Program Management
Quill West
When I first started working in open education, I felt like my job was to persuade faculty and administrators that open education was a good choice simply because of the benefits of OER. I obsessed over elevator pitches, drafted and performed presentation after presentation on the virtues of OER, and strove to change the educational landscape at my institution course by course. I designed professional development sessions in which faculty and staff wrote haiku about the limitations of commercial textbooks and practiced course design through card games. I developed lists of OER broken down by course topics and outcomes with reviews by faculty and students so that I could share them with other faculty, and I asked students to share testimonials comparing their learning with OER to learning with commercially produced educational materials. These were great strategies for relationship-building, connecting OER to success stories at the institution, and garnering support for OER, but the amount of investment in individual and incremental change was a mark against the sustainability of our overall project.
There are only so many times you can talk to the same group of people about the virtues of open practices before they tune out your message, even when that message comes with the chance to earn a stipend. The secret to success in any project is to both ensure that the project ties clearly to institutional goals, and that the faculty, staff, and students believe in those goals and see the payoff for their investment in them. In 2015, Pierce College hired me to manage the development of an OER Degree Pathway. This was the first step in moving from a faculty-to-faculty based approach to OER adoption to a more integrated approach with institutional goals and supports.
A Brief Look at the Structure
Pierce College District serves Pierce County, WA with two colleges, Pierce College Puyallup and Pierce College Fort Steilacoom, two education centers at Joint Base Lewis-McChord (PCJBLM), and two remote education centers in area high schools. In addition, Pierce College offers online learning through each college and center. The District operates with a central leadership team, but there are unique cultures and student needs at each of the campuses and educational sites; this means each campus sometimes implements initiatives meant to serve their specific students. In particular, PCJBLM has a unique structure that is meant to support over 155,000 service members and their families who live and work at the Joint Base Lewis-McChord military base. While any student can enroll for classes at PCJBLM, most students at that site are either service members or family of service members. The first major investment of funds and personnel in OER at Pierce College was to help meet student and program needs at PCJBLM.
Investing in OER
A major issue at PCJBLM in 2015 was the commercial textbook infrastructure and the barriers it created for both s