OE Global 2018

The Maricopa Community Colleges located in Phoenix, Arizona, USA has embarked on a research study to ascertain the impact of the OER program, titled the Maricopa Millions project. The study explores research questions dealing with student success, access to education, access to course materials, and method of delivery of OER on student success. The study evaluates a number of metrics including student success, financial aid eligibility, number of classes taken, enrollment in additional OER courses, etc. The research study will examine data from Fall 2013 through Fall 2017 in OER mathematics classes and the 21 OER courses funded by the Maricopa Millions project, as well as explore qualitative data obtained by student and faculty surveys and focus groups.

Globally, 285 million people are visually impaired, 90% in low and middle income countries (LMIC), 80% from avoidable causes. LMIC settings face a shortfall in eye health specialists, training institutions and faculty. Knowledge and skills to deliver comprehensive health services and strengthen eye health systems is essential to practical functioning of the eye team but is often not included in clinical curricula.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free to access online courses. Open Educational Resources (OER) provide easily downloadable, shareable, adaptable content.
Global Blindness is the world’s first public health eye care MOOC. Over 6 weeks it covers the essentials of planning and managing eye care services. OER content enables further local educational transformation. Global eye care experts contribute to content development and mentor participants.
Course first ran on the FutureLearn platform in 2015. Analytics data, pre- and post-course survey results indicated that health workers in LMICs successfully engaged with it:
• 3,541 joiners, 2,166 active participants
• 69% from LMICs, 81% working in health/social care
• 47% posted comments, 34% completed ≥50%, 20% completed ≥90%
• 96% satisfied/very satisfied
• 206 statements purchased.
After 1 year, online survey sent to assess:
• Did participation lead to career and educational benefits?
• Were OER used to support teaching and learning?
• What impact did course have on health provider practice?
Response rate 3.9%, 82% lived in LMIC, 94% worked in eye care. 88% reported educational benefits; 72% reported career benefits; 85% reported applying their learning; 70% reported challenges in applying learning; 70% reported using OER for teaching and learning.
Currently developing a wider impact methodology to explore cycles of immediate, potential, applied, realised or reframing value from engagement with the MOOC/OER for individual health workers and educators, ophthalmic training institutions, professional bodies and eye care educational landscapes.

This presentation describes reports of 13 OER implementations at higher educational institutions in Canada, the USA and five other countries. All implementations have resulted in significant cost savings for students and/or institutions. There was no general consensus on any other benefit or even challenges experienced by the different institutions. Nevertheless, there were some significant commonalities that will be described in this paper, which describes the opportunity, the innovations, benefits and challenges as well as the future potential for OER in their respective institutions.

The open education movement continues to make strides in the higher education. There is an increasing amount of faculty who have considered authoring and/or adopting open educational resources to enhance their students’ learning experiences. Yet, there are still pervasive barriers that prevent a larger number of faculty from adopting OER. One particularly challenging barrier is the stigmatization of OER. Some faculty assign negative attributes to OER including inferiority to traditional resources and lacking scholarly-inquiry (Belikov & Bodily, 2016). Furthermore, the notion of “open” being “free with permissions” causes some faculty to doubt the quality and efficacy of OER, although there is a growing body of research that states otherwise (Allen & Seaman, 2014; Hilton, 2016). This and more could ultimately contribute to the stigmatization of OER, slowing the efforts of open education advocates. Using Goffman’s theory of social stigma as a model, this presentation seeks to address the contributing factors of OER stigma and carefully examines what systems maintain this particular barrier to OER adoption. While there are numerous studies that document perceptual obstacles to OER adoption, none examine how stigma specifically contributes to the reluctance among faculty to adopt OER and accept open materials as serious scholarly content. The presentation will include coded data of open-ended responses and interviews from faculty and department heads who are not interested in using OER in the classroom. The data will also speak to the challenges of creating cultural change in various departments who have declined to use OER. The audience will learn about a more nuanced approach in considering OER stigma in higher education institutions and, more importantly, what open education advocates can realistically do to overcome this barrier. The overall goal is to motivate open education professionals to create concrete strategies to address and reduce social stigma toward OER among faculty.