ERM Issues in the Adoption of No-Cost Resources for Students

This article discusses how the University of Maryland University College adapted no-cost electronic resources, or open educational resources, for course use and how the Library participated in this process. Open educational resources replaced expensive textbooks and related materials, which resulted in tremendous cost savings for the university and students.1 This is a preprint of an article submitted for consideration in the Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, 2017, by Melissa Foge, Julie Harding, Stephen D. Miller; Lenore England, Column Editor; the Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1941126X.2017.1304767 Title of Column: ERM Ideas & Innovations Column Editor: Lenore England, Assistant Director for Electronic Resources Management at the University of Maryland, University College Library, lenore.england@umuc.edu From the Column Editor, Lenore England: My colleagues in the University of Maryland University College Library authored the ERM Ideas and Innovations column for this issue: Melissa Foge, Reference and Instruction Librarian; Julie Harding, Assistant Director, Public Services; and Stephen Miller, Associate Vice Provost. They discuss how the University of Maryland University College adapted no-cost electronic resources, or open educational resources, for course use and how the Library participated in this process. Open educational resources replaced expensive textbooks and related materials, which resulted in tremendous cost savings for the university and students. My colleagues provide a unique perspective about the use of open access electronic resources in a library environment, which is applicable for all libraries. The university administration mandated the use of open access resources in courses, which my colleagues and all Library staff fully supported while adapting to certain requirements and challenges. Most importantly, they explain how they strategically planned projects to develop open access electronic resources for our patrons’ use in an online learning environment, utilizing their expertise on information literacy and how both open access resources and Library proprietary electronic resources subscriptions are important to learning. That approach is invaluable to the university. I was involved more in the back end of procuring electronic resources, both proprietary and open 2 access, and learned a great deal from their column about how they managed a very complex process very well. Through hard work, they curated a critical and extensive set of electronic resources to support all of our curricular needs now and certainly for the foreseeable future, as they continue to assess electronic resources as courses are revised and developed. Title of Contribution: ERM Issues in the Adoption of No-Cost Resources for Students Column authors: Melissa Foge Reference and Instruction Librarian University of Maryland University College Library 3501 University Boulevard East Largo, Room 1260 Adelphi, Maryland 20783 melissa.foge@umuc.edu Julie Harding Assistant Director, Public Services University of Maryland University College Library 3501 University Boulevard East Largo, Room 1267 Adelphi, Maryland 20783 julie.harding@umuc.edu Stephen Miller Associate Vice Provost University of Maryland University College Library 3501 University Boulevard East Largo, Room 1265 Adelphi, Maryland 20783 stephen.miller@umuc.edu Running head: ERM Ideas and Innovations Abstract: 3 Between 2013 and 2016, the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) undertook a major project to replace traditional textbooks with online open educational resources (OERs), which changed electronic resources management (ERM) at the university. The curation and selection of electronic resources at UMUC is now primarily curriculum-based, including ERM in the Library. UMUC librarians in all functional areas (reference and instruction, access, and ERM) are working much more closely with faculty, subject matter experts, and instructional designers to ensure high quality licensed Library electronic resources are available to complement OERs and meet course objectives. Keywords: Open educational resources, OERs, open access, electronic resources management, reference and instruction, University of Maryland University College Library ERM Issues in the Adoption of No-Cost Resources for Students Introduction Between 2013 and 2016, the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) undertook a major project to replace traditional textbooks with online open educational resources (OERs), which changed electronic resources management (ERM) at the university. The move from fee-based textbooks to no-cost OERs for UMUC students had a distinct impact on the UMUC Library (Library) and ERM staff strategically updated workflow and processes in order to 4 support this initiative and efficiently evolve both over time (England et al., 2016). The curation and selection of electronic resources at UMUC is now primarily curriculum-based, including ERM in the Library. Further, UMUC librarians in all functional areas (reference and instruction, access, and ERM) are working much more closely with faculty, subject matter experts, and instructional designers to ensure high quality licensed Library electronic resources are available to complement OERs and meet course objectives. About UMUC UMUC is one of the 17 institutions in the University System of Maryland (USM) and is a separate institution from the University of Maryland, College Park main campus. Focusing on the online education of non-traditional, working adult students, UMUC enrolls over 85,000 students and employs thousands of adjunct and collegiate faculty worldwide. In 2014, UMUC enrolled more students than any other four-year, degree granting public university in the United States, and enrollments have increased by more than 40 percent in the past ten years. The Maryland Board of Regents projects that UMUC's student headcount will grow 24 percent by 2024. UMUC provides more than 90 undergraduate and graduate degrees, certificates, and specializations, as well as two distinct Doctor of Management programs, with more than 975 distinct courses. In spring 2014, approximately 75 percent of undergraduate students enrolled in UMUC's stateside programs were working full-time. More than half of UMUC stateside students are working parents and UMUC currently enrolls 52,000 active-duty military and veteran students (UMUC, 2016). 5 In order to serve UMUC’s worldwide students and faculty, the Library’s resources and services are almost 100% online. The Library has a core collection of 101 research databases, as well as the use of discovery and cross-linking tools. There are 11 librarians and nine staff members who serve a three-part mission: Library and information literacy education; partnering with UMUC’s schools and faculty; and worldwide Library resources and services. Librarians staff a virtual reference desk 72 hours per week, and in fiscal year (FY) 2016 answered more than 12,300 reference questions. Librarians also conducted dozens of embedded instruction sessions for both graduate and undergraduate courses. The Library filled thousands of electronic reserves and interlibrary loan requests and participated in many university-wide initiatives including the OERs project. Librarians also worked on projects to help provide scalable assistance to students, including stand-alone research guides and course guides, and a searchable FAQ/knowledge base for after-hours use. The Rising Cost of Textbooks The cost of conventional print-based textbooks has been on the rise for a long time. Recent studies have shown the cost of textbooks over time rising 181% from 1998-2016, while the consumer price index, reflecting consumer prices across all product categories, rose only 48% (Perry, 2016). This means that a $50 textbook in 1998 would have cost over $140 in 2016, while a standard consumer product costing $50 in 1998 would only have increased to $74. Textbooks priced between $300 and $400 are now commonplace (Perry, 2016), and the average undergraduate student now spends over $1,300 per year on books and supplies (The College Board, 2016). This trend in textbook pricing creates financial hardships for students, who are 6 more and more often using student loan funds to purchase textbooks, exacerbating the increase in student loan debt and decreasing college affordability overall (Senack & Donoghue, 2016). In UMUC’s experience, students have been known to drop classes due to financial issues caused by course materials costs. Students were also found to be increasingly putting off purchasing textbooks for courses, either delaying their purchase to “wait and see” if the book would be used extensively in the course, or outright refusing to purchase books. As Naomi S. Baron (2015, para. 3) notes, “Increasingly, students are opting not to purchase these books -- not even rent them. Digital formats (and rentals of any kind) tend to be less expensive than buying print, though frequently the decision is not to acquire the materials at all.” Obviously, in most courses, not having access to the required materials will have a major impact on student success. Although the student-purchased resources model worked for colleges and universities in the past, rising textbook costs, the dramatic increase in student loan amounts, and changes in student behavior are causing the model to break down as an effective method of supplying course resources. These trends and unanticipated behaviors lead to less than optimal outcomes for students and the universities they attend, resulting in poorer grades and dropped or failed classes, thereby increasing their educational costs and time to degree completion. Further, the trend towards higher prices is self-reinforcing: “As students buy fewer books, publishers do smaller print runs, resulting in higher prices, which in turn reinforces the spiral of lower sales” (Baron, 2015, para. 11). Thus, a way needed to be found to break the cycle and find an alternative way to provide the materials that students need for their classes. 7 No-Cost to Students In 2013, UMUC undertook an initiative to replace student-purchased textbooks for undergraduate courses with OERs and similar open access materials, provided at no cost to the students. The goal was to have all undergraduate courses using such materials by fall 2015, with graduate courses following in fall 2016 (Cini, 2015). The primary objective to shift from fee-based textbooks to OERs was highly ambitious. UMUC’s strategy for OERs was driven by two overarching goals for implementation: One, to make use of the explosion of new, free, and open education and learning resources that had become available on the internet, and two, to dramatically reduce student's educational costs (Van Dam, 2016). Large amounts of open textbooks, learning objects, and other kinds of OER content produced by academics, educators, publishers, and other enthusiasts had become widely available via portals such as MERLOT and OER Commons and from projects like MIT Open Courseware and Saylor.org, as well as many other online sources. As a result, vast quantity of “raw materials” were readily available and made such a project at UMUC possible. UMUC also drew on existing proprietary Library electronic resource subscriptions and internally created custom modules authored by faculty and subject matter experts. The process of replacing student-purchased textbooks was a vast and complex project, with resource selection at the heart of the process. The selection process began with needs identification, including academic and technical review, and time-consuming modifications to 8 syllabi and teaching guides (Cini, 2015). Academic programs needed to review course outcomes and instructional needs to ensure that replacement resources were appropriate. The end result was to have a course structured around the learning objectives, with resources supporting those objectives, rather than a course structured around the textbook. The processes put in place for The Undergraduate School led to lessons learned that would change the process for The Graduate School conversion. The Undergraduate School Project The plan put into place in 2013 was to replace the use of student-purchased textbooks and other materials entirely with OERs and/or Library-provided proprietary and other electronic resources, at no cost to the student, by fall of 2015. There were 400 courses to analyze and find resources for within an 18-month period. The Library played a major role in this implementation, and assisted in the conversion of these courses. The initial process was team-based, and focused on each course individually. Each team included an academic director, subject-matter expert, Library liaison, and instructional designer. The team would meet to discuss the course objectives and determine search strategies. The subject matter expert, usually an adjunct faculty member, was paid a stipend for their time spent in the process. The subject matter expert would help determine search terms, and the librarian would then spend about eight hours searching for OERs and Library resources that would meet the needs of the course. The librarian entered suggested resources into a spreadsheet that was later vetted by the academic director and the subject matter expert. During this process, UMUC staff created a list 9 of Creative Commons OER websites, which librarians used as a checklist when searching for electronic resources. The Library staff eventually evolved the list into a LibGuide and categorized the OER websites by subject area. The Library’s participation, overseen by the assistant director for public services, added up to 18 months of working time for 9 librarians, plus the working time for the assistant director for public services. Instructional designers worked to revise the content of each course to reflect the inclusion of the new resources, maintain quality control over the number of resources, and make sure all of the links to the resources worked properly. The Graduate School Project Taking lessons learned by The Undergraduate School into consideration, and with a faster turnaround time needed, The Graduate School embarked on their project with a revised plan in January 2016. In only 90 days, over 200 graduate level courses would move from fee-based textbooks to embedded OERs and Library resources. The university’s Learning Design & Solutions group hired temporary employees to search for OERs for each course, while librarians worked solely on searching for Library resources. Because of the quick turnaround required, this became an “all hands on deck” project. All Library staff and faculty, including the Library director, participated in searching for Library resources for these courses. The academic directors and instructional designers then vetted the resources. Project Management 10 The assistant director for public services managed the Library’s involvement in both projects. The project manager for the university-wide initiative used the Trello dashboard tracking system to monitor all departments’ involvement in the project. Once the project manager added a course to the Trello Board, it went through a series of departments, and when it was ready for a librarian to begin searching for sources, a notification was sent to the email address for the assistant director for public services in the Library. Librarians were assigned courses to search, and were given a Google spreadsheet to record and share their work. This spreadsheet included course objectives, suggested search terms, and a list of the resources previously used in the course. A Google Site (internal to the Library) with instructions was created and revised as needed, and an Excel spreadsheet was used to track librarian’s progress and historical information as to which courses had been searched. Librarians could refer to the spreadsheet as a reminder of which courses they were assigned, and to make a notification of completion. The project ran very smoothly and all work was completed and submitted on time for both projects. UMUC Requirements The projects were conducted under several constraints and requirements decided on during the planning phase and were then modified as the projects went on. These included: ● Creative Commons-licensed materials were favored. Because linking to resources on the internet that are outside of the institution’s control invariably leads to materials changing or disappearing unexpectedly, the project favored materials that could be captured, downloaded, and stored on the university’s servers for delivery through the course 11 management system. Therefore, materials that authors had placed online using creative commons licenses, except for those that specified that no derivative works can be made, were favored for the materials selected. The university avoided seeking copyright permissions or making copyright payments in order to avoid additional costs. More information on Creative Commons Licensing is discussed in the next section. ● ADA and Section 508 compliance was required. Course developers in the Learning Design and Solutions group reviewed materials for ADA and Section 508 compliance by reviewing each item with a usability checklist and testing it using screen-reader software. All videos were required to have text transcriptions. ● Library materials meeting certain requirements could be used. Like most academic libraries, the UMUC Library provides a large number of online research databases licensed from vendors. The Library undertook a review of vendor license agreements to determine which Library resources could legally be used under the agreements. Some resources were limited due to the number of simultaneous users – only resources that an unlimited number of users could access at the same time were utilized. Also, only collections which allowed linking via a permanent URL (PURL) could be utilized and the use of PURLs was the primary way that the Library resources were linked to from the classrooms. Creative Commons Licensing 12 All OERs used in the projects had to fall under Creative Commons Licensing. For searching purposes, librarians only needed to look for the Creative Commons License seal, but once linking in courses began, proper use needed to be enforced. There are four different types of licenses, as described below. Note that the creator of the content selects the type of license(s) before publishing their work (Creative Commons, 2017). 1. Attribution - requires attribution, or permission, whenever the work is used, or a derivative made of it. 2. ShareAlike - the user may copy, distribute, display, perform, or modify the work, as long as it is distributed on the same terms. Derivative works must be licensed under the same original license type. 3. Non-Commercial - allows for copy, distribution, display, and modification for non-commercial use without permission. 4. No Derivatives - allows for copying, distribution, and display of original copies of work only. No modifications are allowed without permission. OERs and Library Electronic Resources A broad range of sources were searched while looking for materials to support the learning outcomes of courses. OERs were the first resources searched for to supplement the learning 13 outcomes; some of the main OER collections used were Boundless, Saylor, OpenStax, and Open Textbook Library. Other OER Collections used or searched were collected and listed in a LibGuide created to help facilitate resource searching; it is located at http://libguides.umuc.edu/oer. Links to OERs were also added to more subject specific LibGuides to further support open educational and learning resources and support research. After OER searching, Library resources were searched for articles and ebooks that would help support the learning outcomes. The Library has a broad range of databases with electronic resources to support the research of students and faculty, but the UMUC requirements for potential course materials determined which Library electronic resources could and could not be used in this project. Like OER materials, Library resources needed to be able to be used by an unlimited number of users and be able to be downloaded, not just used on the internet. This requirement eliminated Library ebooks through Books24x7, as they cannot be downloaded - only read through their online interface, and also eliminated many ebooks in the Library’s eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) that can only be used by a limited number of users at a time. The main Library electronic resources used for this project included ebrary (now Ebook Central), encyclopedia databases like Gale Virtual Reference Library, Oxford Reference, and SAGE Knowledge: SAGE Reference eBook Collection, and various other databases for articles. Lessons Learned 14 All undergraduate courses were using OERs by fall 2015, with a savings of $17 million to students for that year, and a projected $19 million savings for 2016 (Van Dam, 2016). Also, a 2015 internal study found no negative effects on grade distribution or course completion (and some suggested gains (Van Dam, 2016). While both increased slightly, the cost of materials dropped significantly, to zero, from an average of $96. For the 15 courses that were sampled in the internal study, the savings exceeded $1.6 million (Cini, 2016). With any success comes challenges. All staff members involved in the project had to be educated to ensure materials being used were actual open source and adaptable. Copyright and technical restrictions had to be dealt with, as well as the maintenance and support of the content.