Open Education 2015

The State University of New York (SUNY) Libraries' collaborations with the instructional design community and teaching faculty to scale up OER creation and adoption across SUNY's sixty-five institutions represents a unique opportunity to facilitate OER impact across the state. In this presentation, "SUNY Open Educational Resources: An Evolving Plan of Action," participants will discover how several SUNY campus libraries are leading the way in developing a new service model (NSM) to proactively address the obstacles to OER adoption, position key stakeholders as developers of OERs and cement institutional support.

The proposed service model operationalizes the Open SUNY Center for Online Teaching Excellence's (COTE) faculty Course Supports model, where librarians, instructional designers and multimedia specialists provide faculty guidance through online course redesign. The NSM is an attempt to support faculty adoption of OER by removing some obstacles identified by teaching faculty as real and perceived roadblocks. The flexible NSM design offers coordinated supports for faculty in OER awareness, discovery, evaluation and use. The NSM also provides tools and supports to infuse assessment into OER content and demonstrate real impact on the system's goal to increase student completion and success. Additionally, the presenters will discuss their methods for local faculty OER adoption by aligning existing OER materials to the course learning outcomes, which bridge the formative assessments of learner's understanding of course content.

Secondly, we will focus on system libraries' support of the open educational resources community through development of new publishing models. Working with faculty and instructional designers to create and develop OER content, librarians are well-positioned to provide facilitation and support for course content design and creation. SUNY libraries collaborate on Open SUNY Textbooks, producing eight textbooks in 2013-14 and another fifteen in 2015. This new model of collaboration depends on the librarian-instructional designer-faculty interaction, where the library works hand-in-hand with the author and instructional designer to publish free and affordable textbooks tied to course content and learning outcomes.

The third part of the presentation will focus on the adopted resolution, A Rationale for a SUNY Strategy for the Future of Academic Publishing, by the SUNY University Faculty Senate (USF), comprised of faculty from SUNY institutions. The resolution recommends, “The University Faculty Senate USF) encourages SUNY, its Libraries,and the Faculty to explore and support alternatives to publishing scholarship with commercial publishers. The resolution further recommends the Executive Committee of the University Faculty Senate work with the SUNY Provost, the SUNY Librarians Association, the SUNY Council of Library Directors, and other stakeholders to create a task force for exploring alternative models of scholarly publishing