3 Georgia
Jeff Gallant
Course Marking Drivers
Visibility to Students
The University System of Georgia (USG) has had affordability as a strategic goal since the implementation of the Complete College Georgia initiative in 2012. Making courses that use OER, no-cost, and low-cost resources visible to students at the point of registration would be another step in the right direction.
Impact Transparency
Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) has been attempting to reduce textbook costs to students since 2014. While we have faculty-reported data to support the impact of the program through our grants, we have no idea what is happening outside of our grants in awareness-raising efforts. Because ALG works from within a System Office supporting 26 institutions and not one university with 26 campuses, we can’t just suddenly unify the way This includes our Champions and Coordinators’ workshops, marketing campaigns, and appearances at important meetings. Knowing more about this will allow us to understand the impact of ALG-related efforts outside of what we directly fund.
Enhanced Decision-Making
ALG programs have supported the work of many small teams of faculty at institutions in adopting, adapting, and creating OER. However, once the project is complete, it is tough to gauge how these efforts may spread throughout departments, or even within institutions. Having readily-available data on which courses have no / some / all no-cost or low-cost implementations would assist us in knowing which departments may benefit from us reaching out and supporting a department-wide scale-up of these implementations, therefore increasing the impact of our supported projects and further reducing textbook costs.
Authoritative and Audit-Ready Metrics
Many state programs are measurable through authoritative quantitative data supporting their goals, such as revenue, enrollment numbers, or retention rates. Others are measurable through “softer” qualitative measures such as self-reported patron satisfaction on surveys. While we do quite a bit of qualitative inquiry in order to determine faculty and staff needs for the program and ensure we are providing high-quality support, we need quantitative data in order to report on our cost-reduction impact. At the moment, we rely on faculty-reported estimates through our grant program, and these estimates, while well-maintained, checked yearly, and accepted as our best possible measure, are not deemed auditable. A uniform 26-institution way of reporting no-cost and low-cost resource use, using the same data that other programs use to determine enrollment, graduation rates, and retention, would provide us with a reasonable way for external reviewers to check on the program.
Implementation
In 2016, ALG partnered with the GeorgiaBEST (systemwide Banner registration system) staff to create two new attributes in the registration system – ZNCM (Z = systemwide designator, NCM = no-cost materials) and ZLCM (LCM = low-cost materials). Technical docum