4 Chapter 4 – Penn State OER or Affordable Course Content Initiatives
The following are selected OER and Affordable Course Content initiatives already underway at Penn State.
John A. Dutton e-Education Institute
The John A. Dutton e-Education Institute is the learning design unit for the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. The Institute works in close partnership with the College’s five academic departments to design, develop, and manage the College’s online certificate and degree programs.
The College of EMS serves as a leader in distance teaching and learning at Penn State. To date, the College boasts 19 certificate and degree programs online and more than 130 online courses. The College has been able to extend the reach of a high-quality, rigorous, and research-based Penn State education to more than 5,900 undergraduates and more than 1,250 working adult professionals around the globe.
Since 2007, the Dutton Institute has housed the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative, which is online at http://open.ems.psu.edu. As part of this initiative, 71 full courses, 9 sets of resources, and 4 noncredit modules are offered.
The resources are currently freely available for non-commercial use under a University- approved open source license. Students who wish to earn academic credit and get feedback from instructors still need to register and pay tuition to Penn State.
eLearning Institute
The eLearning Institute is responsible for the development of online courses within the College of Arts & Architecture. Several years ago, the Institute launched an effort to remove textbooks associated with our online general education courses. The rationale for the decision was twofold: first, textbook costs for some disciplines were very high; second, the flexible nature of online courses permitted a more continual updating of course content that is simply not possible via reliance on a specific textbook from a publisher. As a result, the Institute enacted a strategy for textbook replacement involving a small student fee for access to online content for courses that met several criteria. These criteria include courses for which the need for a textbook has been removed, the course content relies heavily on media (video, graphics, animation, etc), and the courses require continual revisions. For courses that meet these criteria, the Institute charges a $30 fee per student for access to course material. The courses that meet these criteria are not the majority of the Institute’s portfolio of classes, with only 12% of the courses
currently applying the course access fee. As enrollments increase, the hope is that the per- student fee can be reduced to $20 over time.
Revenue collected from course access allows the Institute to sustain the textbook replacement approach by funding media-rich revision costs. Absent the textbook replacement fee, funding media-intensive instructional materials would present significant challenges. Finally, the Institute believes that there is great potential in avoiding courses with ties to a specific textbook, and instead embracing a model that allows individual faculty to alter, edit, or supplement online course content in ways that reflect their individual teaching strategies. The Institute will continue to apply the textbook replacement fee only in cases that meet specific criteria, and will work toward an ongoing reduction of the per-student cost that balances affordability with a sustainable support model.
Department of Chemistry
The Department of Chemistry has developed an interactive electronic textbook (eBook) for its general chemistry courses (CHEM 110 and 112) to provide total pedagogical control of delivered content, to improve student learning, and to lower the costs of educational materials. At University Park, the course is currently taken each year by about 4,000 CHEM 110 students and about 2,000 CHEM 112 students. When completed, the eBook will replace the printed textbook, the accompanying solution manual, the homework platform, and will add adaptive practice and assessment tools. Five-year access to the eBook is currently provided to students for $65 (through the PSU Bookstore), replacing the educational materials listed above that are priced at over $400. Assuming that students in CHEM 112 have already purchased the materials, this project will reduce overall direct-student cost by $1.34 million annually for the 4,000 CHEM 110 students at University Park. Adoption by other PSU campuses could lower the access fee further and create greater overall direct-student cost reduction overall.
The eBook is highly interactive, contains simulations and animations of chemical and physical phenomena, videos of chemical demonstrations, an interactive periodic table and molecular displays, a chemist’s calculator, and interactive quizzes. The homework module offers over 1,000 completely solved and explained chemical questions, all of which are fully cross-linked with the lessons covering the relevant concepts. The text itself also contains extensive internal cross-links and includes an extensive glossary of chemical terms. Navigation is organized through interactive course syllabi that direct students to the assigned reading and studying materials, and homework. The eBook is highly customizable, with individual course sections having the option to adjust the contents to be presented.
BBookx
BBookx is a new technology that uses a human-assisted computing approach to enable creation of open source textbooks. BBookX uses intelligent algorithms to explore OER repositories and return relevant resources that can be combined, remixed, and re-used to
support specific learning goals. As instructors and students add materials to their book, BBookX learns and further refines the recommended material. Account registration and more information is available at http://bbookx.psu.edu. BBookx was developed in partnership between the College of IST and the Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) unit of ITS.
Faculty Engagement Awards
For academic year 2016-2017, OER is the theme for faculty engagement awards administered by the TLT. Each year, several grants are awarded around a specific theme, and faculty are encouraged to apply for these grants, which can cover technology, professional development, or other resources that support the engagement. TLT researchers then assess the impact of this technology and share what they have learned with the Penn State community.
