Chapter 4: Stumbling Blocks

Our OER Working Group expecting some challenges along the way.  We’re a pretty agile team of problem solvers. That said, we found a few boulders in our way.

1. Too many big projects – with three big projects and two from the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, we stayed with our original plan: that the lead for each project would be in the discipline: Humanities, Social Science, or STEM. In Eileen’s case as the liaison to the Warner School, she wanted to be the lead for both Education grants in order to work with her faculty, but in retrospect, scheduling meant that Eileen was sometimes the bottleneck for moving this forward.  Both projects also meant a lot of new learning about both Pressbooks and licensing.  The Miller and Borasi case study will allow for the case study to be licensed as Open Access, while other elements of the text will be licensed as OER.
2. No applicants for our smaller awards.  While we know there is a lot of content that faculty have created – from syllabi to handouts and explainer videos, we haven’t had any interest at all.  We had been hoping that we would get some faculty or staff who wanted to try a small project with a low bar for success.  We’re not alone in having a campus where communication is hard, and timing our liaison emails and our social media hasn’t found it’s “sweet spot.”
3. How do we maintain our efforts from year to year? The grant funding comes from our collections budget, and so ideally, we’d spend down most of the funds every year. But the first year, one project wasn’t finished, so the funds set aside went back into general collections. This year, we asked for more money, so we could cover the final installment for the delayed project, yet still fund new projects.  We’re sensitive to not making life harder for our collections and finance team, but we haven’t hit a steady stream of interest yet.

4. Learning Pressbooks, twice. We began the Miller and Borasi textbook with a trial subscription through Pressbooks. Our Digital Scholarship department maintains our subscription to Reclaim Hosting, but we didn’t want to begin a campus subscription until we were sure this was the right platform to use. They were also rightly wary of committing time and resources to supporting a new application. After a year, it became clear that having Pressbooks available through our Reclaim Hosting site was the best option, so Miller and Borasi’s book had to be transferred, new chapter links created for the CMS (we have Blackboard), and new workflows for onboarding new scholars to Pressbooks.