Nathaniel King and Tiffany Garrett from the Nevada State College Library presented “Pioneering New Forms of Support with OER Institutes” at Open Ed 2021. Garrett explained that Nevada State College was founded in 2002 and is rapidly growing. They are a Hispanic Serving Institution. Work overload was rated 5/7! The new Library was built in 2015 and became a digital library. In 2020 they received an award for textbook affordability among other achievements. Affordability, King noted, is the top reason noted by students when surveyed about why they attended Nevada State. King explained that they started with faculty consultation, then the Library offered ebooks in the LMS Canvas, then they offered conversion grants for OER, and now intensive institutes. The six-week institute is “a very aggressive timeline” and participants receive a $3,000 stipend for the institute. Outside of the institute, they are expected to complete “a significant amount of work.” Each week is a topic: getting started, designing your course, copyright and OER/Canvas consults, peer review, peer review activities, and final project reports. They do user experience tests with students with eye-tracking software! Wow! That must be difficult to set up yet provide rich information. King suggested having a plan to address concerns about hesitancy to leave a textbook. Garrett shared results: over $750,000 saved in student textbook costs and over 25% of full-time instructors have participated in the institute and converted their courses. For project outcomes, they use a standardized survey: the Teaching Support Survey. Their results are higher than the national average for their institution Carnegie classification. They also shared comparisons of paid-textbook and no-cost textbook courses indicating increased performance of students in the low/no-cost versions of the courses. Garrett and King have established with the summer institutes a successful mechanism and incentive for faculty to convert their courses. I was impressed that over 25% of full-time faculty have participated!
