What a fun day! We spent the day with the grandparents, and the kids opened presents. Tonight we went to bed late and watched a 25-minute OpenEd 2021 session entitled “Competing for Attention: Reaching Out to Faculty in a Time of COVID-19.” Andrew Kearns, a librarian at the University of South Carolina Upstate and USC Upstate Director of Transformative & Inclusive Pedagogy, Toni DiMella. USC Upstate launched a campus-wide program to support the integration of OER and open pedagogies into courses. The campus has 5100 students with many veterans. While there isn’t a state-wide initiative, this campus included OER as part of online teaching training. The Center for Academic Innovation and Faculty Support (CAIFS) was created to support open along with the Library OER team. The lunch and learn program on OER shifted to an online format in the spring of 2020. A new provost, Dr. David Schecter, was supportive of OER and had experience at a previous institution, USC Bakersville. A $5,000 grant from PASCAL helped launch an outreach initiative to faculty that was a challenge: a reward to the unit that saved students the most along with supporting 100 and 200-level courses. Kearns worked with others to develop a course on Blackboard to create an OER tutorial. In the summer of 2020, CIAFS created a workshop that provided instructional design support that along with the Libraries, was very productive. The unit that won was Natural Sciences & Engineering with seven courses, most with multiple sections, saving students over $60,000. The Provost was able to contribute funds so that the grand prize was $7,500 and four faculty received prizes. The lessons learned, according to Kearns, was the timeline for faculty to make course revisions or find suitable materials. These were both reasons mentioned by faculty not completing the course revisions. Kearns spoke about how the program would continue and engage more USC Upstate instructors in the challenge to provide affordable quality resources for all students. The idea of a competition was used to effectively create the momentum needed to engage enough people to raise awareness of OER. This approach helped me realize the impact we could have with limited funding if we think strategically about our goals and message.
