Stillwater, OK, United States
Official Website
• @okstate
Type: Public 4-Year, Research University
Annual Enrollment: 25,962
Edmon Low, Head Librarian at Oklahoma State University, helped design a library in 1953 that featured open stacks and emphasized access and discovery. Today, Oklahoma State University Libraries, including the Edmon Low Library, continue to provide affordable and innovative learning experiences for students by championing Open Educational Resources.
To show that commitment, OSU has a team of OER professionals including a full time OER Librarian to help faculty, staff and students implement and understand Open. The faculty council and graduate student association each passed recommendations supporting the adoption, adaptation and creation of OER. The Provost responded to these recommendations by speaking in support of the consideration fo the adaptation and curation of OER as scholarly work in promotion and tenure, and strategies specific to the support of the adoption and creation of OER have been incorporated into the OkState Degree Completion Plan. The OSU student community is inviting peers to join the #OpenOKState movement to advocate for course adoption of OER, and the OSU Library Ambassadors have begun playing a leadership role in OER instruction and advocacy presentations.
The University administration partners with the Oklahoma State University community to organize and support OER advocacy and incentive opportunities. A private donation funded specific commission of several OER textbooks and learning resources, and as those have been completed and published additional grant money has become available in response to instructors' wishing to create OER textbooks for their courses. The most recent addition is Technical and Professional Writing Genres: A Study in Theory and Practice. This work was authored and adapted from other OER by three faculty members currently teaching technical and professional writing, and was edited by Eric Howerton, OSU Technical Writing Program Head. In addition to drawing upon the expertise and experience of OSU faculty in the creation of this text, the inclusion of student work as exemplars shows OSU faculty commitment to innovative teaching techniques such as open pedagogy. The creation and use of this learning resource alone saves students $56,000 a semester, and is representative of the work created and used by the OSU faculty and instructors.
A grant from the President's Fellows has allowed the Library to offer a number of "HackYourSyllabus" mini-grants, through which applicants receive financial incentive and instructional design support to convert their courses from commercial textbooks to OER and library resources. This series of mini-grants has supported conversion of twenty undergraduate and graduate courses and estimates an ongoing minimum savings to students of $20,000 per semester.
A $428,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services is facilitating a partnership between OSU, East Central University, and Redlands Community College. This grant will support a three year project during which the institutions will create a toolkit for use measuring the efficacy of OER in developing lifelong learning competencies and design and publish research methodology teaching and learning resources for use by librarians conducting OER research.
Open Access is in the DNA of OSU Libraries. OER saves time and money by allowing students to easily access curriculum anytime from a device for free. In just the first decade of this century, 2.4 million students in the United States either did not attend, or could not complete college because of the cost barrier. OSU is moving to change that.
~Lonna Freshley, OSU OER Intern
Campus Entities Most Active in Efforts Advancing OER:
Library Departments Active in Efforts Advancing OER:
Academic Subjects With Greatest OER Traction:
Mechanisms to Support OER Included in the Following:
OER Staff Location:
Kathy Essmiller
Assistant Professor of Professional Practice, OER Librarian, OSU Libraries
@kathyessmiller