Hats Off to Washington! Open Policy and Open Course Sharing

The Open Course Library is an initiative of the Washington state community and technical colleges to leverage a variety of existing Open Educational Resources as well as original content by our faculty course designers. I will also discuss the advantages of open educational content that prompted our state agency to invest in the development of education content and to require the resulting digital course materials be shared under a Creative Commons open license. To give context to the Open Course Library I will start by providing some background on our college system, our Strategic Technology Plan, and the formal adoption of an open licensing policy.

The State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) is an organization that provides leadership and coordination for Washington’s public system of 34 community and technical colleges. Based on the current Annual Enrollment Report, the number of students attending our colleges is 470,000 and climbing. This is the highest enrollment level in SBCTC history, with much of the recent increase due to growth in eLearning. One reason for this growth is that more students are able to fit school into their busy schedules by attending hybrid and online classes.

In 2008, SBCTC released its Strategic Technology Plan to provide clear policy direction around a single goal: mobilizing technology to increase student success. One of the guiding principles of the plan is to “cultivate the culture and practice of using and contributing to open educational resources” (p. 17). With a clear plan in place the next step was to provide opportunities, incentives, and policies to promote OER in our system. On June 17, 2010 the nine-member State Board for Community and Technical Colleges unanimously approved the first state-level open licensing policy. It requires that all digital works created from competitive grants administered through SBCTC carry a Creative Commons Attribution-only (CC-BY) license. This license allows educational materials created by one college to be used or updated by another college in our system as well as by other education partners globally. Allowing the free flow of all educational content produced by State Board competitive grant funds is an efficient way to engage in the OER movement while maintaining a focus on the specific needs of Washington’s community and technical college students.

Flickr image credit: Timothy Valentine and Leo Reynolds CC-BY-NC-SA

Building on the Strategic Technology Plan, the SBCTC eLearning team launched the Open Course Library in 2010, an initiative to design and openly share 81 high enrollment, gatekeeper and pre-college courses. The goals of the OCL project include (1) lowering textbook costs for students, (2) providing new resources for faculty to use in their courses, and (3) fully engaging in the global open educational resources discussion. OCL participants are selected through a competitive grant proposal process. Each winning faculty member or team of faculty designs one course. Each of the 81 course teams is directly supported by a librarian, two instructional designers, and an eLearning director. All teams receive additional support from two institutional researchers, 2 accessibility specialists, and a multicultural expert.

Another important consideration is how we will share the 81 OCL courses at the end of each phase. Internal sharing is easy because of our existing WAOL system-shared courses framework. We will include a copy of the full course in our share course system so it can be viewed and copied by faculty in any of our 34 colleges. For external sharing we have partnered withthe Saylor Foundation. Saylor.org will make the OCL course content modular and easy to search and view online.

Open Course Library development will occur in two phases. The first 42 courses (phase 1) will be released at the end of October 2011. The remaining courses (phase 2) will be completed by summer 2013. Each phase is spread over four college quarters. In phase 1, the first two quarters (summer/fall 2010) were spent designing course objectives, finding appropriate OER content, and creating assessments that aligned with the content. Faculty course designers worked closely with their assigned instructional designers (IDs) during this time to ensure that assignments and assessments are tied to course objectives. Faculty then pilot taught their newly designed curriculum at their college during the third quarter (winter 2011). They used feedback from two peer reviews and the course pilot to make updates to the course during the fourth quarter (spring 2011). Phase 2 will follow the same, four-quarter timeline and will benefit from lessons learned in phase 1.

SBCTC will not mandate the use of Open Course Library materials within our system. But we are already getting positive feedback from students who are grateful they don’t have to pay $200 for a textbook. Because these resources are openly licensed, digital resources anyone will be able to access, modify, adapt, translate, and improve them. The cost of making a million digital copies of digital materials is not much more than the cost of the first copy, and print-on-demand solutions are making print copies very affordable as well.

As we look beyond the content development process, the next major challenge is to increase the adoption of these OCL courses. We will start by making it as easy as possible for our faculty to find, browse, and copy OCL course content. We will train newly hired faculty so they are aware of the Open Course Library content available to them as they are developing their lesson materials. As we look for ways to encourage a culture of OER use and sharing in Washington’s community and technical colleges we will create opportunities for Open Course Library content to be adopted, updated, maintained, and shared back with our system and with the world.