OER Sustainability Concerns at PCC

Routine Curriculum Updates.

We would like to have a three year timeline with scheduled OER revision. We need maintenance for current events, new science, new nutrition information, etc. I was 100% all in to OER, but I wouldn’t do it again because it’s such a burden. Particularly form scratch, but even an adaptation. The startup funding happens, but then you have this responsibility to keep it going through volunteerism.

―Deb Lippoldt and Heather Garza, FN

An obstacle now to creating something new is awareness of this maintenance issue. In our SAC, some content is changing on an ongoing basis as time and knowledge evolves. Neuroscience for example is always changing. Human development and Intro Psych are undergoing pedagogical upheaval for a few reasons.

―Debi Cozzoli, PSY

Our SAC created an OER with an early OpenOregon grant. But maintenance is where it fell apart. Health information changes frequently, and there are frequent needs to update content because of new information. Now only one instructor still using it.

―Rachelle Katter, HE

This year the OER reading lists needed to be updated. Students signed up for a section of the reading list, checked links, checked accessibility, and give feedback about content. These student presentations gave us lots of feedback, but now it will take lots of hours to make revisions. And this kind of revision really should be annual or every other year.

―Taryn Oakley, ESR

Making Use of New Technologies.

SAC shells would make it easier to propagate improvements and take burden off of PT faculty, but we don’t have enough FT faculty to take that on. There should be one FT faculty responsible for each SAC shell.

―Deb Lippoldt and Heather Garza, FN

Accessibility needs and cultural responsiveness grow with time. Our Our OER is not currently in a printable form. How will we provide this to Coffee Creek without a new platform?

―Rachelle Katter, HE

All the various math OERs would benefit significantly from folding in more interactive elements to help students learn as they read. Each one takes time and labor to prototype and deploy, and we are years behind where we could be.

―Alex Jordan, MTH

Wrangling Current Technologies.

We use Pressbooks, Google Docs, slides, a webpage linking to 100 different documents, D2L shells. It’s all over the place because of the nature of the course. Ancillaries are difficult to corral: audio files, video files, etc.

In our SAC, PressBooks is not good for workbooks. Google Docs is easier. But then the Goolge Docs are difficult to manage, especially downstream with derivative works.

H5P in Pressbooks is great but we can’t print those exercises. Pressbooks is structured tightly (for accessibility) so not much freedom for layout/non-linear progression. Some materials are presently digital only, which can become an equity issue.

―Tim Krause, ESOL

We teaching from D2L, but all the links for the OER point to Google Docs. Every time there was a simple thing to change, had to be done in D2L and in Google. D2L was barrier because we couldn’t share the OER across instructors easily.

―Rachelle Katter, HE

Technology Expertise.

People feel unsure if they have ownership over making changes. Faculty do not understand licensing well either. And the design of some OER can feel limiting to faculty who want to change things. Projects are in a format that is hard to edit and does not always upload well to other platforms (especially H5P items). Doing any maintenance requires detailing what you want done, and sending that work order to someone outside your SAC who works with STORI, OL, etc.

―Deb Lippoldt and Heather Garza, FN

We have videos and embeddings created in collaboration with someone in OL and STORI. But the videos needed updating, and there were some issue on back end, and we needed that person (rather than anyone in our own SAC) for.

―Ken Friedrick, CH

Many MTH OERs are based in a publishing tool called PreTeXt and manage versions with a tool called git. Only a few SAC members know how to work with PreTeXt and git.

―Alex Jordan, MTH

Logistical Concerns.

There’s a lot of OER, but no department-wide requirement to use the same thing. There’s a lot of freedom. Many things are made, sometimes doubled up for the same course. Teachers make downstream edits, but then how do people know which version is whose version? Where is everything? How do I get it? Which version should I use? It’s frustrating to update something and find other faculty are still using old versions.

Print center job numbers and ISBNs are a challenge. Adopting faculty come to you with questions about “your” OER even when they are really asking about a derivative work a few generations removed. They might just have a logistical question like how to order through the bookstore.

―Tim Krause, ESOL

We need a culture of reporting improvements upstream.

―Deb Lippoldt and Heather Garza, FN

Instructor to instructor, they choose independently how to deliver the OER. We had issues with new faculty needing help getting started with the OER. Now we’ve each settled in our ways, but separately. (We aren’t able to bring improvements back to each other’s versions.)

―Debi Cozzoli, PSY

New versions of any OER for print that go through the PCC print center require a new print center job number. If the print copy is then also sold through the bookstore, it needs a new ISBN. Managing all of these order numbers and ISBNs can be a challenge. If it’s not managed well, you might find an instructor is still ordering print copies of an outdated version from some previous year.

―Alex Jordan, MTH