In this session, panelists will describe efforts led by the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC) under a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and in collaboration with the National Consortium for OER (NCOER), a partnership between the four higher education regional compacts to increase access, affordability, and equity using OER. MHEC’s focus has been to expand and strengthen capacity in the 12 MHEC states (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin) to scale up and implement a sustainable OER infrastructure and open education practices. Capacity-building support has included seeding and facilitating statewide OER action teams, providing grants for statewide OER summits and senior leader seminars, seeding OER creation in high needs areas, such as career-technical education and materials for incarcerated students, and research on the topics of calculating OER cost savings and return on investment, and OER use in dual/concurrent enrollment. Attendees will learn about promising practices in organizing and supporting grassroots regional and statewide collaboration, as well as gain insights from the research underway.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Describe promising practices for supporting regional and statewide collaboration
- Consider how to apply promising practices to their own context
- Apply findings from research on calculating OER cost savings and return on investment and OER in dual/concurrent enrollment to their own contexts
