Introduction

Rebecca Karoff

In Fall 2022, the DOERS3 Equity Working Group launched a William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funded project with six institutional partners to pilot the application of the Equity Through OER Rubric. This report describes the origins of the project, the purpose of the Rubric, the grant design and parameters, and–most importantly–key findings of the funded projects.

The learning and findings come from the grantees and the members of the Equity Working Group as they worked and learned from one another over the course of the year-long project. These findings lead to recommendations for improving both the Rubric itself and the ways in which users might apply it within their institutional contexts. Like the Rubric itself, the grantees’ experience in the pilot also led to more nuanced understanding of the ways in which OER can advance equity beyond the more traditional conceptions that focus on affordability and student success, to include institutional and structural barriers endemic to higher education that prevent the equity promise of OER from being fully realized.

We hope that in sharing the learnings and findings from the pilot project, grantees and Equity Working Group members, the enormous respect and appreciation for the commitment and passion exemplified by the grantees for student success through OER is conveyed.

The OER Equity Blueprint and Rubric Origins

First conceived at an in-person DOERS3 convening held at the University of Texas at Arlington in November 2019, the Equity Through OER Rubric was developed by the DOERS3 Equity Working Group throughout 2020-21 as an integral component of the work group’s OER Equity Blueprint, referenced from here on out as the Blueprint. Doing OER with an equity lens is doing OER well. The Blueprint is composed of three parts: an overview, theoretical framework and research foundation; the Equity Through OER Rubric; and a collection of case studies. The Blueprint was completed in July 2021 to define, unpack, and explain the equity dimensions of OER in higher education, and to foreground the role of OER in removing barriers to student success and closing gaps in student outcomes. The Blueprint sought to reclaim, amplify, and elevate the origins and impact of OER in equity and social justice. Over the course of its work, the Equity Working Group realized the extent to which quality of OER and equity are intertwined:

The blueprint’s core values include:

• Learner-centered OER promotes equity, inclusion, and accessibility.
• Redressing long-standing inequities requires taking responsibility and action that are personal and professional, and individual and institutional.
• Equity and quality should be understood as interdependent components of one another and therefore any efforts to make course access, participation, and completion equitable without assurance of quality is unfortunately a hollow promise.
• Achieving equity, in higher education, results in increased student success through access, participation, persistence, degree completion, and entry into the workforce.
• Equity is measurable.

The Rubric was designed to be the centerpiece and tangible applicationof the theoretical framework proposed in the Equity Working Group’sOER Equity Blueprint. It brings the blueprint into the practice and action realm by identifying roles and responsibilities of institutional players, and proposing levels of engagement, action, and assessment required to aid OER in fulfilling their promise. In its capaciousness, it reminds educators that to achieve the goals and imperative of equity at large, the work cannot be siloed–the responsibility only of individuals and individual units–but, rather, it is everyone’s responsibility. While getting to the established and even the emerging stages delineated in the Rubric will be aspirational for most practitioners and institutions, the Rubric provides a guide to achieve shared goals and outcomes. The process of engaging with the Rubric is–in and of itself–doing the work to advance equity.

What is the Equity Through OER Rubric?

The Equity Through OER Rubric, referenced from here on out as the Rubric, is a comprehensive self-assessment tool, designed to guide students, faculty, administrators, and other academic practitioners in not only better understanding, but also acting on the equity dimensions of OER. The Rubric is organized by three broad organizational categories—Students, Practitioners, and Leadership and Accountability—, aligned with roles and functions for higher education institutions, units, and practitioners. Each category has several dimensions which are essential to build and sustain capacity. Rubric users are invited to engage and evaluate themselves along a set of key dimensions. The overarching goal is to enable users to integrate OER in equitable ways across higher education leading to equitable student access, outcomes, and success.

The Rubric was designed to be used by college, university, and university system educators and students from across all department units, operational functions, and administrative roles within institutions, as well as by practitioners and policymakers from a broad spectrum of adjacent organizations and associations. While we focused on individual institutions in this pilot, the Rubric has broad applicability and relevance to university systems and other educational entities.

As envisioned by the authors, there were always going to be multiple ways to engage with the Rubric, enabling higher educators to use it to both recognize and honor their commitment to equity, as well as to evaluate progress and act on those areas identified as requiring additional focus and effort. The Rubric can be used to self-assess the institution, and/or may also be used to assess units and offices within the institution, including but not limited to colleges, academic departments, student support services, libraries, bookstores, information and instructional technologies, and business affairs. There is a distinct section for leadership and administrators, including those responsible and accountable for making student-facing, academic, policy, and budgetary decisions. At the same time, the Rubric posits that all stakeholders have leadership roles to play in advancing equity through OER.

The Leadership and Accountability category is particularly aspirational. It is aspirational because it expands the traditional leaders and agents of OER work at the institutional level (faculty, adjuncts, subject librarians, instructional designers, etc.) to include decision-makers and higher-level, executive administrators who control budgets, policy agendas, and infrastructure that will facilitate ongoing assessment and accountability to thereby drive deeper change. At some institutions, this group of executive leaders (e.g., presidents, senior academic and budget officers) are not typically at the table in how OER work is done but the Rubric posits that they should be if equity is an authentic commitment by the institution. The category also seeks to remind us that power and labor are not distributed equally at higher education institutions, which are hierarchical by design. This is the importance of naming so many practitioners and units as well as the decision-makers to make visible who and what need to be recognized and supported in order to make institutions as equitable and student-centered as they can be.

Accompanying the Rubric categories is a scale of adoption with multiple stages from Not Present, to Beginning, to Emerging, to Established, by which users can both determine their progress and set goals.

In developing the Rubric, the DOERS3 Equity Working Group understands that the emerging and established dimensions are as aspirational as the Leadership and Accountability category. These categories are intended not to intimidate but to motivate and provide a roadmap across interconnected endeavors, cultivating the recognition that equity does not happen without intentionality of purpose and action, and that siloed equity work is all too often limited in its impact.

The Equity Through OER Rubric Pilot

With generous funding from the Hewlett Foundation, the Equity Through OER Rubric pilot served as a demonstration project to test and assess the Rubric and its design as well as its intended purposes and users. Following a call for proposals in Fall 2022, six institutions were selected to participate, including one multi-campus community college, four universities, and one community college system.

The institutions varied in terms of their OER engagement and capacity, and in terms of their sizes, student populations, and financial and human resources. Importantly, the diversity of students at the participating institutions—in terms of race and ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, first-generation, age, ability, and geography, among other characteristics—is representative of the ”post-traditional” student populations increasingly served by higher education institutions in North America and around the globe.

The project launched in December 2022 with a virtual kick-off meeting for all participants, grant leads and team members. Members of the Equity Working Group collectively led the meeting and the project, and served as mentors to grantees. The launch meeting laid the foundation with an overview of grant requirements, deliverables and process, as well as of the Equity Through OER Rubric, and included breakout time for each project with their assigned mentors (two per project). It was clear from the outset–especially to members of the Equity Working Group–that mentoring would entail two-way learning.

Following the launch, there was a May 2023 project-wide check-in meeting. Mentors met regularly with the grant leads, and the cadence was intentionally left to grant leads and mentors to determine. The Equity Working Group wanted to be sensitive to the time commitment grantees were already making to the project without mandating more meetings to already busy calendars and work lives. In hindsight, however, and as will be discussed below, a more defined relationship between mentors and grantees along with a more structured schedule for check-ins would have been beneficial.

Grantees were invited to attend the in-person DOERS3 Fall convening in St. Paul in September 2023, and many of them did. Meeting time at the convening was dedicated to hearing from grantees and to discussing their experiences in using the Rubric, both their successes and challenges. This informed emerging plans for how to improve the Rubric, the grant experience, and the identification of strategic priorities for future work of the Equity Working Group and DOERS3 as a whole. In its design and delivery, the convening provided strong networking and a sense of community for grantees and Equity Working Group members that was especially timely as the project headed towards the finish line in December 2023.

The final project meeting took place virtually in December 2023 and celebrated the work and deliverables from the grantees. It also provided the opportunity for structured exit interviews conducted by the new Equity Working Group chair, Liliana Diaz. The exit interviews yielded critical information, referenced in the sections below, and was important for the Equity Working Group to gather essential understanding of the experiences of the grantees and ways the Rubric and the grant project could be improved in future iterations.

Grantees were asked to produce four deliverables as part of their participation, some public-facing and some meant for their own internal purposes and those of the Equity Working Group. Templates were provided for each of the deliverables, designed to allow customization as well as some uniformity in grant products. The single institution projects each received $10,000 for their participation; the community college system received $14,000.

The project descriptions and case studies are available on the project website and yield valuable insights and learning aligned with each of the grantees’ institutional contexts and cultures.

Grantees expressed appreciation for the opportunities to conduct gap analyses and to develop an action plan to be implemented upon completion of the project. At the same time, project learnings describe institutional and structural constraints in being able to address some of the identified gaps and fulfill some of the actions in grantee plans.