Today marks the end of Open Education Week 2022, a global celebration of the Open Education movement, and a perfect opportunity to share an update on how UW Tacoma is growing and supporting the use of Open Educational Resources on campus. UWT OER advocates have been working hard to grow the use of these resources and save our students money.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are materials for teaching and learning that are free to users and can be easily shared, modified, or combined with other open materials to create custom content. They can come in almost any format as long as they have an open license. Videos, Canvas modules, and slide decks can all be OER. 

Benefits to using these resources include creating custom content that reflect and address the unique needs of our UW Tacoma students, but they are frequently used to reduce the cost of education for students by eliminating textbook costs – and they work! Tacoma Community College has saved its students almost $10 million dollars through OER efforts since 2012.

What does this work look like at UW Tacoma?

In 2019, the UW Tacoma Library began an annual faculty development training initially funded by a series of Strategic Initiative Fund grants to help faculty on campus transition their courses from traditional textbooks to OER. Selected participants take part in a multi-day training on how to find, use, and adapt these materials with dedicated work time to help them search for OER for a UWT class of their choice. 

After three years of offering this training, we’re beginning to see some cumulative effects. Here are some highlights:

• While OER adoption is not a program requirement, 30 out of 44 total participants in all three cohorts reported plans to adopt free or low cost materials in their courses in the coming academic year, with additional faculty reporting plans to gradually transition courses to free or low cost materials over several iterations of the course. 
• These pledged adoptions have saved UWT students between $139,372 and $241,482 (depending on factors like students’ preferences of textbook format, purchasing new or used materials etc.) in three years, assuming that faculty only adopted free or low cost materials for a single year following the program. 
• The most common reason faculty cite for not adopting OER for their selected course is a lack of high quality, immediately usable OER available on required subjects. In reflections of broader barriers to OER adoptions on campus, nearly all participants in all three cohorts have cited lack of time and compensation as the main challenges preventing them from converting more courses.

Learn more about OER at UWT

• Open Educational Resources at UW Tacoma Guide
• UW Tacoma perspectives on Open Educational Resources
• Panel discussion: Open Educational Resources at UW Tacoma

What’s next?

The UWT Library will provide a fourth year of faculty training in early summer of 2022. Stay tuned for a call for participants in the spring!

Email Marisa Petrich (marisp2@uw.edu) with questions.