8 Colleges Collaborate on Open Courses

Many students can't pay hundreds of dollars each term for textbooks. So they choose not to buy any of them.

"They just try to take the class without the book, and boy, that's hard," said Marty Christofferson, dean of campus technology at Tompkins Cortland Community College in New York.

This year, eight colleges that primarily serve at-risk students are working together on Project Kaleidoscope. In California, New York and Nebraska, faculty members are collaborating on open general education courses that will cut student textbook costs to less than $30 per class.

Why 6 two-year and 2 four-year colleges started Project Kaleidoscope

While higher education has received funding for open educational resources, community colleges haven't received much. And their at-risk learners need it the most, said Kim Thanos, project manager for Project Kaleidoscope.

"We can't just wait for the trickle down theory. We actually need to put programs in place that create an opportunity for the funding of open educational resources to benefit these learners."

In April, the project received a Next Generation Learning Challenges wave one grant. The funding comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates and Hewlett foundations, but EDUCAUSE administers the grant.

Faculty members work together on courses

Over the summer, teams from College of the Redwoods and Cerritos, Chadron State, Mercy, Palo Verde, Santa Ana, Santiago Canyon and Tompkins Cortland colleges found Creative Commons-licensed online content.

In the Sakai learning management system, they designed courses including introductions to biology, psychology and geography along with six courses in developmental English and math.

Faculty members from at least two colleges collaborate on each open course. And that's been the key to the project as well as a challenge.

"I kind of viewed it as a technology grant, and what I believe is making a difference has nothing to do with technology," Thanos said.

The technology supports the faculty members, but the faculty collaboration makes the difference. In the eight colleges, instructors are teaching a little over half of the courses fully online, while other instructors use the Web resources to enhance their face-to-face courses, Thanos said.

At Cerritos College in Southern California, faculty members are piloting eight of the nine courses this fall. And as more faculty members hear about the project, they want to join, said M.L. Bettino, dean of academic affairs.

Even though faculty collaboration is a good thing, probably the biggest challenge the project has faced involves the faculty.

"While they're certainly willing to talk to one another and to collaborate, there is this idea that what they do is so important and so vital that they have a hard time wanting to use other people's materials sometimes," Bettino said. "That's been a challenge."

And Bettino understands this mentality from his experience teaching. He thought he knew how to teach and didn't want anyone to tell him what to do.

To deal with this challenge, the senior academic leaders on the steering committee suggested that faculty talk about how to assess student learning outcomes, not what or how to teach. And that's helped.
 

Colleges search for Creative Commons-licensed content

Though MIT announced its OpenCourseWare initiative a decade ago, open content is relatively new. And in higher education, many people aren't aware of how helpful open licensed content is.

In their search this summer, the project teams found helpful resources that other universities and colleges developed specifically for others to use. But they were copyrighted. And that meant the faculty members would have to link out to the material rather than pulling it into the course.

While it sounds like a small thing, it means the colleges don't have control. If someone updated the content or moved the URL, the colleges would have to track and manage that. 

"Our immaturity as an educational community in understanding and pervasively using Creative Commons licenses stands in the way of these kinds of projects being as successful as they can be," Thanos said.

But so far, Project Kaleidoscope has exceeded its goals. The team wanted to enroll 2,000 students in Kaleidoscope courses in the fall and actually enrolled 4,197.

The project set a goal of reducing learning material costs to $30 per student for each course. But students actually paid less than $1 per course on average and saved an estimated $61,507 collectively this term.

Next week, the project team, new faculty collaborators and experts in the open education community will meet in Utah to talk about how to improve their courses — and ultimately student learning — for the spring term.

As the project moves forward, Thanos says she hopes more faculty will collaborate and become part of learning communities that address student needs in these types of courses.