Transcript
Elise: Welcome to our presentation. Today we’re gonna be talking about our experiences jump-starting an oer awareness campaign at the University of Utah. We are hoping to share some insights from the student perspective.
If you have any questions while we talk, drop them in the chat and we’ll get to them at the end!
Donna: Hello my name is Donna Ziegenfuss, I am a Librarian in the Teaching, Research and Outreach unit of the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. I am the College of Education library liaison and an adjunct faculty in the Educational Leadership and Policy department.
In our library, we do not have a dedicated OER librarian but I do what I can to support faculty interested in using OERs and a state-wide Pressbooks pilot initiative and. Based on my OERs and Open Pedagogy sabbatical research in fall 2023, I created an action plan to develop awareness around OERs across campus and support faculty projects. As an adjunct faculty member teaching a graduate course and using OERs in my own teaching for several years, I saw the benefits for my students both financially and academically. But on our campus, there is no OER faculty support or funding. So we are starting from ground zero this year. We hired 2 undergraduate student workers to help jump start OER efforts. Having student voices at the table in planning and students perspectives driving our OER efforts have been an amazing experience for me and changed how I think about OER support and outreach. So this session today will spotlight the work they have done so far this year. I will hand it over to them to introduce themselves and show you what they are doing. So Elise and Emma, take it away.
Elise: Okay, we just want to start off by introducing ourselves. My name is Elise LeMonnier. I’m from Utah. I’m a senior at the University of Utah. And I study English and art history and some graphic design.
Emma: My name is Emma. I’m also from Utah. I’m currently a freshman at the U, and I’m studying business marketing.
As Donna was saying, the University of Utah, and Utah as a whole doesn’t really have any oer initiatives or support. Because of this we didn’t know anything about oers when we first started working at the library, so the first thing we wanted to do when we got hired was to sit down with Donna and make a few goals to direct the process throughout our first semester.
As students, we especially wanted to provide our perspective on the OER initiatives at Utah, we also hoped to spark conversation among students and educators about the benefits of OERs, master pressbooks-and in doing so, produce our own oer. Additionally we planned to collaborate with different departments to create oers through pressbooks and canvas, and collect quantitative and qualitative data about course materials from other students.
Elise: Our 1st step was to learn about what oers are, So one of the 1st projects we started working on was creating a playbook website that basically acted as a one-stop-shop, tutorial for open implementation. It’s a way to provide step-by-step instructions on different aspects of OERS. It meets people where they are at, if they don’t know anything about OERS they can start at the beginning, or they can just pick and choose the topics they want to learn more about.
So on this slide, we have our little concept map that we used to gameplan how we wanted the website to flow and to work in the Ui, and then I was able to use my graphic design knowledge to make all of these cute little graphics in the top right.
Here’s a little video run navigating the website. This was a perfect first project because it pushed us to learn as much as possible about oers so that we could help others do the same. A lot of research went into creating the playbook and we hope it will be used as a comprehensive guide on our campus and in our community. We explain creative common licensing, different ways to access oers, how to remix and adapt them, open pedagogy, and more. Right now it is in the pilot stage, but we are hoping to get it online soon!
Emma: Okay, after we finished making the playbook, we really wanted to start learning about pressbooks and kind of start creating our own oer, because at this point we had a lot to say and we wanted to begin documenting our experience, as well as have a place to compile everything we learned into one place.
Some of the chapters we really wanted to include were our ten tips for implementing OERs especially for people who had never used them, and we drew a lot of this knowledge from making the Playbook. We also wanted to cover how OERs are not just about the money, as we believe students and educators can benefit from implementing them in many different ways, as well as our thoughts on the inclusive access debate, the top things we would tell students, and how AI and OERs go hand in hand.
Elise: Continuing the trend of everything building off of each other, after we wrote our own pressbook, we began to collaborate with different people and departments around the university to produce more pressbooks. We 1st worked with Donna to create 2 different press books about quality course framework and research at the library.
And then we were fortunate enough for the medical school to reach out to us, asking us to integrate all the information from one of their websites to a press book, ensuring that the information would still be available to the public after their site went offline. They were super happy with how it turned out and they appreciated the different resources provided by Pressbooks that a simple webpage does not have, like H5P, and if you look at the photos on the right, you’ll see how the table of contents looks in pressbooks. Not only did we preserve their information, but we also made it more accessible and interactive for those using it.
After that, we worked with a business librarian who wanted to integrate a canvas course into pressbooks, focusing on H5Ps and automatic grading within canvas.
Throughout these collaborative projects, we have seen that despite the lack of Open Educational support and knowledge at our University, if people try Open Resources, they love them. Going forward, we definitely see the symbiosis between pressbooks and canvas as a good place to advocate for and spark excitement for Open Education, especially among educators.
Emma: So now that we felt confident working with pressbooks and better understood the OER world, we decided we needed to venture out and start OER initiatives at our own university and among our peers, which was a daunting task, but we started, anyway.
We knew that there was going to be a lot of politics around our oer advocacy, particularly because our university owns the bookstore and currently pushes Inclusive Access. So before we really began, we met with a librarian who works with the bookstore and inclusive access, and she kind of directed us on how we wanted to go about this without offending anyone.
This conversation helped us change our verbiage and rhetoric within our marketing strategies to change our angle to be more focused on the students, rather than threatening the profit of the university-owned bookstore. Our main priority is supporting students over anything else and we didn’t want to run into any unnecessary complications along the way.
Here is an example of how we adapted our approach. Rather than promising Free Textbooks, we emphasized the support we could provide, and the changes that could be made with student advocacy.
Elise: From there, we met with the marketing department at our library and worked to develop tons of posters that engaged different types of students. Here are 3 of our favorites that we put up around the library and campus. As Emma was saying, we didn’t want to promise free textbooks because we lacked the support and resources, instead we wanted to create a conversation around textbook prices as a way to initiate Open Educational action.
Another big goal of ours was to hear from students and gather data, as a way to validate our goals, make an impact, and show that these issues go beyond our work in the library. So we put a QR code on all of our posters which took students to a 6 question poll called The Textbook Conversation that asked about their experiences with course material and OERS.
In addition to just recording their responses, we also wanted to give them resources. So at the top of the form, we linked our Library’s Interlibrary loan, a way for students to request the library to purchase their course materials for them. We also linked our favorite oer repositories so that students could explore and find free resources tailored to their needs.
We wanted to provide students with options now while we continue to chip away at implementing OER in a more encompassing way at the U.
We believe that any type of change at the University needs to start with students, so informing them of other, more affordable options is a way to be advocates while collecting their voices and data.
Emma: Our priority of hearing student stories led us to hold a few tabling events, where we focused on having open conversations with other students and telling them about our OER experience and hearing their perspectives. From this, we managed to get 50 responses on our poll.
So these are just some of the QR codes we had on our table: One was going out to the poll, one was going out to Interlibrary loan, where you can suggest a purchase for the library to bring in. Surprisingly, we found that almost all students had never heard of this option and were immediately excited to utilize it in their lives. Then we had a qr code to a linktree going to different oer libraries as a way to offer curated resources for students.
And then we developed this flowchart, titled the “pathway to free textbooks”. We made this because we know how confusing it can be to find accessible resources and sometimes it can feel easier to just accept the expensive option. We wanted a very clear, easy-to-follow pathway for students to find options that work for them. Here, we wanted to do the hard part for the students so all they had to do was follow the steps.
Elise: Now we get to the exciting part, the findings from our data from the poll attached to our fliers and our tabling event.
Our 1st question, to get a good baseline of our community, was how much did students spend on textbooks in the fall 2024 semester? Most students spent between $100-$200. But some students paid up to $600 in one semester! The key takeaway after talking to students was that regardless of the amount, every student felt like they were spending too much, especially on top of tuition.
We then asked students what impact the price of textbooks has had on their lives. And almost 70% of students said that it had a mild to severe impact on their lives, which is a data point we will shortly qualify.
Emma: Our next few questions were about oers. We knew we’d never heard of oers before we started this job, and wanted to know if that was similar to other students’ experience as well. We found that 71% of them had never heard of oers before walking up to our table. After we talked to them and told them all about the benefits of oers, 95% of students said they were interested in using them.
And even though students had never heard of oers before, in our poll, we actually asked if they’d ever taken a class where they were given course materials free of charge. 63% of students claimed to have taken a class like this, which goes to show that the conversation around OER at our university is so minimal that students are using them without even knowing what they are.
Elise: At the end of our poll, we had an open-ended, free response question where we asked: “has the cost of course materials negatively affected your university experience?” We got a lot of super interesting and passionate answers to our poll question, on top of the answers we got in our face to face conversations with students.
Here are some of the key stories that we chose to share with you today: Students said that they had to restructure their budget, that the cost of textbooks was equivalent to 3 weeks of their grocery expenses, and that paying for textbooks on top of the price of tuition felt unreasonable. One student even felt like they had to pay more attention to which classes they picked because they wouldn’t be able to afford certain textbooks. Because of the rising prices and inaccessibility of course materials, students are having to sacrifice the classes they want or need to take because of an inability to afford them. We believe that no student should have to make this kind of sacrifice for their education.
Emma: students also talked about how they didn’t want to add additional financial stress on themselves or their parents by taking out extra loans, and they said that it’s just not reasonable to cover those expenses. One student said they’re already in school and they can’t be working full time just to cover textbook costs. Other students also tried to find older PDF versions of their textbooks online, resulting in messed up pagination, incorrect citations, and confusing assignments because they did not have the same resources as other students in their classes. Additionally, a lot of students actually commented on how they felt like they were spending a lot of money on textbooks and then not using them or not using them enough to make it feel worth the cost. In a lot of cases, students, as we also know from personal experience, feel like educators sometimes only use small sections of textbooks while still requiring students to purchase the entire book. This is one reason why we really need to advocate for oers because they are so adaptable to situations exactly like this.
Last semester, I experienced first-hand the frustration of paying for a textbook we didn’t use nearly enough to justify the cost. The course didn’t label the textbook as essential, giving students a false sense of choice in whether to purchase it. Unfortunately, because it was an Inclusive Access textbook, opting out wasn’t really an option, as most of the course, including assignments, capstone projects and exams was entirely integrated into the book. After purchasing and using the textbook for a few weeks, the professor had so many complaints about the inaccurate automatic grading and other issues, that we fully shifted away from using it, making the money I put towards the book obsolete.
Elise: To wrap up our presentation, we just wanted to share our key takeaways and tips that we’ve learned on this journey, from a strictly student perspective. I’m sure we’ll learn more as the spring semester continues and throughout the rest of our time at the library, but this is what we have found so far:
Our 1st one is to talk to students, because while we were passionate about and personally invested in this endeavor, it wasn’t until we tabled and heard students stories that we got super invested in the importance of this project. We both believe that if students speak up and demand their voices to be heard, other people will join our fight for oer. This issue needs to come from the ground up for any progress to be made.
Emma: Another takeaway was the benefits of collaborating and connecting with other people who are interested in using oers. We learned a lot from making our own oer, but we learned even more from seeing how they’re being used in other contexts. Working with different departments around campus and developing OERs for their needs helped us see the full range for how Open resources can be utilized, making us excited to continue this work!
Elise: Our 3rd takeaway is about canvas and H5P. Throughout this process, we really learned that educators and people at our university are more likely to use oers and pressbooks when they are used in tandem with canvas, providing an interactive element for students. Doing so makes OERS more palatable because they’re in a familiar and helpful format. This engagement shows both students and faculty the benefits of oer.
Emma: there’s so many different oers online that you can access. And we found it really beneficial to see what’s worked for other people and see how other people have used OER. We believe that the oer community needs to be a community that collaborates and shares and we learned so much from other creators in our journey by embracing the (somewhat) overwhelming oer libraries. One thing we have really loved about working on this initiative, is that the Open Educational world is so supportive and authors of OERs make themselves accessible. We have made friends, been inspired, and truly feel like a part of this community working for the betterment of students and learners everywhere.
Elise: And then our fifth and final takeaway is that we need to be patient. This goes back to the political element at our university. We know that our goals are not everyone else’s goals, but we are hopeful that the future is moving towards more open educational opportunities.
Emma: Just as we shared our initial goals at the beginning, we want to share our goals going forward:
We have applied for a seed grant which we plan to use to run a campus-wide case study on the impacts of AI on OER. For that we will bring in professors and help them develop OERs for their courses by utilizing current AI tools, for example copilot.
We also want to continue working with faculty outside of that project to help create Open books for their courses, do a state sponsored survey.
Elise: And lastly, we hope to grow the OER community specifically in Utah. Which we will be working towards by presenting on the Student Perspective of OERs at the state-wide Utah Academic Library Consortium webinar series.
We now want to open our presentation up to questions.
Questions for you:
- Do you have students working with you on OER? If so, tell us in the chat we would love to hear from them and maybe collaborate?
- If you are working with students, do you have any advice or tips for us?
Thanks so much for listening. We’d love to chat and hear about the work you guys are doing at your universities. for further questions or comments, please reach out to Donna.
