Assessing OER use across curricula can be difficult to determine. Faculty surveys do not always elicit robust participation and grant programs do not capture data from faculty who use OER but do not apply for funding. Our university is entering the third year of a concerted OER campaign, and the second year of OER grant funding. We have strong administrative support, and it is explicitly written into our campus strategic plan as a commitment to include OER in half of all academic programs by 2024. To track our progress with OER adoption and to determine what programs had high adoption and which ones we need to focus future efforts towards required a bit of thinking outside of the normal assessment box.
Curriculum mapping has been a tool utilized by libraries for years to help librarians scaffold instruction across campus. Booth and Matthews (2012) state "by building comprehensive understanding of the learner experience and expanding beyond a narrow library-oriented view, we can examine our curricula and communities through the eyes of students and instructors in order to appreciate their perspective and better deploy local resources". As we were in the process of updating our curriculum maps for instructional librarians, we wondered if we could leverage them to help us determine where and how OER was being used on campus.
Our graduate student assistant updated the campus curriculum maps and then crosswalked the data from the maps to the bookstore orders departments compile each semester. Using this data, we were able to determine which faculty were not ordering books and could reach out to them to determine what course materials they were using and if any were OER. Then we were able to map that data back to the curriculum maps to assess the following:
- How many academic programs on campus were using OER
- What programs were our biggest adopters
- What programs had low/no adoption
- Which programs we could prioritize for adoption
This presentation will detail the work the OER team and the Graduate Student completed and what the current program assessment results are. We will also discuss how we plan to move forward with this project including updating the maps each year and running a cross-comparison with bookstore orders in order to track the growth of our OER program. This will help us set new campus strategic goals for OER implementation.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Understand how to employ curriculum mapping on their campus
- Utilize curriculum mapping to assess campus use of OER
- Implement assessment strategies to gauge OER growth
