Creating Affordable Content Programs
Ron Joslin, John Meyerhofer, Angi Faiks, and Teresa Fishel
by Ron Joslin (Macalester College), John Meyerhofer (College of St. Benedict/Saint John’s University), Angi Faiks (Macalester College), and Teresa Fishel (Macalester College) (bios)
Introduction & Background
Colleges and universities are increasingly engaging with open access (OA), open educational resources (OERs), and open textbooks. At Macalester College, an exclusively undergraduate institution of roughly 2,000 students, we have long been involved with OA initiatives. We believe strongly in the free and fair exchange of information, which is the foundation of open access.
In this chapter we focus on our experience supporting OERs, which, according to the Hewlett Foundation (n.d.), are “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium—digital or otherwise—that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions” (“Open Educational Resources: OER Defined”). Our background with OA initiatives has served as the foundation for our foray into OERs and open textbooks.
Our first entree into OA was supporting SPARC (originally the Scholarly Publishing and Research Coalition) in 1997; we have been a member since 2002. Although our initial efforts were focused on lowering journal costs, for two decades we have supported a variety of OA initiatives in order to encourage positive changes in scholarly publishing and wide dissemination of scholarly and creative works. We developed an institutional repository that provides OA to student honor projects, award-winning papers, peer-reviewed OA journals, and faculty publications. Resources in our repository have been downloaded more than 2 million times from locations around the world. We have expanded our OA support to include open monograph publishing initiatives such as Lever Press, Open Book Publishers, and Knowledge Unlatched.
We explain here how we have educated our community on OERs, developed tactics for engaging with faculty partners, and created of a set of resources to support anyone interested in working on an OER project.
We explain here how we have educated our community on OERs, developed tactics for engaging with faculty partners, and created of a set of resources to support anyone interested in working on an OER project. We conclude with lessons learned and next steps. While we write from our small-college perspective, our insights will resonate with all higher education institutions with a similar goal of wanting to meaningfully participate in the OA, open textbook, and OER movements.
Starting the OER Discussion & Finding our Motivation
As we started exploring OERs, we looked at initiatives at other institutions of higher education, and attended OER and open textbook discussions, meetings, and conferences. At these gatherings, we found ourselves among librarians and fac