Authors Jonathan A. Poritz
License CC-BY-4.0
Open Educational Resources:
Current and Future Activities and Prospects
For Pueblo, the System, and the State
Jonathan A. Poritz
jonathan.poritz@csupueblo.edu
www.poritz.net/jonathan
Center for Teaching and Learning and
Department of Mathematics and Physics
Colorado State University-Pueblo
8 February 2019
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 1 / 25
What Are Open Educational Resources [OER]?
HB18-1331, Higher Education Open Educational Resources, passed by
the Colorado General Assembly and signed by Governor Hickenlooper on
30 April 2018, defined OER here:
(6) ”OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES” MEANS HIGH-QUALITY TEACHING, LEARNING,
AND RESEARCH RESOURCES THAT RESIDE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR HAVE BEEN
RELEASED UNDER AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LICENSE THAT PERMITS FREE USE
OR REPURPOSING BY OTHERS AND MAY INCLUDE OTHER RESOURCES THAT ARE
LEGALLY AVAILABLE AND AVAILABLE TO STUDENTS FOR FREE OR VERY LOW COST.
OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES MAY INCLUDE FULL COURSES, COURSE MATERIALS,
MODULES, TEXTBOOKS, FACULTY-CREATED CONTENT, STREAMING VIDEOS, EXAMS,
SOFTWARE, AND OTHER TOOLS, MATERIALS, OR TECHNIQUES USED TO SUPPORT
ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE.
1
1
Closed based on the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s definition: “OER are teaching, learning, and research
resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use
and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming
videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 2 / 25
First Answer: Free Textbooks
A basic place to start with this is
(6) ”OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES” MEANS HIGH-QUALITY TEACHING, LEARNING,
AND RESEARCH RESOURCES THAT RESIDE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR HAVE BEEN
RELEASED UNDER AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LICENSE THAT PERMITS FREE USE OR
REPURPOSING BY OTHERS AND MAY INCLUDE OTHER RESOURCES THAT ARE LEGALLY
AVAILABLE AND AVAILABLE TO STUDENTS FOR FREE OR VERY LOW COST. OPEN
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES MAY INCLUDE FULL COURSES, COURSE MATERIALS,
MODULES, TEXTBOOKS, FACULTY-CREATED CONTENT, STREAMING VIDEOS, EXAMS,
SOFTWARE, AND OTHER TOOLS, MATERIALS, OR TECHNIQUES USED TO SUPPORT
ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE.
So the term “OER” includes free textbooks.
Students tend to like this a lot, and it changes their behavior in many ways.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 3 / 25
Second Answer: “Repurposing by Others”
But notice this also includes
(6) ”OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES” MEANS HIGH-QUALITY TEACHING, LEARNING,
AND RESEARCH RESOURCES THAT RESIDE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR HAVE BEEN
RELEASED UNDER AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LICENSE THAT PERMITS FREE USE OR
REPURPOSING BY OTHERS AND MAY INCLUDE OTHER RESOURCES THAT ARE LEGALLY
AVAILABLE AND AVAILABLE TO STUDENTS FOR FREE OR VERY LOW COST. OPEN
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES MAY INCLUDE FULL COURSES, COURSE MATERIALS,
MODULES, TEXTBOOKS, FACULTY-CREATED CONTENT, STREAMING VIDEOS, EXAMS,
SOFTWARE, AND OTHER TOOLS, MATERIALS, OR TECHNIQUES USED TO SUPPORT
ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE.
So “OER” also includes resources which can be adapted, mixed with other
OER, and then shared back to the global scholarly community.
Faculty tend to like this a lot, and it changes their behaviors in many ways.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 4 / 25
“Open” vs “Free”
A better word than “open” in OER might therefore have been “free,” in
both of the two common senses of that word in English:
“free as in free beer” and also “free as in free speech”
This linguistic issue has been around for a while. You might be familiar
with “open-source software,” like Android, Linux, Firefox, MediaWiki
[the engine that runs Wikipedia], Apache [the most widely used web
server software in the world], etc. Such software was originally called “free
software,” and even though it is free [as in free beer] it has enormous
economic consequences and has made a lot of money for many businesses.
E.g., when I worked for IBM Research in the early 00s, my youthful radical
background in FLOSS2 was a business benefit, not problem.
2
FLOSS = “Free/Libre/Open-Source Software” is the best term.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 5 / 25
[Micro]Economic Issues for Students
The #RealCollege Survey found3 in 2017 that for university students
• 36% were food insecure in the 30 days before taking the survey,
• 36% were housing insecure in the last year, and
• 9% were homeless at some point in that year.
Students face these economic burdens at the same time that tuition is
going up faster than inflation [as the cost of “public” higher ed is more
and more born by the individual students].
Then a class a student needs or wants requires an expensive textbook –
$100, $200, $300, or even $400 is not unknown today.
Now ask yourself: if you were a student in debt, [sometimes or often]
hungry, and concerned about keeping a roof over your head ... where
would your economic priorities be?
3
Still Hungry and Homeless in College, Goldrick-Rab, Richardson, Schneider, Hernandez, and Cady, 2018, on the web here.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 6 / 25
[Macro]Economic Issues for Students
These individual decisions students make are happening in the context of
other financial burdens increasing steeply on students. The result is well
known:
total student debt in the U.S. is around $1.45 trillion.
Some examples in Colorado:
Institution Avg Debt, 2014 Grads
CSU-Pueblo $29,914
MSU, Denver $28,468
Colorado College $19,756
University of Denver $29,050
All private[non-profit]
$25,064
and public 4-years in CO
2014 is most recent complete data available
Average debt of 2017 CSU-FC grads was $26,348
Source: https://ticas.org/posd/state-state-data-2015#
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 7 / 25
Students Pay Many Different Costs...
Consumer price indices for tuition and school-related items,
not seasonally adjusted, January 2006-July 2016
January 2006 = 100
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/college-tuition-and-fees-increase-63-percent-since-january-2006.htm
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 8 / 25
...But the Winner4 Is: Textbook Cost
Increase in textbook costs since 1980
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
4
in terms of rate of growth, not absolute size
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 9 / 25
Your Intuition for Textbook Costs is Wrong
One attempt to correct our intuition for these different rates of inflation:
Source: https://mathematikoi.net/
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 10 / 25
But Why Do Textbooks Cost So Much?
A broken market mechanism: faculty choose, students pay. Publishers
understand this.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 11 / 25
Consequences for Students
Studies5 have shown that, as a result of these economic realities, students
• make decisions about which courses to take based on the costs of the
textbooks;
• take fewer courses because of expensive textbooks;
• do not buy even required textbooks, because of cost, and therefore
learn less, do more poorly, and drop out more frequently; and
• take longer to complete degrees because of the obstacle of textbook
cost.
A particularly exciting recent study6 found that DFW rates went down
by one-third among minority and Pell-eligible students in gateway
courses which switched from commercial textbooks to OER.
5
See references in Report to the Joint Budget Committee and The Education Committees of the General Assembly – Open
Educational Resources in Colorado, Brown-Sica et al., 2017, on the web here.
6
The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Various Student Success Metrics, Colvard, Watson, and Park,
International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (2018), on the web here.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 12 / 25
Scholarly Production Wants to Be Free
Faculty are not used to thinking of the economic consequences of their
choices, nor of their work as being in a marketplace7 .
We are used to signing over our copyrights on research papers to the
journal publishers, who in turn make large profits on subscriptions which
they in no way pass on to the article authors.
Scholars do tend to keep the copyrights on their monographs and
textbooks, although usually tied up in restrictive contracts.
It is as rare as winning the lottery (or getting struck by lightning) that a
book will sell enough to make some serious money for the author.
Scholars mostly seek impact, which comes when others use a work in new
ways – clearly without first asking permission. We hope someone else will
take our ideas, with attribution!, and do something amazing.
In this sense, scholarly production wants to be free, as in speech.
7
other than “the marketplace of ideas”
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Freedom Includes the Right to Seek a Profit, or Not
If a professor wants to assign an expensive textbook in a class (and has a
good reason to do so) or wants to publish a textbook commercially with
the hope of writing the runaway bestseller on economic history, then by
academic freedom and scholarly tradition, we should not stand in the way.
But usually, many faculty will be happy to contribute their textbooks,
problem banks, software, and other writings to a global intellectual
commons, a Creative Commons.
If there were a way to dedicate a creative work to this commons, rather
than having it automatically fall into the domain of all rights reserved
copyrights – as any work of original expression does as soon as it is fixed in
a tangible medium8 – many scholars would likely do so.
8
this is the trigger which causes a copyright to spring into existence: no registration or formalities is actually required.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 14 / 25
Creative Commons Licenses
The way to bend copyright law to the purposes of the scholarly life is to
release works with a Creative Commons Licenses:9
Educational resources release with a CC license – well, not those two
licenses with “ND” – are open to repurposing by others, in the words
of HB18-1331, and therefore are Open Educational Resources [OER].
OER can be customized, localized, adapted to a faculty member’s own
way of teaching, unlike [commercial] textbooks under traditional copyright.
Only OER truly respect an instructor’s academic freedom!
9
see https://creativecommons.org
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OER Premodern History at CSU-Pueblo
Some faculty at CSU-Pueblo have been creating, adopting, and adapting
OER – often without knowing the terminology or about Creative
Commons licenses – for a while. For example
• the Chemistry department has used an OpenStax book;
• Dr. Jane Fraser, chair of Engineering, wrote a book Introduction to
Industrial Engineering and freely shared it on a website she bought
http://www.introtoie.com/;
• I wrote and freely share on my website http://poritz.net the two
books Yet Another Introductory Number Theory Textbook and
Lies, Damned Lies, or Statistics.
Lies, Damned Lies, or Statistics:
How to Tell the Truth with Statistics
Jonathan A. Poritz
Department of Mathematics and Physics
Colorado State University, Pueblo
2200 Bonforte Blvd.
Pueblo, CO 81001, USA
E-mail: jonathan@poritz.net
Web: poritz.net/jonathan
13 M AY 2017 23:04MDT
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OER Early Modern History at CSU-Pueblo
In 2017, the Provost’s office gave $10,000 to support OER-promotion
min-grants. An ad-hoc committee out of the Center for Teaching and
Learning and the Library administered this program, disbursing the funds
to around ten individuals or small groups of individuals.
Almost all of these achieved their goals – and also helped position us to
make a strong application for the 2018 state grant program [about which
more in a moment].
Our Provost also nominated me for a state OER Council in response to a
call from the Colorado Department of Higher Education [CDHE], as Meg
Brown-Sica was nominated from Ft Collins and Courtney Bruch from
Global; we three all were selected and served.
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OER In Colorado: 2017 and 2018 [April-December]
The Colorado General Assembly passed SB17-258 in 2017 and it was
signed by Governor Hickenlooper on 3 May 2017. That bill created an
Open Educational Resources Council to study the use of OER in
Colorado’s public institutions of higher education and then to make a
proposal for a state program to support OER.
The 2017 Council wrote a long report (available here) which included a
detailed proposal that became, with surprisingly few changes, HB18-1331.
Beyond giving the definition of OER with which this presentation started,
HB18-1331 created a new OER Council empowered to promote the use of
OER at public institutions of higher education in Colorado, and funded the
activities of this Council with $660,000 in year one and around $1million in
years two and three.
Meg, Courtney [until the end of 2018, when she left CSU-Global], and I
are on the new Council; I am the chair.
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OER in Colorado: December 2018
There were 28 applications [out of 31 eligible institutions] for the $550,00
in state grant funds for year one, with total requests of $1.3million.
There was a very competitive and difficult decision process [individual
council members recused themselves when their institution’s application
and applications from other institutions in the same system as theirs were
discussed] which resulted in awards including
• $60,000 for Ft Collins
• $45,000 for Pueblo
• Global did not apply
While these decisions were made in December 2018 and presented to the
Colorado Commission on Higher Education [CCHE], as the overseeing
authority, the awards are not official until the February 7th CCHE meeting,
nor will the funds be disbursed until after that meeting.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 19 / 25
Breaking News!
Press release yesterday:
Source: https://highered.colorado.gov/Publications/Press/Releases/2019/20190207-OER-Grants.pdf
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OER in Colorado: 2019 → ∞
The OER Council in 2019 will disburse grant funds and collect data on
how they affect student costs and success in Colorado institutions of
higher education.
The Council also is organizing a conference – note the date: May 30-31,
2019 – which will have training sessions for OER practitioners, keynote[s]
by internationally recognized OER experts, and group meetings of Colorado
institutions working in particular areas [e.g,: free (in both senses) online
homework support systems for classes not using a commercial textbook].
We have asked Governor Polis to make a visit to our conference, and it is
not out of the question that he might: in his last job, he was one of five
authors who put provision in a federal funding bill to create a federal OER
grant program.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 21 / 25
Aside on the Need for OER Grants
But why does money need to be spent on OER, if they are, after all, free?
The answer is that while the individual OER are free, it can take a lot of
time to re-construct a course around an OER in place of a commercial
textbook you used to use10 , and more time to adapt the OER itself to your
course, and even more time to create an entire OER from scratch. Since
the OER world is competing with all the gee-gaws and doo-dads that
commercial publishers provide with their texts (as they, with their other
hand, steal your academic freedom), stipends for faculty and staff, or other
forms of support which may have a price-tag, can be useful.
One thing to note, however, is that experience in other states has shown
that for every dollar spent on a state-level OER program, the aggregate
student body in that state saves between $4 and $10 – quite an ROI!
10
But maybe no more than it would take to switch to a different commercial text,
which you might choose to do or be forced to do by a change of edition.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 22 / 25
OER at CSU-Pueblo: 2019 → ∞
The Pueblo OER committee will support several major projects as well a
running a new, campus-specific mini-grant program to support faculty who
are excited but not yet involved in OER.
Experience at other institutions in other states shows that it is important
to be proactive about OER support: rather than only waiting for faculty to
come to a meeting or answer a CFP, it helps also to have advocates go to
specific faculty with possible OER for their courses and then to provide a
lot of support in the incorporation of those free resources into the class.
The CTL at CSU-Pueblo will provide as much of this support as time and
resources allow.
One concrete example: one major project supports the creation of an OER
for the roughly 1,400 students per year who take courses in our writing
program. The commercial textbooks which will be replaced cost $110.
That is a total of $154,000 of savings, for which we will spend $15,000
from our state grant funds (plus time of CTL staff): an ROI of 10.3.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 23 / 25
Let Us Be Bold
During the VISION2028 process at CSU-Pueblo, we have tried to be bold.
Because OER serve so many of the VISION2028 Principles, have such
potential to help our institution’s bottom line (as a marketing tool, and by
increasing student success and persistence), I propose the following bold
goal for our campus:
CSU-Pueblo shall be a default-OER [DOER] campus by 2028
...in the sense that students should expect not ever to pay for the
educational resources which are required in their classes here, and instead
they should expect customized OER to be used in most classes, with many
classes also using OER-based Open Educational Practices. Of course, no
one wants to trample on academic freedom, so faculty who wanted to use
a commercial text or other non-OER could do so, although we should
expect that to be rare and only to happen for clearly articulable reasons.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan BoG Feb 2019: OER 8 February 2019 24 / 25
Questions, Comments, and Contact Info
Questions? Comments?
If any occur to you later, feel free to contact me at
jonathan.poritz@csupueblo.edu .
These slides are available11 at
http://poritz.net/j/share/OER4BoGFeb2019.pdf .
11
for reuse under a Creative Commons license, of course!
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