15 Interinstitutional Collaborations to Forge Intracampus Connections: A Case Study from the Duke Endowment Libraries

Introduction

Academic libraries are increasingly providing education and support for faculty interested in open educational resources (OER). Some academic libraries offer comprehensive training programs and dedicated staff to support the creation and adoption of OER. Other libraries focus on smaller initiatives seeking to explore the interests of OER stakeholders on their campuses. However, there are still a significant number of academic libraries with little or no experience supporting faculty OER needs. This was the situation at Duke University, Davidson College, Furman University, and Johnson C. Smith University in early 2016.

Most of the librarians at these institutions had minimal to no experience working with OER, and had no clear concept of which of their faculty had adopted or contributed to OER. Fortunately, these institutions have access to a shared endowment that facilitates collaborative programming across their institutions. Beginning in the summer of 2016, librarians from these four schools joined together to develop a unique OER pilot program that pooled resources and created a support structure across institutions with notably different student populations, faculty interests, and library structures.

TDEL OER Pilot Program

The OER pilot program implemented by Duke, Davidson, Furman, and Johnson C. Smith benefited from external funding and interinstitutional collaboration made possible by the Duke Endowment. Established in 1924 by the tobacco and hydroelectric power magnate, James B. Duke, the Duke Endowment is a permanent trust fund with designated beneficiaries. Among these beneficiaries are four institutions of higher learning: Davidson College, Duke University, Furman University, and Johnson C. Smith University. In 2001, the libraries from these four institutions established an informal group called the Duke Endowment Libraries (TDEL) to foster collaboration and share knowledge and training across the institutions’ libraries. In 2015, TDEL established a project fund to provide financial support for joint projects among two or more of the Duke-endowed libraries. During preliminary discussions about possible uses of this fund, the topic of OER presented itself. With the exception of Davidson College, the OER experience among the libraries was fairly limited. Working collaboratively, the Duke-endowed libraries could realize the following benefits:

• Connect librarians at different institutions with a shared interest in supporting open access and OER.
• Collect and analyze OER information from several institutions to identify larger trends and interests in higher education.
• Maximize resource utility by pooling training and funding across institutions, while still facilitating a program that best suits the needs of each individual campus.

Even with all the benefits of collaboration, it is important to note that the four beneficiary institutions of the Duke Endowment are very different from one another. They have varying missions, student bodies, and levels of involvement in scholarly communication initiatives. The TDEL library directors felt this institutional variety was an asset to the project.

Davidson College is a highly selective liberal arts college of almost 2,000 students located just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. For its size, Davidson has been fairly progressive in the field of open education. In 2015, their Library and Center for Teaching & Learning began offering Open Educational Resources and Open Pedagogy Stipends. This program awarded $500 to five faculty interested in integrating OER into their fall 2016 classes (Center for Teaching & Learning, 2016).

Duke University is a private research university of over 14,800 undergraduate and graduate students located in Durham, North Carolina. While the Duke University Libraries have been active in scholarly communication including the management of the University’s institutional repository and offering funding to support faculty open access publications, they had done very little in the realm of strategic OER programming prior to this project.

Furman University is an undergraduate liberal arts university located in Greenville, South Carolina serving 2,700 students. While Furman Libraries have been actively involved in other scholarly communication initiatives including the management of the University’s institutional repository and the administration of the University’s Open Access Fund, they had done virtually nothing related to OER prior to this project.

Johnson C. Smith University is a historically black college and university (HBCU) serving approximately 1,350 students in Charlotte, North Carolina. The library has a strong reputation of collaboration with faculty; however, they had very little hands-on experience with OER prior to this project.

In the spring of 2016, the TDEL library directors approved the creation of a collaborative OER pilot program for academic year 2016–17. The OER pilot program was developed to have two major elements: a Train the Trainer Workshop and a Faculty OER Review Program. The budget for the program was $12,800 with $10,000 earmarked for faculty stipends. The program had the following goals:

• Increase knowledge of OER among librarians;
• Increase awareness of OER among faculty on campus;
• Assess campus knowledge and climate regarding open access and OER;
• Inform the development and/or expansion of OER initiatives supported by the libraries.

Train the Trainer Workshop

As noted above, an important goal of this program was to increase knowledge and experience of OER among the Duke-endowed librarians. To that end, they organized a Train the Trainer Workshop where an OER expert educated the librarians on the benefits and limitations of open resources, offered hands-on experience with locating and evaluating OER, provided tips for engaging faculty, and facilitated a brainstorming session on implementing a successful faculty OER review program.

Selecting an expert for the Train the Trainer Workshop was the result of interinstitutional collaboration. Each librarian conducted research to identify possible candidates to lead the workshop. This list of candidates was then discussed and decided over the phone. William Cross, Director of the Copyright and Digital Scholarship Center at North Carolina State University (NCSU), was chosen. His knowledge and expertise in implementing the Alt-Textbook Project at NCSU was a contributing factor in his selection (North Carolina State University, 2017). Because he was located in the Carolinas, like the other institutions, it was an added benefit that he had familiarity and a strong frame of reference for the Duke-endowed libraries.

Two librarians from each institution attended the workshop, which was held in the James B. Duke Memorial Library of Johnson C. Smith University. Having two librarians in attendance was extremely beneficial. First, it increased the amount of cross-collaboration and knowledge sharing within and between the institutions. Second, it allowed for a more distributed workload in implementing and running the OER faculty review programs at each local institution. Each of the librarian participants had other duties and responsibilities within their libraries. At the same time, none of the libraries had dedicated staffing to support open education initiatives, making it even more imperative to build expertise and support across neighboring institutions. There were a myriad of tasks involved in setting up the OER pilot program, such as training, logistics, outreach and promotion, budgeting, reporting, and maintaining a commitment to the proposed timeline. Because of the amount of work required and the limitations in staffing, having two librarians from each institution allowed for a more even distribution of the workload.

In the workshop, Cross introduced the concepts of open education and OER. He also incorporated an interactive exercise in finding, evaluating, and using these materials by providing hands-on experience with the OER websites OpenStax, Open Textbook Network, OER Commons, and MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching). He then illustrated various models for establishing a successful and engaging OER faculty review program, including the Alt-Textbook Project at NCSU. He worked with the TDEL librarians to create an action plan that defined the priorities and timelines for organizing the logistics of an OER faculty review program centrally and implementing it locally. Cross concluded with a brainstorming session on how to conduct an OER training workshop for faculty with tips for promoting the program on each of the campuses.

The materials Cross used to facilitate the TDEL training session can be accessed at https://goo.gl/S3Ac7o.

OER Faculty Review Program Overview

The second component of the OER pilot program was a faculty review program in which faculty were paid a $250 stipend to conduct a written review of one or more OER. The faculty were not required or even encouraged to adopt OER for use in the classroom. The goal of the program was simply to introduce them to the concept of OER and allow them to spend some targeted time assessing an OER to see how it might work in their classroom.

Supporting the creation of faculty OER reviews through stipends had several benefits: it created an opportunity to start conversations about OER on campus; it allowed librarians to build expertise in locating and evaluating OER; and it provided faculty with hands-on experience using OER. Finally, this program was a low-resource, high-impact way for the libraries to slowly transition into campus OER support.

The concept of implementing a review program as a first step in OER support is not a new one. The TDEL libraries were inspired by initiatives like the University of Minnesota’s Open Textbook Network review program (Senack, 2015) and the University of South Carolina’s SCoer! Awards (University of South Carolina, 2017) which demonstrated great success in engaging faculty by paying them stipends to conduct reviews of OER. The University of Minnesota determined that awarding stipends to faculty willing to review OER eventually led to more holistic faculty adoption. OER expert Ethan Senack (2015), writing about the Minnesota program, stated that “[w]hile the original intent of the project was to build open textbook credibility through reviews, it soon became clear that when faculty engaged with open content to provide a review, they were likely to adopt the open textbook in their class” (p. 13). This model has been highly successful for the Open Textbook Network (OTN), a consortium of over 600 campus members working to increase open textbook adoption and access to course material. While the TDEL libraries considered a consortial OTN membership, both funding and time constraints were barriers to membership. The group ultimately decided that creating a similar internal program and implementing it successfully would be a good first step to potentially asking the TDEL libraries directors for additional funding for OTN membership.

In summary, even though other libraries had conducted similar faculty review programs, the TDEL program was unique, because it was conducted collaboratively across four institutions with varying student populations, faculty interests, and library structures. For the program to be a success, it was necessary to establish cross-institutional program features for standardized results and also accommodate individual institutional customizations.

Cross-Institutional Program Features

Common Documentation

To incorporate both the standardization necessary for cross-institution analysis and the flexibility of campus-specific marketing and data, the group decided to develop base forms for program participation. These base forms included the standardized elements in a format agreed upon by the TDEL librarians. Each institution would then create a copy of the forms to customize. Colors, logos, and identifying information were customized to the individual institutions. If schools wished to gather additional information, they added unique questions to the forms. Since the core of each form was the same across institutions, results could then be easily aggregated and analyzed.

The base forms are publicly available in Google Drive for other institutions to copy, adapt, and reuse under the license CC-BY 4.0.

• Consent Form (Adobe PDF): https://bit.ly/2q5yNji

Faculty participants completed a consent form prior to official participation in the program. Because of privacy concerns, this form was not created in Google Docs. Instead, it is a fillable PDF form that was printed out and physically signed by faculty.

• OER Review Form (Google Forms): https://bit.ly/2ItHGtM

The review form was created in Google Docs, easily allowing the institutions to make copies of the base form and customize as needed.

• Stipend Form (Microsoft Word): https://bit.ly/2q8wFao

Stipends were paid by the Duke University Libraries Business Services which preferred stipend forms formatted in Microsoft Word.

• Feedback Survey (Google Forms): https://bit.ly/2Iw0dWb

The feedback form was created in Google Docs, easily allowing the institutions to make copies of the base form and customize as needed.

Institutional Review Board (IRB)

In keeping with research best practices, prior to launching the OER faculty review program, the librarians applied for Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval through Furman University. Originally, the application was submitted as Exempt Status, because the review form was similar in nature to a survey, and because the information being collected was not deemed by the librarians to pose any potential risks. However, after reviewing the application, the IRB requested it be resubmitted as Expedited Review. It is important to note that an IRB at a different institution may have come to a different conclusion and determined that Exempt Status was sufficient.

As part of the Expedited Review proposal, the librarians were required to address the following: a thorough rationale for the program, complete copies of all four forms, detailed procedures and methodologies, privacy and security of the research, and potential risks to participants. One of the major concerns expressed by the IRB related to the level of personally identifiable information that could be publicly included with the faculty reviews. Three out of the four institutions were small in size and the Board was concerned that individual faculty members could be easily identified due to limited demographic information. Given the concerns, the librarians updated the consent form to allow faculty to choose the level of personally identifiable information they were willing to share. The Board also required that the consent forms be paper-based (rather than a Google Form) and stored off-line to protect participant privacy.

The IRB process was a new one for the Furman librarians who took the lead in conducting this portion of the project. As such, they were required to go through extensive training on IRB procedures, and also had a much greater learning curve in understanding and completing the application. This process added several weeks onto the faculty review program. Because IRB approval was not built into the initial timeline, it did delay the launch of the program by a week. However, approval was well worth the delay because it enabled the librarians to publish and present on the results of the faculty review program.

Faculty Participant Requirements

Faculty participants from all the TDEL institutions went through essentially the same process, although its implementation differed slightly from institution to institution.

The format of the consultation was the most varied part of this process. In some cases, workshops were used to allow multiple faculty to be introduced to OER and the program process simultaneously. In other cases, the specific interest of a faculty member coupled with the difficulty of scheduling group meetings led to one-on-one consultations. In all formats, the consultation included: an overview of OER, particularly licensing; a discussion of the review criteria; and an introduction to platforms and sites designed for OER discovery.

As required by the IRB, all participants completed a hard copy consent form to participate. This detailed the program and allowed participants to indicate what level of identifying information they would allow to be included in any written or publicly available materials resulting from the study. The form also indicated the title and URL for all OER to be reviewed. Faculty were allowed to choose one large curricular component, such as an online course or textbook, or several small components such as videos or content modules.

A standardized review form was utilized across all four institutions. The first section covered basic demographics and contact information. The second section asked for basic metadata about the OER, including license and content level. The main body included a professional review that was based on the BCcampus OER review criteria (BCcampus, 2013). Faculty ranked and commented on the following areas:

A fourth section completed the survey with a personal review where faculty reflected on strengths and weaknesses of the OER as well as how the resource might be used in their own teaching.

Once the completed review was received by librarians at the faculty member’s home institution, they were directed to the Business Services Office at Duke University which collected the sensitive information required for issuing payment from the Duke Endowment funds. External payment processes are complex, particularly when compensating faculty at different institutions. It’s important to plan ahead, document how the compensation process will work, and think through the collection of sensitive information beforehand to ensure that expectations of faculty participants are clear.

1. Attend a workshop or one-on-one consultation with a librarian, which included identifying possible OER.
2. Sign a consent form to participate.
3. Complete a written review for each OER using a standardized form.
   • Comprehensiveness
   • Content Accuracy
   • Relevance/Longevity
   • Clarity
   • Consistency
   • Modularity
   • Organization/Structure/Flow
   • Interface
   • Grammatical Errors
   • Cultural Relevance
4. Submit personal information required for $250 stipend to be issued.
5. Complete a follow-up survey.

Participants who completed a review were sent a follow-up survey in early summer after the program. This survey aimed at determining the success of the program as both a specific OER review and a larger OER awareness campaign.

The first section asked participants to rank their experience and knowledge of OER before and after the program, as well as reflecting on benefits and challenges to OER adoption in their teaching. A second section asked about perceived OER knowledge and challenges at the department and institutional level, including whether faculty would consider adopting OER in their classroom. The final section rated the various elements of the OER review program individually as well as a whole.

Questions about concrete textbook savings were not asked as this project was an introductory effort intended to build knowledge and understanding of the concept of OER.

Individual Institution Customization

Even though the faculty review program was largely standardized, each institution also had the flexibility to make its own customizations. Librarians utilized their knowledge of successful communication strategies, effective outreach tactics, and existing culture around openness on their campus to maximize success. As previously mentioned, while faculty across institutions were required to meet with a librarian to learn more about OER, each institution could decide what that meeting looked like.

At Davidson College, the program was promoted through the faculty listserv, internal web pages, and an OER tab on the Davidson Open Access guide (https://davidson.libguides.com/open/oer). Librarians met with interested faculty in one-on-one consultations where they could tailor their searches to each faculty member’s interest, as this aligned with the small, liberal arts college culture at Davidson.

At Duke University, the program was promoted through the Center for Instructional Technology (CIT) newsletter, a blog post on the Duke University Libraries website, and a presentation at the CIT Showcase. The program was also promoted to library staff through presentations at a staff digital scholarship discussion group, departmental meetings, and a discussion series about scholarly communication topics entitled “ScholComm in the Edge.” A website was also created: https://scholarworks.duke.edu/open-access/open-educational-resources/.

At Furman University, the OER faculty review program was promoted at the New Faculty Orientation and an Undergraduate Evening Studies Faculty Orientation. An OER Guide (http://libguides.furman.edu/oer) and information about the review program in specific was created and posted to the library website. Because of significant interest from these two orientations, the program was not actively marketed elsewhere. Group workshops to introduce OER and the program requirements were held to reach multiple faculty at once. A few faculty members who could not attend the workshop or joined the program later had one-on-one consultations with a librarian.

At Johnson C. Smith University (JCSU), there was no familiarity in general with OER. Some faculty were using OER without realizing it, however, when teaching with public domain materials and Creative Commons-licensed journal articles. To publicize the pilot program, liaison librarians for different subject areas attended meetings for their respective departments as well as meetings of the library committee and with departmental chairs. A LibGuide was also created to assist in promoting the initiative

(http://jcsu.libguides.com/OER). Word of mouth about the $250 stipend also assisted in recruitment and outreach efforts. Like Davidson, Johnson C. Smith found that meeting with professors for one-on-one OER consultations was a better model than a group workshop, because faculty could more easily receive individualized and modified assistance for their particular courses.

It was important to balance standardization across the TDEL group with institutional customization. Others hoping to create a similar program should aim to balance data collection across institutions with customization to each institution’s goals, mission, and culture in order to be effective.

Results

OER Review Results

As of June 12, 2017, 28 faculty members had completed 37 professional reviews of OER for the program. Johnson C. Smith and Furman had robust faculty response, with 11 and 10 faculty participants, respectively. Duke and Davidson had a smaller response, with 3 and 4 faculty participants, respectively, on each campus. Every possible rank of faculty was represented across all four campuses (see Table 1), with Assistant Professor and Instructor being the most common. The participants also represented a wide variety of disciplines and departments, (see Table 2), though the social sciences dominated the group. Also of note, 10 of the participants taught in nontraditional undergraduate programs. Introductory level material and textbooks where the most popular content levels and format, but there was a good bit of variety in both of these areas (see Table 3).

Table 1. Participant Ranks