OER at Ramapo College

By Hilary Westgate

Since 2017, librarians at Ramapo College have been working steadily on the College’s OER initiatives, beginning when librarians Sam Wittenberg and Hilary Westgate attended the Northeast Regional OER Summit at the University of Massachusetts in 2017 and 2019. More recently, Hilary attended the New Jersey OER Summit in 2019, and both attended multiple VALE and Open Textbook Network trainings, workshops, and conference sessions offered in New Jersey. A professional staff member in our Instructional Design Center (IDC) also attended an Open Textbook Network training with us. From what we learned at conferences and workshops, we took the following steps: Created an OER LibGuide to be shared with Ramapo faculty (https://libguides.ramapo.edu/oer); presented to fellow librarians; presented multiple workshops for faculty with the Faculty Resource Center (FRC) and at our College’s Faculty Development Day; presented to all Unit Councils (the meetings of each school within the College), and sent targeted emails to faculty with offers to assist in finding OER, setting up meetings when applicable.

We learned that first we had to share what OER and Open Access actually mean, why they might be worth using, and where to find them before we could hope to increase their use on our campus. Workshops and presentations to faculty have been helpful throughout the past few years, but we do encounter the common related questions about these resources, such as their reliability and quality, review processes, ‘publishing’ processes, accessibility, longevity, availability in specialized subject areas, and more. These are all completely reasonable questions, and the workshops and conferences helped us to understand and share the answers to many of them. We always stress that faculty have the final say in their choice of materials, and we hope to simply offer them options and ideas for lower-cost, high-quality alternatives.

College-wide, the RCNJ Student Government Association wrote and passed a bill in November 2017 asking faculty to consider using more Open Access materials and/or OER in selecting course materials, in order to reduce costs for students. A few months later, the Faculty Assembly voted to create a campus OER Task Force with these goals: 

  • Raise awareness among the faculty about the benefits of OER and how OER can be implemented in their courses;
  • Identify areas that will achieve the greatest financial savings for the most students; and
  • Work with faculty and other stakeholders to transition course materials to OER or other cost saving materials in the areas identified.

Since librarians had already started to learn and share about these types of resources, we were happy to join the campus-wide Task Force, which allows us to further our efforts and reach more faculty. We are glad to have strong connections with the Faculty Resource Center and the Instructional Design Center, and we co-host/co-present workshops about OER. Such workshops are often hosted by their offices, and therefore, they help us to advertise them and encourage faculty attendance. The Deans of our schools were also open to having librarians and faculty representatives from the Task Force attend faculty meetings to present this information. At this point, we are still in the early stages, but several faculty have reported converting their courses fully or partially to OER and Open Access materials.

The Ramapo College OER Task Force is currently developing a more detailed survey for faculty about OER and Open Access resources, and we are in the last stages of finalizing our report for the NJ Office of the Secretary of Higher Education in accordance with S768, the bill that requires NJ institutions of higher education to submit a plan that addresses their efforts to expand the use of Open Educational Resources, open textbooks, and commercial digital learning materials in order to achieve cost savings for students. We also recently received a Ramapo College Foundation Grant to pay a student aide to help us with this work, and to help create a more fully developed outreach plan for campus around using OER/Open Access materials, which we plan to start in Fall 2020. We will continue to follow the plan we’ve created to encourage even more of our faculty to consider adopting such resources, and to ultimately work toward reducing cost barriers to higher education by helping our students have increased access to high-quality, lower-cost materials. For questions, discussion, and/or shared materials, please feel free to reach out to Hilary and/or Sam at hwestgat@ramapo.edu or switten1@ramapo.edu.