Open Educational Resources (OERs): OER Development Awards

Launched in September 2017 by Christopher Center Library, the Open Educational Resource (OER) Development Award aims to help curb out-of-pocket costs for students in classes that utilize Open Educational Resources.

The Open Educational Resource (OER) Development Award aims to:

• Encourage the development of alternatives to high-cost textbooks by supporting the adoption, adaptation, or creation of Open Educational Resources (OER).
• Provide support to faculty to implement these approaches.
• Lower the cost of college for students in order to contribute to their retention, progression, and graduation.
• Encourage faculty to engage in new pedagogical models for classroom instruction.

The high cost of commercial print textbooks is a major concern for both students and their parents. Data shows that the cost of textbooks affects the academic choices and success of students. If textbooks are prohibitively expensive, students often respond by making poor choices: finding an online illegal PDFs version, buying an outdated edition, or not getting the textbook at all. With the increasing use of adaptive learning systems available directly from commercial publishers via access codes, the used, rental, sharing, and library options that have provided alternatives for students, are effectively eliminated. To address these concerns, the Christopher Center Library Services launched the Open Educational Resource (OER) Development Award in the Fall of 2017. The Open Educational Resource (OER) Development Award is a faculty incentive program that encourages the use of existing openly-licensed or free information resources to support our students’ learning.

Award amounts will vary based on the following tracks:

• Adoption of a previously published OER ($500)
• Revise/Update a previously or currently implemented OER ($750)
• Creating or authoring a new textbook ($1000)
• Creating or authoring a new textbook, while also partnering simultaneously with another institution ($2000)

Courses with multiple sections and/or multiple instructors may be eligible for larger award amounts.

Previous awardees are welcome to reapply, if they wish to update their OER or adopt a new OER.

SUBMIT HERE

This initiative is partly adapted from a similar initiative by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Libraries. Christopher Center Library Services thank UMass Libraries for their assistance and permission for re-use.

Below are 1st and 3rd year executive summaries of the award's impact. If you would like access to the full report, please contact Jonathan Bull (jon.bull@valpo.edu), Director of Collections & Digitization.

In addition to credit given for various images, parts of this guide were adapted from work/guides by:

University of the Pacific, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Temple University, University of Oklahoma, Grand Valley State University

Used with permission or in accordance with Creative Commons Licensing.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.