Supporting OER Adoption
James Glapa-Grossklag
College of the Canyons is a California Community College and Hispanic Serving Institution in northern Los Angeles County. Our 22,000+ students attend classes at two physical campuses, with online classes accounting for 25% of our schedule (pre-pandemic). We offer 88 certificate and 95 associate degree programs in career education and transfer programs.
At the 2018 Open Education Global Conference in Delft, the Netherlands, Natalie Miller, then a College of the Canyons student, received the first Open Education Global Student Award. As proud of Natalie as I was for winning this international recognition, it also occurred to me that this focus on a student pointed to many elements of what made our OER program successful.
As Dean of Learning Resources at College of the Canyons, I have led our OER program since 2008. In the early years, I was the lone OER champion, delivered workshops on OER to nearly empty rooms, and counted OER adoptions in the single digits. Over time, however, I built an OER team and recruited allies. I tied OER efforts to larger institutional goals such as increasing student success and reducing equity gaps, which often led to funding. This was all helped by documenting the impact of OER and connecting to the larger OER community.
Student OER Team
At College of the Canyons, OER adoptions soared once we began building our OER program around students, beginning with Natalie in 2016 and evolving into a team of student workers and recent graduates. We originally hired Natalie to help faculty locate OER materials. On her own initiative, she created a promotional campaign for our OER initiative (you might have seen our cat banner, pictured in Figure 1), she wrote for student publications, and she set up tables on the quad where she showed off our collection of OpenStax books. She connected me with our student government, which led to a formal resolution calling on faculty to consider OER.
Ultimately, Natalie passed the baton to other students. Today, the OER team typically consists of four current students and recent graduates. This is in addition to the Director of Online Education, who supervises their daily work. (More on the organizational structure, below.)
Crucially, when advocating for OER with faculty, a student voice has more credibility than someone with my administrative title. I have facilitated plenty of workshops at my college and can respond to most questions from faculty, but having a student speak about her own positive experience with OER quickly wins over an academic audience. I can cite research about financial hardships, while a student can describe her own hard choices with finances and textbooks.
Nascent OER programs sometimes encounter faculty who like the idea of adopting OER but say that they do not have the time to actually make the change. The core function of our student OER team is to remove the reasons faculty might give for not adopting or adapting OER.
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