Open Education 2013

The Virginia Community College System (VCCS) dedication to increasing the success of its students is reflected in its ambitious six-year plan, Achieve 2015, as well as through a number of important and ongoing reengineering efforts. One significant barrier to the success of its students is the rising costs of college, especially the cost of course materials. Reducing the cost of textbooks and other course materials not only makes college more affordable but also increases the likelihood that students will succeed.

The VCCS is actively working to reduce textbook costs for its students by supporting several innovative initiatives. In 2012, the Reengineering Task Force assembled a Textbook Costs and Digital Learning Resources Work Group to develop recommendations for reducing textbook costs across the system. In addition, several colleges were awarded mini-grants to develop open educational resources for a handful of high enrollment courses on their campuses. Tidewater Community College?s OpenTCC is the first college in the nation to offer a degree?an Associates in Business Admin?with no textbook costs. The VCCS has also joined other public, post-secondary institutions in the Commonwealth to establish and sponsor the inaugural Open & Digital Learning Resources Conference (openva.org) in order to build awareness of innovative OER initiatives at 2- and 4-year institutions across the state.

Despite these efforts, more needed to be done. To that end, the Chancellor invited proposals from faculty of high enrollment VCCS courses to help reduce course costs for their students by adopting free, openly-licensed materials (such as an open textbook, free digital resource, etc.) for their course. Twelve proposals were selected to receive a $3000 Chancellor?s OER Adoption Grant to identify, review, and customize existing high quality OER to incorporate as the only required material in the course. During the spring and summer of 2013, the grant cohort worked under the guidance OER experts to identify open resources, verify the licensing of selected resources, and develop high-quality courses. These courses are currently being piloted by the grantees at their home colleges.

This presentation will describe the opportunities and challenges of this effort, some initial outcomes of the project, how effectively this project synced with the other OER efforts taking place throughout the VCCS.