Open SUNY Affordable
Learning Solutions (ALS)
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What is Open SUNY ALS?
http://opensunyals.org
•A State University of New York (SUNY) initiative to provide affordable
educational alternatives to traditional textbooks
•A service to assist SUNY faculty, librarians, and staff to identify lowercost, electronic, free, and Open Educational Resources (OERs)
•A California State University-MERLOT partner benefit service
What is MERLOT?
Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching
“The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of disciplinespecific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder web
pages…. All of these items have been contributed by the MERLOT
member community, who have either authored the materials
themselves, or who have discovered the materials, found them useful,
and wished to share their enthusiasm for the materials with others in the
teaching and learning community.
All the materials in MERLOT are reviewed for suitability for retention in
the collection.”
http://info.merlot.org/merlothelp/index.htm#merlot_collection.htm
MERLOT and Open Textbooks
Currently MERLOT offers 3,467 open textbooks encompassing a broad range
of academic disciplines:
Academic Support Services (184)
Arts (120)
Business (760)
Education (149)
Humanities (522)
Mathematics and Statistics (421)
Science and Technology (1,311)
Social Sciences (194)
Workforce Development (48)
Who is MERLOT?
•“MERLOT is an international community of faculty, staff, students,
administrators, librarians, and others in education interested in discovering,
using, and sharing Open Educational Resources (OERs) for the improvement of
technology-enhanced teaching and learning.
•The MERLOT community, which began in 1997, has developed a unique and
globally-renowned collection of more than 40,000 online learning materials, all of
which have been peer- or crowd-source reviewed by members of the community.
•MERLOT is a free resource, and is sustained through the support of higher
educational institutions from around the world, led by the California State
University. “
http://info.merlot.org/merlothelp/index.htm#who_we_are.htm
What are the benefits of Open SUNY Affordable
Learning Solutions?
• Open SUNY ALS enables faculty to find quality free course content that can
substitute for more costly textbooks;
•organizes tools for faculty to customize and author course content;
•provides easy access to information about usability and accessibility of ereaders;
•helps faculty be recognized for quality teaching and efforts to reduce
students' costs
Why should we be concerned
about textbook costs?
What are traditional textbook issues?
Who else is creating and using OERs?
Just a sample…
What are Open Educational Resources (OERs)?
OERs are pedagogical books, media, and courses (learning objects) that are
licensed to be both free of cost and to allow the following modifications to
their content - the 5R’s:
•Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and
manage)
•Reuse - the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form (e.g., make a backup copy of the
content)
•Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into
another language)
•Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new
(e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
•Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with
others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)
David Wiley http://opencontent.org/definition/
What makes OERs different from other “free”
educational resources?
•Even free intellectual property is protected by copyright, meaning its use is
restricted by very specific Fair Use copyright guidelines.
•Open Educational Resources have Creative Commons licenses, as selected
by their creators.
•While Creative Commons licenses have 6 levels of attributions, or
restrictions, the majority of OERs carry the most liberal attribution of “By”
which allows the Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, and Redistribute ideal.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
Creative Commons Licenses – look for the “BY”
(For more information about OERs visit https://creativecommons.org.)
How can I know the quality and
erudition of an OER?
Many digital repositories, including MERLOT, provide ratings and
reviews for their OERs. The volunteer nature of peer review allows for
many more reviews than would be provided by a traditional publishing
editorial board.
In this example for MERLOT you can clearly see the 5 star rating for
Peer Reviews:
What About Peer Review in MERLOT?
•The Peer Review page for each resource in MERLOT is detailed and
clear both graphically and textually.
•A quick look at the star rating graphics provides an expedient way of
quickly assessing if the resource merits further consideration:
Does MERLOT include the contents of
other OER repositories?
Yes! MERLOT both indexes the content of some repositories such as
Orange Grove and also offers a federated search of several other
OER repositories:
NSDL: National Science Digital Library
MIT Open Courseware
OCW Search
Orange Grove… AND MORE
For a link to the federated search AND an annotated list of repositories
that can be search directly, link to:
http://opensunyals.org/searchotherrepositories.html
Example: Using Open SUNY ALS
Example: A general education core course, General Biology, uses a $187
textbook with ISBN 978-0077350024 (Biology, published by McGraw Hill)
1) The instructor links to opensunyals.org and goes to the Free Textbooks page;
2) he/she searches by the ISBN;
3) the results are 10 rated and reviewed open textbooks;
4) these textbooks can be evaluated to replace the $187 option.
(screen-shot next slide)
Example: Alternatives to High-Priced Textbook
978-0077350024
What is SUNY Doing About OERs?
Open SUNY Textbooks - SUNY Geneseo, SUNY Brockport, the College of Environmental Science &
Forestry, SUNY Fredonia, Upstate Medical University, and the University at Buffalo
Tompkins Cortland Community College - the Kaleidoscope Project through Lumen Learning (open
courses and adopting OERs for student success)
Open SUNY MOOCs - SUNY’s Empire State College was one of the first institutions in the United
States to offer a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). SUNY was one of ten public university
systems that announced an agreement with Coursera (May 2013) that enables use of their platform
to deliver MOOCs.
Locating, Creating, Licensing, and Utilizing OERs (OER-101)
SUNY Buffalo, Empire State College,SUNY Oswego, and powered by Open SUNY – use this
course to learn more about OERs!
Open SUNY Textbooks
http://opensuny.org
Open SUNY Textbooks is an open access textbook publishing initiative
established by State University of New York libraries and supported by
SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grants. This pilot initiative
publishes high-quality, cost-effective course resources by engaging faculty
as authors and peer-reviewers, and libraries as publishing service and
infrastructure.
Open SUNY Textbooks
•The libraries involved are from SUNY Geneseo, SUNY Brockport, the
College of Environmental Science & Forestry, SUNY Fredonia, Upstate
Medical University, and the University at Buffalo.
•Currently there are 7 Open SUNY Textbooks in publication and 15 more in
process. In the Spring 2014 semester, 185 students saved $15,464 using 2
Open SUNY textbooks (based on an average cost of $83.59 per book; taken from Open SUNY Textbook
Report to SUNY Library Directors by Cyril Oberlander, former direct of Milne Library at SUNY Geneseo, July 2014)
Tompkins Cortland Community College & the
Kaleidoscope Project
•Tompkins Cortland Community College is one of 8
colleges that participated in the Lumen Learning Kaleidoscope
Project: http://lumenlearning.com/innovative-projects
•“Kaleidoscope set out to implement a set of fully open general
education courses across eight colleges serving predominantly at-risk
students, dramatically reduce textbook costs, and allow collaborative
improvement of course designs to improve student success.”
Tompkins Cortland Community College & the
Kaleidoscope Project
•The Kaleidoscope Project was a national collaborative that built 20 open
courses using OERs.
•At TC3, from 2011-2013, 698 students saved an estimated $69,800 on
textbooks costs and there was an 26.7% increase in passing grades
accompanied by a 15% decrease in withdrawal rates in the Psychology
courses developed by Kaleidoscope (savings estimate is based on an average cost of $100 per book;
taken from the presentation OPEN and ONLINE TC3 Uses OER to Improve Student Success and Saving Students Big $’s by Tony
DeFranco and Marty Christofferson, Tompkins Cortland Community College, September 2013)
•TC3 instructor Sophia Georgiakaki adopted an open textbook and states:
“We went from $120 to $0 [in textbook costs] and we offer the same
content.”
Video: Tompkins Cortland Community
College Open Educational Resources
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uRkheB0-CU
Video: Tompkins Cortland Community College
Adopting an Open Course
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVbsZUN20Qk
Open SUNY MOOCs
SUNY’s Empire State College was one of the first institutions in the United
States to offer a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). SUNY was one of ten
public university systems that announced an agreement with Coursera (May
2013) that enables use of their platform to deliver MOOCs. SUNY campuses
have the opportunity to work with Coursera to deliver courses to students
within SUNY or across the globe. (As of June 2014, Stony Brook faculty have
developed three MOOCs).
https://www.coursera.org/suny
How do I learn more about
Open Educational Resources?
Locating, Creating, Licensing and
Utilizing OERs (OER-101)
https://opensuny.coursesites.com/
OER101 an open, self-paced online community
course built collaboratively by professionals from
from Buffalo State College, Empire State College
and SUNY Oswego and powered by Open SUNY
How do I network with my SUNY
colleagues about OERs?
The SUNY Open Educational Resources Learning Commons Group is a place for SUNY professionals to ask
questions and share your thoughts, plans, and expertise.
To Join the SUNY Open Educational Resources Group:
•log in to the Learning Commons, http://commons.suny.edu, using your campus username and password
•click on the Groups link
•search for suny open educational resources
•click Join Group
•please complete the member survey linked from your welcome e-mail message!
If you are not a member of a SUNY Campus, please send a request to join to laura.murray@suny.edu
How do I join MERLOT as an individual?
Just fill out the membership form:
http://www.merlot.org/merlot/join.htm
How do I contribute to MERLOT?
“Any member of MERLOT can contribute learning materials to the collection. Contributing
means filling in information or metadata to describe the item and provide a URL. If there isn't a
URL for the item, it cannot be added to MERLOT. MERLOT does not store learning materials.
Only the metadata (descriptive items) are stored on the MERLOT site. To maintain an accurate
site, MERLOT runs a link checker on a monthly basis to ensure the validity of the materials.”
•Join Merlot as an individual member. http://www.merlot.org/merlot/join.htm
•Carefully read the Contribute Material instructions:
•http://info.merlot.org/merlothelp/contribute_material.htm
•Go to the Contribute a Material page
http://www.merlot.org/merlot/addMaterial.htm and complete the required forms.
Roles for SUNY Librarians in OER Support
Mediated searching – librarians are the ideal professionals to help faculty locate
OERs for evaluation and use. They are skilled in crafting efficient search syntaxes,
filtering large result sets, and using a wide variety of search interfaces. Open SUNY
ALS can be your starting point in helping faculty locate quality OERs.
Adding content to MERLOT – librarians know how to catalog content using
standardized metadata and create effective workflows for doing so.
Educating faculty, administrators, and other academic professionals about OERS –
SUNY libraries already have in place information literacy training structures, both
face to face and online. OER education can happen using these existing structures
and identify librarians as OER partners and liaisons.
Who do I contact for more information?
Laura K. Murray, Open SUNY ALS
Coordinator
Office of Library and Information Services
SUNY Plaza, N104
Albany, New York 12246
E-mail: laura.murray@suny.edu
Phone: 518-320-1477