Conclusion
Rebecca Karoff
The DOERS3 Equity Through OER Rubric pilot asked a lot and received even more from the six institutional grantees and their projects. The grantees took a leap of faith with the Equity Working Group in applying the Rubric, essentially flying a plane that had been built but not yet flown. For our work in higher education, this is both a fairly common practice and also how change happens–through widened stakeholder engagement, expanded capacity, the building of evidence and impact, and the demonstrable achievement of progress achieved, even if each of these things grow incrementally.
The pilot project brought to the foreground the fact that process matters. Intentional engagement with equity is about capacity building to deepen student learning and success. Moreover, this kind of intentional engagement has everything to do with institutional excellence, effectiveness and accountability, not just broadly understood but also specifically delineated by the various roles, units, and departments across the collective higher education ecosystem.
There are other findings emerging from this inaugural multi-institutional application of the Rubric that are important to capacity building and change leadership. It is important to understand the equity dimensions of OER holistically. At the same time, grantees and other users need to be supported in engaging only parts of the Rubric as part of their experiences. As the experiences of the funded projects reveal, there is tremendous value in focusing on parts of the Rubric.
Our pilot underscores another reality around both OER and equity work that is present still too often across many sectors of higher education: the work may be siloed, relegated to, and therefore marginalized as the responsibility of a few people, both those with named roles surrounding OER and those without designated job descriptions that recognize OER work as paid versus unpaid labor. OER and equity work may not be universally understood as a shared and collective responsibility – this is a core value and motivation of the Rubric and at the heart of so many quiet champions of open education.
Several of the grant projects were constrained by turnover of people in colleges and universities, as well as not having a balanced input from students, practitioners, and leadership. While grant proposals needed to have sign-off from some facet of institutional leadership, the teams put together to conduct the self-assessment and write the action plans rarely included executive leaders. In our current educational structures, executive leaders with institutional/system-level decision-making power are critical to ensuring that the project goals align with institutional strategic priorities and plans, and can thereby move forward, including identifying the resources–human and financial–essential to implementation and sustainability.
The implications of inadequate leadership sponsorship and resources can reify existing and historic labor inequities rampant for both OER and equity work, with corollary impacts on student engagement and success. The Rubric is aligned with traditional hierarchies, organization, and structures, and yet offers users motivation and opportunities to challenge those hierarchies, redistribute power, and generate new ways of doing the work where everyone at the institution has influence and authority to make decisions.
Indeed, one of the other design considerations for the Equity Through OER Rubric’s comprehensiveness was to counter the decades-long tendency to silo equity work to individual offices or people. The Rubric was born of a political, social, and cultural moment in the U.S. when calls for a racial reckoning were dynamic, unifying, and sought innovations in how equity was enacted across higher education. The difference between where the project started in 2020 compared to where the U.S. is currently in 2024 could not be more striking with the passage of anti-equity legislation in a growing number of states, and the alarming elimination of equity offices, programs, and people in many states across the U.S. We believe that the siloing of equity work has made this pernicious elimination easier to execute, and something to combat through community building and redefining the responsibility of OER onto a collective body. Despite the split screen across the U.S.–determined by geography and politics–for who and how higher educators can continue to do equity work, the Rubric’s strength remains in demonstrating the capacity-building enabled by OER engagement to remove barriers to student success and close gaps in outcomes, to enhance educational quality and institutional effectiveness, and to bring added dimensions of leadership and accountability to this work.
DOERS3 believes that the equity Rubric as a tool and framework is strong and useful. The commitment and experiences of the grantees underscore its value and point to the ways in which the Rubric and Rubric grant program can be improved, for future grantees and for all users who want to self-assess through the Rubric. The Equity Working Group could not be more grateful and impressed by the work done and the learnings the six institutional grantees have shared with DOERS3 and its many members to advance equity through OER. We dedicate this report to them.
