if the quick advancement of computer science on the whole did not happen, the individual goals of each of these participants would be held back. When this rapid growth happened and personal computers became a normal household device, priorities shifted: software became a product to be bought and sold, and computing knowledge became increasingly proprietary, triggering a revival of the original open and connected computing community through the Free and Open Software (FOSS) movement.^[5]

Open education is a similarly connected free and open sharing field composed of institutions, instructors, librarians, instructional designers, nonprofit organizations, governments, and companies, all with a shared overarching priority: to collectively improve education for all. Like with FOSS, open education’s participants have their own priorities under this larger umbrella: states and institutions want to lower the price of educational resources for students; faculty instructors want to improve their instructional methods with the maximum amount of academic freedom available to them; instructional designers want to assist with their expertise in optimizing resources for engaging and new pedagogies; librarians want to assist with their expertise in resource discovery and metadata; nonprofit organizations fund and organize open education groups; governments want to increase public institution enrollments and retention through standout methods in making education more affordable; companies see an opportunity for partnership in IT and courseware support for creating and sharing resources.

An important aspect of open education is sharing faculty-authored resources with an open license. An open license gives other instructors throughout the world the permission to use and redistribute the resource immediately and with zero cost to students, remix and revise the resource to meet the needs of their students and fit their teaching styles and improve the resource by adding more current or culturally relevant content.^[6] Remixes, revisions, and improvements can then be shared with that same community to improve the resource further. These open educational resources, OER, generally have a Creative Commons License as their open license, with the exception of the No Derivatives restriction, which would prevent any remixing or revising.^[7]

Improving educational resources while reducing the cost of textbooks and improving resource access to students are two in-tandem drivers for the open education field in themselves. A 2022 survey with over 13,000 student responses from over 30 Florida higher education institutions showed over half of students not purchasing course materials because of their cost, with more than 40% of respondents reporting taking fewer courses due to the cost of course materials.^[8] Open education goes beyond the cost of resources, though: the remixability and revisability of OER can enable new forms of instruction, including involving students in the creation and editing of resources, thereby allowing students to take a higher level of responsibility and make a much larger impact on their field than your average graded-and-disposed assignment.^[9] This combination of cost impact and innovative pedagogy made open education programs a prominent enough field to necessitate an American Association of Colleges and Universities Institute on Open Educational Resources, now in its third year.^[10]

Current State of Open Education (organizations, studies, platforms)

National and international organizations supporting the adoption, adaptation, and creation of open educational resources are critical to creating a shared infrastructure of connections, outreach, research, production, and policy, and these organizations have been building and growing substantially over the past decade. When exploring the field of open education and starting a campus-wide or system-wide initiative, be sure to familiarize yourself with organizations available to support OER programs, such as these four examples:

Open Education Conference: Convening and Connecting

The Open Education Conference has been an annual event since its inception in 2003, starting with a 40-attendee conference in Utah organized by David Wiley, founder of Lumen Learning.^[11] In 2019, Wiley turned the leadership of the conference to the larger open education community, and the conference lives on as a virtual event with over 1,800 participants in 2021.^[12] The Open Education Conference functions as the premier North America-based open education convening, bringing together instructors, librarians, instructional designers, students, OER program directors, and executive administrators to share successes, lessons learned, and new ideas, along with a chance to form a more connected network through virtual social events. The 2024 Open Education Conference is planned to be a hybrid in-person/online event.^[13] For anyone interested in open education or planning an open education program at their institution, the Open Education Conference is one of the best ways to get to know OER, get to know the key organizers within the open education community, make connections with instructors and professional staff in your institution or region, or survey the wider OER landscape and learn about future plans.

Open Education Network: Training and Curating

The Open Education Network, first called the Open Textbook Network at the University of Minnesota^[14], started with one idea: host a campus workshop that informed faculty on OER basics that would result in a small incentive for completing one in-depth review of an open textbook. By this simple framework, faculty would increase their awareness of OER, evaluate the quality of an open resource within their discipline through a detailed rubric, and provide that review openly to the public through a website devoted to open textbook curation: the Open Textbook Library.^[15] In turn, the Open Textbook Library would be able to provide a collection of well-reviewed open textbooks across academic disciplines with reviews listed alongside the text. Reviews could then inform the original authors or anyone looking to revise the resource on what to address, thereby improving the overall quality of the text. The Open Education Network has grown to support both this Open Textbook Library and a nationwide consortium of open education leaders, including a training program for starting an open education initiative, professional development for the community, and publishing support in the form of both open publishing training and the development and discounting of OER creation platforms.

Open Education Group: Researching and Reviewing

The Open Education Group has been moving research forward on the impact of OER adoption by supporting annual fellowship cohorts of early-career researchers on OER research projects and publishing frameworks to assist anyone involved in OER research. The Open Education Group is responsible for the COUP (Cost, Outcomes, Usage, and Perceptions) Framework followed by researchers in the open education field. They also maintain a long-running and frequently updated literature review called The Review Project, which focuses on OER instructional efficacy and perceptions research.

OpenStax: Producing High-Quality Core Textbooks

OpenStax, a nonprofit organization operating within Rice University, is the leading producer of comprehensive, double-blind peer-reviewed open textbooks for general education / core curriculum courses, with contributing authors from institutions throughout North America. Initiatives within OpenStax are expanding the reach of their resources, including a new business subject collection, a learning research platform, and early access to a learning management system integration too.

Affordable Learning Georgia: A Case Study in Creating OER Programs

In the United States, OER awareness has doubled since 2014, reaching an awareness level of over half of respondents in the 2021-2022 annual Bay View Analytics survey.^[16] A major contributor to the increase in awareness is the growth of OER initiatives; faculty who are even aware that an OER initiative exists are far more likely to adopt OER in their courses.^[17] Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG), an initiative of the Library Services department in the University System of Georgia (USG), is one of the first funded initiatives in the United States aimed at promoting student success and foster educational equity by supporting the use of affordable and open educational resources, established in 2014 with a pilot team of librarians, instructional designers, faculty, and administrators alongside a partnership with the California State University’s affordable resources initiative, Affordable Learning Solutions.

ALG Champions

Each institution has a group of advocates and experts that other faculty can turn to for advice in OER projects. These advocates, our ALG Champions, also serve as a larger steering committee for ALG, meeting monthly with the ALG Program Director and Manager and providing feedback on both our programs and the state of educational resources at their institutions. Affordable Learning Georgia’s new programs and changes to our existing programs are always vetted by Champions first, and their insights and perspectives are critical to keeping ALG adaptive and agile within our system. From the design of our website to the structures and strategic priorities within our grant programs, anyone benefiting from ALG is in turn benefiting from every USG institution’s ALG Champions.

Affordable Materials Grants

Affordable Learning Georgia operates within the tenets of academic freedom alongside our 26 USG institutions; the USG cannot tell faculty which materials to teach with, just as it cannot dictate exactly how faculty can teach a course. Instead of mandates, ALG provides support to faculty who would like to adopt, adapt, or create new affordable materials such as OER by removing the largest barrier to OER use: the time needed to adopt, adapt, and create materials to fit the specific learning outcomes of the course. This support primarily comes in the form of Affordable Materials Grants, which are competitive awards given to teams of USG faculty and professional staff with proposals to adopt, adapt, or create OER, use library materials, and/or adopt other no-cost or low-cost materials for their courses. Awards where expensive materials are replaced offer a maximum of $5,000 per team member to support this extra time used.

Since 2014, these grants have led to a variety of different types of OER projects, including department-wide adoptions of existing open textbooks, the collaborative creation of entirely new open textbooks, open courses using content management systems such as LibGuides and campus website tools, the creation of ancillary materials for existing open textbooks such as videos, podcasts, lecture slides, and practice test banks, and the adoption of low-cost courseware alongside an open textbook.

The first implementation of resources isn’t the end, of course: while regular sustainability measures such as keeping course content current and doing regular course revision work will occur in any course, some Affordable Materials Grants teams need to improve their materials further, either through an extensive revision of an open textbook or the creation of new ancillary materials. To support this higher level of resource improvement, Affordable Learning Georgia also provides Continuous Improvement Grants to anyone who has already implemented no- or low-cost materials, whether awarded a Transformation Grant or not. These awards are smaller, with a maximum of $2,000 per team member offered.

As of Spring 2023, Affordable Materials Grants have supported USG faculty in saving $119 million in textbook costs to 806,000 students enrolled in a course section affected by an award. With $7.7 million awarded since 2014, these grants have led to $15.50 in student savings per one dollar awarded in the grant program. Grant teams largely report better or same student performance (GPA and/or outcomes test scores) and DFW rates while reducing costs.^[18]

Training, Hosting, and Partnerships

Funds are not the only support provided by ALG: the initiative also provides synchronous and asynchronous online training on open education, open licensing, and accessibility. ALG also supports open materials creation through a central repository and platform for all open materials, hosting all materials created within grants under an open license and managing the discovery of these materials through metadata. ALG then uses the power of its library roots to connect open educational resources to every institution’s library catalog through its harvesting and mapping integration with the open Georgia Knowledge Repository (GKR).

ALG cannot achieve its affordability and student success goals alone, and its partnerships are a core strength of the program. The University of North Georgia Press first started publishing open textbooks in partnership with the USG in 2011, with US History I as its proof-of-concept double-blind peer reviewed open textbook. The knowledge and expertise gained from this two-year effort meant that this was one of the first university presses to establish an open textbook publishing workflow, from developmental editing to the final graphic design touches, and they have been an open textbook publishing partner with ALG since its inception. The US History I text, along with several textbooks to follow, were also developed in conjunction with an effort for the USG’s online core curriculum courses, named eCore, to reduce the cost of their online learning materials. Therefore, not only did ALG have a partner publisher and a grassroots-supporting grant program, but it also had an at-scale, system-wide implementation of open educational resources created within the USG. eCore regularly measures resource and instructional efficacy and does a three-year revision cycle on each of its courses, and the results of the original implementations were so positive that eCore then aimed to make every course zero-cost.

eCore, along with its consortial online major program, eMajor, have worked with USG faculty to save a total of $24.8 million in textbook costs to students in partnership with ALG.

Data, Workload, and Staff

With an impactful initiative comes the inherent need to measure the impact ALG has on textbook cost savings and student success. Grantees report textbook cost savings and the number of students affected per Summer, Fall, and Spring semester. Because the effects of grant projects cannot be assumed to last forever, grantees are asked whether or not they are using the same or different no- or low-cost resources or went back to commercial materials, along with any changes in the amount of students affected or the cost of the original resources. Course markings for no- and low-cost materials have been implemented across the USG, but there is no mandate to keep these marked and updated in our shared registration system, so while course markings can help in checking the sustainability of our grants, they cannot be relied upon entirely, so an email-and-survey system is still running. eCore, through its parent organization eCampus, provides savings data to us directly each year.

Collecting, maintaining, updating, analyzing, and reporting on savings data can take a considerable amount of time for anyone running an affordable materials program. This set of tasks, along with maintaining partnerships, hosting materials, providing training, and administrating a grant program, requires the work of at least one full-time staffer or the dedicated, in-job-description efforts of a larger team. While a committee of driven volunteers, such as our ALG Champions, can help immensely, the significance of having dedicated staff with the allocated time to create and sustain programs like this cannot be overstated. ALG has two full-time staff members dedicated to the program.

Advice for Campus Leaders

Not every institution, system, or consortium will have the same set of circumstances that led to the creation of Affordable Learning Georgia, but there are some key takeaways for any leaders interested in starting an OER program:

Connect with Your Champions

There are most likely a few instructors, librarians, and instructional designers around you using OER, if not engaging in the larger open education field. Getting to know the vanguard of open education at your institution and bringing them together regularly is a solid first step toward an OER program. Whether the goal is just brainstorming, planning a small event, or running a pilot, connecting with and convening your OER champions will accelerate the process. Be sure that the group is not siloed within one department – either you, or someone within your leadership, should be a regular part of this group in order to remove barriers to success and contribute broader-view ideas whenever possible.

Set up Shop

If you have a dedicated team of champions, OER is becoming a priority within your organization, and it’s time to take the next step, you will need dedicated staff time and resources in order to move open education forward. If you can have someone working on the program full-time, this is ideal, but there are other ways to allocate this time without unfairly adding this work to an existing position as “other duties as assigned.” Reclassifying and redefining a position to include recognized and supported OER work can help get a program started, as can a budget to begin larger workshops, day-long or two-day summits, and grant programs like the one at ALG. Both time and resources are necessary in order to move OER forward, though: time without resources means you will often find a small cohort of OER champions who can do great work, but the field cannot expand past those initial enthusiasts without supporting the time it takes for new OER learners to get up to speed and take on new projects. Resources without time means you will have all the potential to start a great OER program, but not enough staff time to support a grant program, a repository, an outreach strategy, and all of the data and reporting that comes with running an impactful program.

Record and Report

Data collection, storage, cleanup, analysis, and reporting should be kept in mind from the beginning of creating any impactful initiative, including an OER program. Grant applications and reports should tie into how data is collected and used; measurable goals should be linked to such a program; media outreach, and communications to the public and legislators should be built into how program goals are measured and analyzed. Without an integral data strategy from the start, recording and reporting the data that shows what an impact OER can have will be difficult.

Share your Resources

Even if you plan for your faculty to simply adopt existing OER in a grant program, eventually you will find that faculty are also adapting and creating new materials – those should be shared with your institution, your system, and the rest of the world as OER. Include requirements to share materials openly within your grant program’s call for proposals with a default open license (ours is a Creative Commons Attribution license), collect created materials at the end of a grant cycle, and through a repository, share these resources. This way, impact spreads beyond just cost savings and students affected at your institution – as with every other OER program, every shared resource makes open education and affordable resources a bit more possible across the globe.

Conclusion

While OER are saving students money on textbook costs within the University System of Georgia and many other institutions and systems with OER programs, open education is about more than just cost savings, and the future of open can stretch beyond even the improvement of student learning outcomes and DFW rates. A great OER program supports and connects higher education faculty and staff – our greatest educational resource of all – with each other in order to achieve impact at a scale beyond their classrooms and offices, in the tradition of other open movements such as FOSS. While not every higher education leader may have the pieces in place to start a grant program like Affordable Learning Georgia, the most effective OER change-makers should connect their champions first, then build a program together, with both data and shared resources in mind from the start. Even the smallest advances in OER at one campus can improve the open education ecosystem nation- and world-wide.