Una Daly (OE Global) , Judith Sebesta (Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas), Liz Yata (OE Global)
The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) uses an annual survey to gather feedback from its OE Global members across the United States and Canada. It has been using a “needs assessment” type survey for nearly a decade to understand our members priorities, encourage collaborations, and plan for upcoming professional development and advocacy supports.
The Digital Consortium for Higher Education in Texas (DigiTex) supports a biennial statewide survey with all 158 two- and four-year public and private, non-profit institutions across Texas. The goal is to understand the OER landscape across Texas to encourage collaboration and make informed choices about resource allocation to grow the OPEN ecosystem in Texas
Thank you for the presentation and the survey report, it provides a great overview of the CCCOER and DigiTex. Getting survey to the right repondent(s) is indeed always a struggle… In a inter-institutional community I examined the role of brokers to cultivate the community. Maybe this will help to get access to the right persons? My experiences with reaching out to management is that they are often excellent at managing work, but do not always know who is working with OER (or don’t even know what OER are). But sending out surveys is always difficult, especially in the working from home era.
I also have a question: how did you measure the perceived value? I’m looking into that as well and am curious how you explored this aspect. Value is so important to nurturing sustainability, so happy to hear your experiences. And a somewhat unrelated question: what do you mean with faculty buy-in?
Thank you so much for this response and these insightful comments and questions! You have a very salient point about management. In sending our survey to CAOs and CIOs, we can’t be certain that they will consult the right people to most effectively respond to the questions, and as you point out, they might not even know who the right people are! It’s definitely a limitation of the data we collect. And in fact, in spite of directions to only submit one response per institution, we have gotten multiple responses, most often one from the CAO and another from an OER campus lead (often a librarian). (And in at least one case, some responses were considerably divergent!) In those cases we contact the respondents and ask them to consolidate and resubmit. Because a partner (our state higher ed agency) on the survey is also one of our partners helping us organize a statewide conference, I think we are getting a better idea of who are the key OER stakeholders across the state (and I keep an informal spreadsheet). So for the second survey, we actually sent some targeted emails to these OER experts giving them a “heads up” that we were sending the survey to the CAO/CIOs. We also now have a statewide OER Google Group and sent out the notification there as well. As the network of administrators, staff, and faculty expands across the state, so will this work get stronger and more effective and impactful (at least I hope).
Speaking of faculty, “faculty buy-in” is a rather nebulous term, admittedly, but it largely refers to faculty engaging with Open Education – as advocates, creators, adaptors, and/or adopters. What we have found is that for OE to truly take hold on a campus, those in the trenches of teaching need to be involved in order to build an effective, sustainable Open campus ecosystem.
Let me think a bit more about your great value question. It is a complicated one…
Hello Marjon,
Lovely to see you here – it has been a while since we’ve seen each in-person at an OE Global conference. Yes, the question of value is an interesting one and of course is always important in a membership organization such as CCCOER at OE Global. Our survey actually requests ratings on the various supports that we provide to our members i.e. peer support through email list, online meetings and webinars, professional development, and other resources such as blogs, case studies, student stories, etc. Although the responses are very positive, it doesn’t always provide feedback that we can act on. I’m thinking we may need to change the way we ask the questions to what do these resources enable you to do at your organization, etc.
I appreciate you sharing any thoughts you have had on measuring value. Thank you!
Thank you for the extensive reply! It is great that you have such a statewide community around OER. It sounds as you already are making use of brokers in the institute as you have identified the OER stakeholders within the institutes. It is always difficult to find these persons, especially because OER experts are often experts because they are advocating for OER, not because it is a part of their job description (at least, not where I’m working). And learned a new word, thank you for explaining it to me
Will definitely take your experiences and lessons learned back to my institute.
Yes, hope we can see each other in real-life on a conference real soon. Hopefully 2022 will allow more travel. Would be great to see everyone in-person again.
For the national community we tried to grasps value by asking a very generic question related to what you proposed, a question related to what the community enabled them in their teaching. Although it provided us with some insights, the answers turned out to be more generic as well… So maybe a combination might be useful by starting with the more generic question and then ask ratings on possible outputs that the community provided. To solve our issue with the generic respons, we decided to include some interviews (although it was hard to find teachers that were willing to participate due to covid). This provided us more insights. We are know thinking about analyzing it with the Value Creation Framework of Wenger, Trayner and De Laat (2011). I hope that will provide more insights into the ‘type’ of value. So, therefore I was curious about your methods for measuring value. Thank you for sharing your experiences and methods, very appreaciated
