Pending

Contact: Leah Hannaford, 360-736-9391 x423

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Mission/Vision:When asked to describe the ideal relationship between students and course materials faculty cited the following consistently: allowance of self-guided learning, access to technology, accessibility for all represented populations and student ability to interact with material that suits their learning style.

Open education offers an opportunity to make this ideal relationship happen. We encourage participation in a cohesive open education initiative where faculty members adopt, produce, and share OER. Kirk Library has worked for the past year to develop workflows and streamline processes with the adoption and fostering of OER.

Library Guide

Centralia College

Photo: ©Laurie Black. All Rights Reserved
Architect: David Leavengood.

Noteworthy:

Their Foundation

When looking to start an open education initiative, Centralia took a look at various models that have been implemented. There were three models they found to be most influential:

1. Replacing commercial textbooks 1 for 1. Case Study: Tacoma Community College
2. Open Education Focused by Audience. Case Study: University of Maryland
3. Repositories and developed concept of open from a grassroots level. Case Study: UK OER

After taking a look at these models they decided that the core of their initiative has two main components: sustainability and accessibility.

Sustainability

The UK OER offers a Synthesis and Evaluation Framework which encompasses questions of sustainability from before they launched their initiative, those noted as the initiative evolved, and a final evaluation of the sustainability of their pilot projects. Several of the UK OER projects are still active and continue to drive discussions that include both Open Education and Open Access. There are a few models in the United States that attempt to address both Open Education and Open Access, but they still exist in nascent stages; Centralia was happy to find a robust evaluation framework that included both topics from the perspectives of several types of institutions.

Faculty Open Education Awareness Survey

After planning their framework Centralia launched a faculty open education awareness survey which they derived from the Babson Report. They used the results from this survey to design their workshops. Faculty noted that they are considering open education, but have reservations about copyright issues and students’ technical abilities.

Current Projects

Centralia has 15 ongoing open education projects. The scope of their projects range from writing open textbooks, ensuring secondary materials are all open access, and converting current courseware into OER. They have launched a mini-grant program and some of the proposed projects are focused not only on developing materials for Centralia College, but also for other institutions as OER in the humanities is quite limited.

They strongly encourage faculty to attend our How to Use Open Educational Resources course and have built a follow-on Canvas course which helps faculty members through the process of outlining their project, building a workflow, and and also with work through tools employed for their project as they adopt OER. Their open education librarian works collaboratively with faculty and their departments to build appropriate search strategies, offer quality evaluation, and ensure copyright compliance.
They are a part of the Canvas Commons Beta Testing and have shared their follow-on course with the Commons.

Future Goals

Not wanting to tie dollar amounts to their initiative as they understand faculty reservations and are looking for a shift in perspectives rather than providing impressive numbers. They want to ensure the changes to the courses being made are benefiting students and so approach course revisions with evaluation of changes in mind.

Quarterly updates and results from their survey and workshops are available in their LibGuide.