Kaleidoscope Grant Research Findings

College of the Redwoods is a participant in the Kaleidoscope grant. This grant helped faculty partner with other colleges to develop free, openly licensed textbooks to help students save a significant amount of money. The Community College Consortium for Open Education Resources is sponsoring a webinar with a few of the participants to discuss the results of the grant. Their invitation is below:

(Photo credit: Dmitry Baranovskiy)

Please join us Tuesday, December 4, 10:00 am PST for a webinar on OER Research findings on student outcomes and faculty and student feedback. The Kaleidoscope project, a collaboration between six community colleges and two 4-year colleges, developed OER for eight General Education courses and will report on student learning outcomes and faculty satisfaction. Florida Virtual Campus has been administering surveys to both faculty and students using open textbooks and open educational resources at their college and university campuses through their Open Access Textbook project and will share their findings from the last three years. Another Next Generation Learning Grant funded project Bridge-2-Success has worked with non-traditional students transitioning back to college or entering for the first time to improve college success. Working with Open University UK adapted open educational resources (OER) and online data gathering, they will share student outcome data from Anne Arundel and their 20 pilot colleges.

Dr. Robin Donaldson, Director of Open Access Textbooks and Project Manager of Orange Grove, Florida Virtual Campus Robin will give us an overview of the student and faculty survey feedback from 2010 and 2011 and will compare how data has changed over time.

Dr. Nassim Ebrahimi, Ann Arundel Community College Nassim will report on student learning outcomes finding from the Bridge-2-Success project at Ann Arundel and the 20 pilot community colleges that participated.

Kim Thanos, Lumen Learning. Kim will share differences in how students performed in classrooms using OER compared to those who continued to use publisher materials. She will also report on satisfaction among faculty participants.

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OERs and the Next Stage of Open Textbooks

By rubyblossom. via FlickrThere are some exciting things happening in the world of open education resources and open textbooks. I have worked in the recent past on projects that create or find open education resources, participated in presentations on open textbooks, and this latest project feels like the next step in all of this. I am working as a consultant (instructional design) on the Kaleidoscope Project. The purpose of the project is to create collaborative efforts between colleges to create courses using existing OERs with each course being developed by at least two partner institutions. A number of our College of the Redwoods faculty are participating in this grant. The focus on the grant is not the production of open textbooks or course materials (although that is happening anyway) but on design and results:

"Project Kaleidoscope will close the loop on improved course design and student learning. Using OER and a common assessment process will allow faculty teams to improve the course design and learning results based on analysis of embedded assessments and deeper learning results. Actually, the project requires this on-going, iterative review and improvement."

The learning outcomes piece of this is what is going to allow us to track the effectiveness of the materials used. Folks in the OER world have an idea of where this might go, that using open textbooks and learning objects can be just as effective and in many cases, more effective than a commercial textbook. Why? Because learning objectives and outcomes differ from institution to institution based on the needs of the local communities. This is especially true for the community colleges who often have to work on getting students up to speed academically. Faculty already have to adapt and remix commercial texts for the needs of the student populations often in the form of additional, costly supplements or multiple books. What I have been finding in my work with open textbooks is that textbooks are often supplanted (not supplemented) by openly licensed video, audio, images (and yes, open textbooks) making the course even more engaging for the students. When colleges work from the learning objectives and then find openly licensed materials that meet those learning objectives, everyone wins. But we have gone through that phase; it is now time to apply learning analytics to OERs and really show what works, what yet needs to be done, and what is possible.

Partners with the grant include Cerritos College, Chadron State College, College of the Redwoods, Mercy College, Palo Verde College, Santa Ana College, Santiago Canyon College, and Tompkins Cortland College. Advisers to the grant include Norman Bier, the ubiquitous Cable Green, M.S. Vijay Kumar, Terrel Rhodes, and David Wiley.  rSmart is supporting the project by hosting the Sakai sites where the courses will live. And Kim Thanos, CCH*, is managing the whole thing on amazingly tight deadlines!

If you are involved in similar research into OERs and learning analytics, I would love to hear about it via email or leave a comment.

Related articles

• 10 Open Education Resources You May Not Know About (But Should) (mindshift.kqed.org)
• Brazil introduces OER into federal legislation and adopts local government policy (creativecommons.org)
• Creative Commons & the Association of Educational Publishers to establish a common learning resources framework (creativecommons.org)
• Should OER favour commercial use? (downes.ca)

*Chief Cat Herder