OER Sustainability Concerns at PCC

OER projects present course materials to students. In some disciplines, course materials become outdated quickly, and need to be revised frequently (in some cases annually). Other subject areas (and courses within subject areas) also need regular revision, even when the subject itself is stable. This keeps examples current and recognizes areas to make the content more culturally relevant.

Some OER projects should take advantage of new technology methods that become available. For example a new interactive H5P widget could be a more effective learning device to display some data compared with using just a static picture. Or there might be a new way to integrate the OER with D2L.

Some support tools that currently host OER (Google Docs, Pressbooks, D2L, and more) introduce an unmanageable workload when faculty attempt to update OER. Especially if they are hoping to update it in a way that makes the improvements easy to share.

Sometimes OER is created or stored using technologies that typical faculty are unable to work with. Faculty would like to improve the OER, but have to work through a bottleneck of accessing the few (or one) person at PCC who has the technical skills to make those changes. The people with that technical expertise may not have curricular expertiese, complicating the collaboration.

As an OER evolves, new versions come into existence. While some faculty use a new version, other faculty may need to continue using an old version (either for curriculum reasons or the burden of updating secondary materials may be too high). And so we reach a point where multiple versions of a single OER are in use, and management of versions is needed.

This creates logistical issues for managing an OER. Logistical issues may be scoped to an individual instructor, a group of PCC colleagues, an entire SAC, or to include external colleagues.

For example if an OER is for print and printed through the PCC print center, it has a job number. If it is then sold through the book store, it has an ISBN. These numbers are necessarily different for each version of an OER. Within a SAC, there can be confusion about which job numbers and ISBNs should be used, which are outdated, which are for a certain instructor only, etc.

Similar concerns exist with proliferation of an OER across D2L course shells. In SACs where there is no SAC management of D2L template shells, faculty lose track of where they have made meaningful improvements to an OER and how they could propagate good changes along for other faculty.

If an external OER is used, it can change our from under PCC faculty without warning, and without maintaining access to the previous version. Even when there is not a concern about content changing in a meaningful way, the sudden breaking of links and references in PCC materials is a concern.