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At higher education institutions, tenure and promotion portfolios are often evaluated in terms of tiers, with the highest tiers expecting blind peer reviews of research articles. While some open textbook developers include peer review, the review process is often open, not blind, which presents challenges for tenure and promotion for faculty who embrace the creation, use, and assessment of OER. Often, the result is faculty reluctance to create/adapt OER due to fear of promotion interference. At Georgia Southern University, a faculty-based OER working team is investigating institutions that consider OER for tenure and promotion to gauge its own institution’s interest in considering OER as top-category evidence for promotion. This presentation will explain the data generated from this survey and the data’s potential for rendering university support for faculty whose OER scholarship might warrant promotion and tenure.

Multiple educational institutions, as well as nonprofit entities, have surveyed faculty in attempts to determine their perceptions and usage of OER materials. Our university did the same in 2021 with results that mirrored prior surveys. Interestingly, despite ongoing education and advocacy, the list of perceived barriers remains the same. Quality of OER, and time to commit still rank as the top two. However, delving deeper into the free responses has revealed some interesting insights. These comments tell a story not captured through the fixed choice alone. This multimedia presentation will guide participants through our survey results with commentary from the OER Librarian as well as two Teaching/Research faculty from different disciplines. We’ll show how to tease out this hidden story and how we plan to utilize it to guide our narrative for OER advocacy and education. Participants will have access to a template created to guide them through their own discovery of hidden stories.

In 2021 a team of faculty from a Health Sciences and Kinesiology department received an Affordable Learning Georgia Transformation grant targeting the Human Anatomy and Physiology (HAP) laboratory courses at our institution. HAP labs are two-semester undergraduate courses required for all health majors and enroll about 2,700 students/academic year. The goal of the project was to create no-cost course materials for all sections. We had four objectives: pedagogical transformation, supplementary/ancillary OER creation, student success and student savings. The newly developed OER became part of our courses in the spring of 2022. This poster will present the overall changes to the HAP labs, share the resources created and discuss implications for student success.

The burdening cost of textbooks affects student life and overall student success. Too often students do not purchase the textbook, because they cannot afford it and miss valuable learning opportunities. To provide inexpensive and robust major-oriented textbook materials for Organic chemistry I and II, Organic Chemistry Lab techniques manual, Survey of Chemistry for nursing majors, Comprehensive Chemistry course for engineering majors, Forensic Chemistry and Drug Design, faculties from the chemistry department utilized free materials from various open ancillary materials, open educational resources (OER) chemistry textbooks and compiled on the Library Guides platform at Georgia Southern. The combined projects from the chemistry department through nine different grants have led to an estimated thousands of dollars in annual student savings. This proposal will share the steps involved in writing and hosting the contents through OER libguides and discuss the sustainability of the work.

An Integral History: Asian Studies Digital Archive provides a curated collection of multi-disciplinary resources related to Asian Studies research. Housed in Georgia Southern Commons, the archive highlights the University’s scholarly and cultural assets related to the Asian Studies and are organized by Georgia Southern University’s Strategic Pillars. The initiative provides free, open access to Asian Studies research to scholars worldwide. As of March 2023, research and artifacts in the Asian Studies archive have been downloaded over 8,500 times by people in 132 countries. A new feature for 2023 is a storytelling space for members of the Asian American Pacific Islander community to contribute their reflections, narratives, essays, photos, videos, oral histories, etc. about their experiences. “Our Stories, ourselves: AAPI Stories” will offer a new community engagement opportunity to collect, preserve, and share stories.