[Open-education] OER Digest - September 8th, 2016

Thu Sep 8 20:11:59 UTC 2016

 From Ethan Senack (PIRG) and Brady Yano (SPARC) | Volume 14 | September 
8th, 2016

With the help of Nicole Allen, Katie Steen, and Kasya O’Connor Grant

_THE OER DIGEST_

Your bi-weekly newsletter for open education updates, opportunities, and 
reminders

Welcome back to an improved OER Digest! After a hiatus this summer, 
we’ve made some changes to increase consistency and reliability, 
streamline our delivery system, and make the Digest more accessible to 
the community. You can now share event notices, policy updates, exciting 
milestones, and other open education stories directly to 
oerdigest at gmail.com <mailto:oerdigest at gmail.com>, or tweet us @OERdigest.

BACK TO #TEXTBOOKBROKE: With school starting again, OER supporters, 
including Senators Durbin, Franken, and King, took to the twittersphere 
and Facebook to call out costly course materials and advocate for OER 
using #TextbookBroke. Senator Durbin shared infographics 
<https://twitter.com/SenatorDurbin/status/773601204232450049>that show 
the impact of high prices on students, and highlighted steps forward 
like visiting the Open Textbook Library, or for students, joining the 
new Open Textbook Alliance <http://opentextbookalliance.org/>. On 
Twitter alone, #TextbookBroke showed up on timelines over 9.5 million 
times in 26 hours. Check outthe highlights> 
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/textbookbroke>

UPDATED DATA: Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released new 
data 
<http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/college-tuition-and-fees-increase-63-percent-since-january-2006.htm>on 
the increase in costs for college expenses. Over the past decade, 
tuition and fees have increased sixty-three percent, while there was 
only a twenty-one percent increase on items generally. The most drastic 
cost increase was, unsurprisingly, that of textbooks – which saw an 
eighty-eight percent increase in the past 10 years.

MAJOR MILESTONE: Last week, the Open Textbook Library received it’s 1 
millionth visitor! Check out this great chart 
<https://twitter.com/open_textbooks/status/773193260500029440>depicting 
their growth, and share the tweet to say congrats.

CENGAGE OER REPORT: Cengage recently released a report titled “Open 
Educational Resources (OER) and the Evolving Higher Education Landscape 
<http://assets.cengage.com/pdf/wp_oer-evolving-higher-ed-landscape.pdf>”, where 
they “interviewed industry experts and surveyed more than 500 OER 
primary adopters, supplemental adopters, and non-adopters”. The report 
has some interesting conclusions: About 78% of non-adopter faculty said 
they “expected to use OER or would consider using OER [in the next three 
years]”. It’s worth noting, however, that Cengage is a major textbook 
publisher and has pushed against OER policies in the past.

SUMMER IN REVIEW

Catching up on what happened while we were away

BIG BOOST FOR OER DEGREES:A newly-launched OER Degree Initiative 
<http://achievingthedream.org/resources/initiatives/open-educational-resources-oer-degree-initiative>coordinated 
by Achieving the Dream seeks to reduce financial barriers to community 
college, by expanding degree programs based around OER. Over the next 
three years, 38 community colleges across 13 states will work to build 
“Zero-Textbook-Cost-Degree” of their own.

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN:Shortly after the OER Degree initiative was 
announced, the California government approved $5 million 
<https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-07-06-with-5-million-for-z-degrees-small-change-is-a-big-step-for-california-community-colleges>in 
the state’s budget to fund the development of “Zero-Textbook-Cost 
Degrees”. The newly-approved state funds will be distributed as grants 
to California community colleges, where students are hardest-hit by 
textbook costs (a 2008 California State Auditor report 
<https://www.bsa.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2007-116.pdf>found that on average 
textbooks cost more than tuition!) California has a track record of 
investing state resources in OER, including 2012 legislation to identify 
or create open textbooks for 50 high-enrollment courses.

FROM THE BAYOU STATE:The Louisiana legislature has passed a concurrent 
resolution <http://www.legis.la.gov/legis/ViewDocument.aspx?d=1004327>to 
establish the Virtual Library Study Commission, which will make 
recommendations regarding the development of a statewide virtual 
library. Part of the study will explore the role of a statewide library 
in distributing OER to reduce textbook costs for students.

OREGON’S ANNOUNCEMENT: The State of Oregon has announced a grant 
opportunity <https://www.oregon.gov/HigherEd/Pages/oer.aspx>in 
accordance with legislation passed last year, which allows the state’s 
public higher education institutions to apply for funding to develop OER 
in high enrollment courses.

DEPT OF ED RULE: June marked the six month anniversary of the public 
comment period for the Department of Education’s proposed open licensing 
rule 
<http://sparcopen.org/our-work/department-of-education-open-licensing-policy/>. 
The Open Education community celebrated the Department’s proposed rule 
last fall as the first proposed Federal agency policy that would 
comprehensively ensure publicly funded educational resources would be 
openly licensed for the public. Since then the Department has continued 
to be a vocal advocate for OER through its K-12 #GoOpen campaign 
<http://tech.ed.gov/open-education/>. The rule is currently under final 
review by the White House and could be issued as early as mid-September.

OER AWARENESS ON THE RISE: The Babson Survey Research Group released a 
new national report 
<http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/openingthetextbook2016.pdf>assessing 
faculty awareness and attitudes regarding OER in U.S. higher education. 
The report shows OER is gaining ground in U.S. higher education, but 
still faces barriers our community is working to address. Below are some 
of the key survey findings:

  *

    Faculty awareness of OER has increased, with 25% of faculty
    reporting that they were “Aware” or “Very Aware” of open educational
    resources, up from 20% last year.

  *

    Open textbooks have gained a market share around 5.3% of courses.
    Open textbooks published by OpenStax have a 10% adoption rate among
    large enrollment undergraduate introductory courses.

  *

    The most common factor cited by faculty when selecting educational
    resources was the cost to the students. The next most common was the
    comprehensiveness of the resource, followed by how easy it was to find.

  *

    The barriers to adopting OER most often cited by faculty are that
    “there are not enough resources for my subject” (49%), it is “too
    hard to find what I need” (48%) and “there is no comprehensive
    catalog of resources” (45%).

NIH ANNOUNCES OPEN GRANTS: The National Institutes for Health has 
launched a new round of grants for OER in conjunction with its Big Data 
to Knowledge (BD2K) program. The grant program, 
<http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-HG-16-016.html>entitled BD2K 
Open Educational Resources for Skills Development in Biomedical Big Data 
Science, seeks to fund the creation of courses that can give scientists 
the skills to extract knowledge from biomedical Big Data; grantees are 
directed to release materials as OER.

AMAZON INSPIRED:In keeping with Amazon’s commitment to #GoOpen, the tech 
giant released a closed beta of their OER platform, Inspire, earlier 
this summer. The company is working with school districts to aggregate 
open materials and develop systems to review it. After some early 
hiccups, the company has also engaged OER advocates in an effort to 
improve the system.

OPEN CONNECTIONS

Conference, job, and other OER-related opportunities

JOB:The Open Education Group is searching for OER Research Fellows. The 
deadline for applications is a week away on September 16. 
https://www.formpl.us/form/5363738620198912

NOMINATIONS: The Open Education Consortium just opened their nominations 
call for the  “Open Education Awards for Excellence.” The deadline is 
December 18th. 
http://www.oeconsortium.org/2016/09/oe-awards-2017-call-for-nominations-now-open/

EVENT: International Open Access Week is coming up next month, October 
24-30. Events are happening around the world. http://www.openaccessweek.org/

CONFERENCE: The EDUCAUSE Annual Conference is happening next month from 
October 25th-28th, and will include multiple sessions on 
OER.https://events.educause.edu/annual-conference/agenda

STORIES FROM THE FIELD

A brief snapshot of those making change on the ground level, and those 
most impacted

FROM VIRGINIA:“As college students, we are all here to better serve our 
societies once we have successfully completed our journeys of higher 
education. We only wish to order books that will get extensive and 
necessary use from them throughout the entire semester. As students, 
generic brands of food fill our pantries, and we work outside of class 
just to pay our rent or else we scrape together our student-loan money 
to last us months. Paying hundreds of dollars for textbooks that we will 
not be instructed to use more than a few times is not our idea of 
getting the most for our money or our time when it comes to our 
educational finances.” Read 
more><http://www.collegiatetimes.com/opinion/textbooks-have-become-an-unnecessary-financial-burden/article_47a11b2a-72c2-11e6-b583-4b01e92c21a1.html#.V9Ft9EJZ_CY.twitter>FROM 
BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Some students in B.C. are taking to social media to 
show that they are #textbookbroke. The student societies at UVic, UBC 
and SFU are running awareness campaigns to show just how much of a 
student's budget is now eaten up by purchasing textbooks. "Over the last 
10 years, prices have risen four times the rate of inflation in the 
textbook industry," said Maxwell Nicholson, the director of campaigns 
and community relations for the University of Victoria Student Society. 
UVSS is posting photos of students with their textbook bill on social 
media to draw attention to the issue.” Listen to the story> 
<http://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/all-points-west/segment/10106920>

TWEET OF THE WEEK

Senator Dick Durbin @SenatorDurbin 
<https://twitter.com/SenatorDurbin/status/773567711679045632>: Over the 
past 40 yrs, the price of college textbooks has tripled, even after 
adjusting for inflation#TextbookBroke 
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/TextbookBroke?src=hash>             RETWEETS 145   LIKES 
89

SYLLABUS

Interesting Reads on Education and Open

Study: Open Educational Resources and Market Growth | Inside Higher Ed

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/09/08/study-open-educational-resources-and-market-growth

The Demise of the Textbook Mafia | Boston Magazine

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2016/08/28/textbook-publishing/

State Legislators Praise OER at UConn | The  Daily Campus 
http://dailycampus.com/stories/2016/9/7/bookstore-press-conference-uconn-open-source-textbooks

Contracts Pose No Roadblock to Alabama SGA Open Textbooks Bill | The 
Crimson White

http://www.cw.ua.edu/article/2016/08/contracts-pose-no-roadblock-to-sga-open-textbooks-bill

Non-Profit Pilots Delivery of Offline OER for Prisoner Education | 
Campus Technology

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2016/09/01/non-profit-pilots-delivery-of-offline-oer-for-prisoner-education.aspx

Something we missed? Let us know at oerdigest at gmail.com 
<mailto:oerdigest at gmail.com>, or tweet us @OERdigest.

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