2019 Charleston Library Conference

As the national economy continues to grow, many states, such as Alabama, are having difficult filling all the jobs because they do not have the credentialed workers. To get more students in the education pipeline, government agencies and higher education institutions are collaborating to identify ways of making college more affordable and accessible, particularly for lower-income and first-generation students. Open Education Resources (OER) are a potential method of accomplishing both goals. Recognizing that fact, Alabama’s higher education agencies – the Alabama Commission on Higher Education (ACHE) and the Alabama Community College System – began providing numerous grants to institutions to increase awareness of the value of Open Education Resources (OER) in 2018. The grants were for a wide variety of uses, such as holding all-day OER conferences for faculty and staff at two- and four-year institutions, providing incentives to faculty who replaced commercial textbooks with OER for their courses, and even subsidizing an ACRL workshop on Open Access (OA). Along the way, both community college and university librarians played an active role in events and activities. During this session, an ACHE staff member will briefly describe and provide updates on the 2018-2019 ACHE-ACCS OER grant program, which was projected to impact over 18,000 students and saved them over $2,000,000. Afterwards, academic librarians from the University of North Alabama (UNA) and Athens State University will describe how their grants supported their institutions’ OER initiatives.
Attendees will leave this session with best practices for conducting a grant program, ideas for promoting OER on campus, and suggestions for customized training for faculty and staff.