8 Washington
Boyoung Chae
Course Marking Drivers
In Washington State, the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) is the coordination agency for system policy, shared resources, and collaborative initiatives. SBCTC’s OER initiative, which has been underway for nearly a decade, is a key component of our system’s ethos of resource sharing as a way to support colleges’ efforts to make high quality, affordable curriculum available to all students. In SBCTC’s Education Division, the Office of Educational Technology and Open Education is charged with developing the infrastructure of research, policy, and process to support these efforts.
The rich collaboration between the agency and the colleges has resulted in a highly motivated community of practice made up of thousands of faculty, staff and student advocates for OER, and textbook affordability across the state.
Implementation
Study 1. Assessing the needs
At SBCTC, efforts have focused on a multi-layered research program designed to ensure that our system-wide initiatives are deeply rooted in data-driven insights about what students and colleges need to promote success in open education. A comprehensive study of perceptions of OER in our system in 2015 revealed remarkable findings that continue to drive SBCTC OER initiatives.
One of the most important findings to emerge from this research indicated that students were finding it difficult to consistently locate courses using OER or other affordable materials. The means to identify and mark those classes at or before the point of registration have been beyond the capacity of many colleges. Because of this, OER based and affordable classes were not consistently supporting students’ ability to manage cost by making informed choices. Moreover, definitions and standards for OER and affordability varied across the system.
Study 2. Establishing a policy for OER labeling
In 2016, this insight led to a second study. SBCTC, with the help of system governance and student groups throughout the state, sought to identify consensus definitions and criteria for labelling OER-based courses in a consistent manner across all 34 colleges. The research led to a statewide policy for coding such courses. Soon after these codes were created, legislation passed in Washington state requiring OER information to be available at the time of registration. With the OER Code already established as policy by SBCTC, colleges were well-prepared to implement the requirement set forth in the statutes (E2SHB 1375 & RCW 28B.50.789).
Study 3. Establishing the threshold for Low-Cost labeling
During the implementation of the OER code, it became evident that the goal of informing student choice could best be fulfilled by enabling them to also identify courses that used affordable course materials, such as library materials, inexpensive textbooks, regardless of whether or not those materials included OER. Consequently, a new code was proposed to tag courses using low-cost mater