OER Award Program
Overview
ARC has been allocated funding to support the development of “Open Educational Resources" (OER). ARC's Affordable Learning Materials Committee has developed a plan to use these funds to help close equity gaps for disproportionately impacted students by reducing textbook costs and promoting the development of culturally relevant course materials. This plan will:
- Invest in faculty professional development around OER, equity, & accessibility
- Support individual faculty and departments who want to adopt/revise OER
- Build institutional capacity to support OER and ZTC courses & degrees
Faculty can earn up to $4,995 via PEX for contributing to this project.
What is OER?
OER is a broad term that refers to free, openly licensed, online information resources that can be used in place of traditional textbooks. OER can range from a single video to an entire textbook. OER can be combined, remixed, revised, and otherwise customized to provide the information you want your students to learn. You can also write your own OER! For more info about OER, check out the ARC Library’s Textbook Affordability guide.
OER has many benefits for students AND faculty. Students enrolled in an OER-based course have access to their free course materials on day one. And by using OER, you can customize your course materials to match the specific needs of your students, your teaching style, and your expected learning outcomes.
Equity Lens for OER
ARC is “committed to equity and social justice through equity-minded education.” The OER Award Program is an important tool in advancing equity for our disproportionately impacted students, including Native American, Black and African American, Latinx/e, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and LGBTQIA+ students. OER materials can help promote equity at ARC in two main ways:
- Our DI students report that the cost of school fees and expenses are a barrier to reaching their academic goals. Adopting zero cost course materials such as OER is a powerful way to reduce college costs and increase educational access for our disproportionately impacted students.
- Another important part of equity-minded education is to ensure our curriculum and course materials are culturally responsive. In designing our own OER course materials, we have a unique opportunity to infuse equity and anti-racism throughout our lessons and readings. Therefore, workshops and training materials will be offered to support faculty who work on projects funded by the OER Award Program to approach their work with an equity lens. For now, here are two resources to help you get started:
Award Categories
At ARC, we are offering three categories of OER awards:
For departments who want to collaborate to develop OER for a course for which 10 or more sections are typically scheduled. (There is no obligation that all faculty in the department will use the resulting OER, though we hope some will choose to do so!). See our list of eligible courses here but please reach out if you think your department’s course should have been included. Additional criteria for departmental awards:
- Departments will identify a team lead for the project. The team lead will receive .400 FTE re-assigned time in Fall 2023. This equates to 15 hours per week that the team lead should plan to spend on the project. The team lead will be responsible for:
- Convening regular team meetings
- Coordinating the work of the team
- Taking the lead on finding, writing and /or developing the OER resource(s), with assistance from the other team members
- Soliciting regular feedback from the rest of the departmental faculty
- Departments will identify 1-2 additional team members who will work on the project. Team members will be paid according to the “Individual Faculty Awards” schedule below. Team members should commit to spending at least 3 hours per week on the project (48 hours total over the course of the semester)
- A letter of support from the department chair
- A letter of support from the dean
- A commitment and a plan to share progress with the other faculty members in the department and seek feedback & input.
- Teams agree to meet at least twice during the semester with the OER project lead (Sarah Lehmann)
Support Available for Departmental Teams (if desired)
- Accessibility training and support
- Assistance with finding suitable OER resources
- Project management support from the OER project lead (Sarah Lehmann)
- Help with identifying a repository for the OER resources to “live” once created
- Faculty peer mentors
- Input and feedback from the Student Design Team
Expectations for Departmental Awards
By the end of Fall 2023, the team will:
- Develop an accessible, OER-based textbook and/or Canvas shell and/or curriculum for the course that any faculty member in the department can adopt. (We know the end product will look different for different departments!)
- Share the resource(s) in a location that all department members can access, such as a departmental shared drive or campus OER repository (forthcoming)
- Initiate a revision of the Course Outline of Record to include the OER materials in the list of representative textbooks.
- Share the final project with the faculty in their department
- Create a departmental plan for keeping the OER resources up-to-date
For individual faculty who want to:
- pursue professional development relating to OER, and
- convert up to 6 units of their courses to OER, or
- revise the OER resources they currently use to ensure accessibility and cultural relevance.
Faculty may be paid for up to 111 hours of work. Each participant will choose how much work to complete on this project and will be compensated accordingly. The work will be paid via timesheet, so it will be necessary to keep track of how much work you do and when you do it.
For more details about individual faculty awards, please see
For faculty who already use OER and are willing to share their expertise by either:
- Serving as peer mentors for their fellow faculty OR
- Helping to work on one or more projects to build the support infrastructure for OER/ZTC at ARC. Project examples:
- mapping all the OER/ZTC courses at ARC to identify possible ZTC degree pathways
- Help improve the process by which courses are designated as ZTC in the schedule of classes
The exact details of this work are TBD. Peer mentorship could take the form of:
- Serving on discussion panels
- Facilitating faculty discussion groups
- Meeting one-on-one with faculty members in your area to answer questions, troubleshoot challenges, brainstorm ideas, etc
If you’re interested in helping out and have questions, please contact Sarah Lehmann for more information.
Award Application and Submission
The College wants to support as many faculty as possible in adopting OER. All faculty are eligible (and encouraged!) to complete the Individual Professional Development portions of the project. Depending on faculty interest and available funds, there may be a selection process for those who wish to convert their course(s) to OER.
Interested faculty are asked to submit an OER Award Program Application by Monday May 8, 2023. OER Award Program Application
Adjunct and full-time classroom faculty are eligible to receive the award, which will be disbursed upon achievement of milestone targets.
Awardees agree to the following:
- To participate in the self-paced Canvas course: Free the Textbook: An Introduction to OER. This course provides a starting point to understand open licensing and copyright as well as search for OER that can be adopted, revised, and remixed. Furthermore, this Canvas course will be the mechanism by which faculty submit their required milestone achievements in order to be paid for their work.
- Equity & OER workshops. Multiple cohorts will be offered to accommodate everyone's schedules.
- All OER materials produced will be fully accessible and contain culturally relevant examples and/or content.
- All OER materials produced will be licensed under an open Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0) and will be shared with the Los Rios community via a (to-be-created) OER repository. The OER project lead and team will assist in this requirement.
Awardees can be paid for up to 111 hours of work to:
- convert up to 6 units of courses to OER,
- revise existing OER,
- serve as a peer mentor,
- or work on OER infrastructure projects.
See this payment schedule document for more information.