Open Education 2015

As the open movement picks up steam, many colleges and universities are planning OER initiatives. But what does a successful OER initiative look like? Which project models correlate to student savings and success? What institutional investments payoff? We plan to use a combination of surveying and interviewing to examine how model characteristics, like funding, release-time provided, incentivization, initiative leadership, etc. correlate to measures of success, like student savings, performance, completion and retention.

When creating a new open initiative, institutions face multiple organizational choices. Who will lead the initiative? Will there be a steering committee? What should the initiative prioritize? Do we need to advocate for funding? How much? How should we use those funds? Should we provide participants with release-time? Should we partner with external companies? We plan to investigate how these choices correlate to measures of success in order to describe model characteristics that work.

Open makes sense to those of us advocating at our institutions. We believe that OER adoption and open course development saves students money and makes them more successful. In order to convince colleagues at our institutions as well as legislators, grant organizations and funding agencies many OER initiatives are tracking student savings and increasingly collecting metrics related to student success, like student performance, completion, and retention in courses that use open resources. We plan to investigate how these metrics of success relate to initiative models.

We hypothesize that larger institutions will invest in organized initiatives with significant planning and goal-setting, identifiable leaders, and compensation or release-time supported by administration in order to see positive and sustainable outcomes. Smaller institutions, we suspect, may be able to achieve successful programs that require less structure and financial investment, depending more upon personal relationships and influence.

The results of this research will be useful to faculty, librarians, administrators and staff planning new OER initiatives to help them advocate for appropriate resources and get set up for measurable success. We intend to openly publish our findings and present highlights at OpenEd15.