Skip to Main Content
Course materials support network for Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota and beyond

Advocacy & Campus Leadership: Institutional Contexts & Funding: Home

Overview

Institutional Context & Funding
Leaders need to assess institutional culture, policies, and priorities to align their initiatives with broader strategic goals. Situational awareness, flexibility, and the ability to navigate complex organizational structures is easier with knowledge of institutional by-laws, budgeting patterns, incentive systems, and key influencers. By mastering their INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT, leaders can position OER and affordable content to address existing challenges, such as enrollment trends, financial constraints, or marketing strategies. From the perspective of academic support, an environmental scan and robust list of possible stakeholders will aid in making strategic the connections needed to build an OER or affordability initiative. 

Institutional Contexts & Funding Topics

To piece together your strategy, which is a theory about how you will succeed, you need to perform an environmental scan of your institution. The scanning process is an opportunity to engage stakeholders from across the institution, and its purpose is to find alignment between OER, affordability initiatives, and open pedagogy and the university's stated (and unstated) strategic priorities. You might choose a common method like SWOT, Five Forces, or PEST/PESTLE analyses.  Below are some starter questions to help gather information for an environmental scan of your institution. 

Academic and Faculty Perceptions

  • How does awareness of OER and open pedagogy compare to the national average?
  • How interested are instructors in redesigning their courses? Parts of a courses?
  • Do they have writings they use for teaching that could form the basis of an OER?
  • Has the Faculty Senate shown any support for OER, affordability, and open pedagogy?
  • Does your department have any particularly strong relationships with deans or department heads? 

Collaborative Academic Support

  • If you aren't the library, what working relationship exists with your library?
  • What is your relationship with the bookstore? How aggressive is the bookstore in pursuing inclusive and equitable access programs? Are they willing to work with the library to share their list of textbooks so libraries can check can purchase for collection?
  • Are there instructional designers who are interested in OER or open pedagogy? Standards-compliant interactive content?
  • Is there a separate online learning center and if so, what working relationships exist with it? 
  • Does course marking exist at your institution? If so, which areas are responsible for carrying it off?

Existing Adoption Practices

  • What is the existing culture and workflow related to textbooks adoptions and course materials?
  • Do departmental or institutional policies affect whether instructors are free to choose their own course materials?
  • Which other university units participate in existing course material adoption workflows (e.g., bookstore, registrar, IT)? 

Innovation

  • How receptive is the campus culture to innovation, pilot programs, and new initiatives?

Institutional Effectiveness

  • Do you have a department of data scientists that studies institutional effectiveness? Could you see them partnering with you on a study of the use of open and affordable content?

Internal Factors

  • In the strategic plan, are there goals and actions that align with the outcomes of OER grant programs, Z-degree programs, and low cost degree programs?
  • Do administration leaders and decision makers have enough agility to take suggestions and create a charge for a textbook affordability committee or open education working group from the top down?
  • Is there enough interest within academic support staff to build a committee or working group from the bottom up?
  • Does your administration already provide funding for a "textbooks on reserve" program?
  • Would your administration consider faculty stipends not only for creating and adopting OER, but for participating in OER 101-style or CE courses/workshops?
  • Which institutions does your institution consider aspirational peers? What is happening in the open and affordability space at your aspirational, benchmark institutions?
  • Some automatic billing programs may include volume discounts. Is that influencing course materials decisions at your institution?
  • Are there already existing initiatives that could work well together with OER and affordability initiatives?
  • What are the effective communication channels at your institution? Campus portal? LMS? Email lists? Meetings?

Legislative

  • Is your university mandated to meet goals set by current legislation or is it eligible to receive part of an existing appropriation to invest in open ed and affordability?

Outside Funding and Programs

  • Is anybody at your university already working on external grants which would lend themselves naturally to open educational resources or affordable content strategies?
  • Are external grants encouraged at your institution?

Student Groups

  • How active are your student government groups? Would student groups be interested in organizing educational events on OER or helping create/support OER grant programs?
  • Are there student champions willing to vocally frame textbook affordability as a social justice issue?
  • Are student media interested in running a story or covering open and affordable education?

Student Success

  • Have affordability, sense of belonging, or lack of universal design for learning been identified as causes of poor academic performance, increased DFW rates, and low retention rates at your institution?
  • What are the strategic priorities of the university with respect to supporting and improving student success?

Getting a new initiative off the ground in education requires engaging stakeholders. For the initiative to move forward, these engagement efforts need to locate influencers, early adopters, and thought leaders who are willing to participate in pilots or actively promote and support your OER, affordability, or open pedagogy initiative. There is no shortage of ideas about where you can look to find these stakeholders.

Possible Stakeholders

In the report "Toward Convergence: Creating Clarity to Drive More Consistency in Understanding the Benefits and Costs of OER" prepared by Katie Zaback for the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC) (2022), a framework is proposed where a group of diverse stakeholders at an institution convene to perform a cost-benefit analysis of OER and alternative course materials options. This approach is an inventive way to bring together decision makers to focus on an institution-level initiative while seeing how costs and benefits are distributed among different stakeholders throughout the system in different scenarios.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

According to the report, a cost-benefit analysis is uniquely positioned to:

  • increase transparency of both costs and benefits
  • highlight indirect costs and benefits
  • distinguish between collective institutional or systems-level expenses and benefits versus individual expenses and benefits.
  • support institutional-level decision-makers (dept heads and deans as opposed to administrator policymakers) who must make more nuanced decisions around resource allocation based on their individual contexts

Beyond the report, planning and executing a cost-benefit analysis also:

  • removes silos
  • builds relationships 
  • catalyzes partnerships
  • signals the willingness and savvy of academic support areas
  • encourages fair, well-rounded analyses, not just persuasive pitches or takedowns

Possible Costs and Benefits

  • Time to Develop Courses
  • Time to Manage Systems Change
  • Materials Costs
  • Implementation Costs
  • Reduced Book Store Revenue
  • Student Cost Savings
  • Credit Accumulation
  • Increased Course Completion
  • Student Retention
  • Increased Attainment
  • Student and Faculty Engagement
  • Closing Equity Gap

Resources

Legislative appropriations are the funding provided by lawmakers to implement the requirements in laws for open education and affordability initiatives. These appropriations are normally part of laws, not statutes, and so are not permanent, though some appropriations for open and affordable initiatives have been five year commitments. Outside of the general encouragement of adoption of open and affordable resources, a frequent approach in legislation is to require a certain amount of Z-Degrees or Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC) programs, which allow students to earn an entire degree without having to pay for course materials.

Example Legislative Appropriations

  • Zero cost: Provides funds to develop programs, create OER, and bring other resources to bear in the pursuit of Z-degrees and ZTC-degrees
  • Policies: Provide funding for the development of statewide polices and guidelines
  • Incentives: In general, provide incentives to accelerate the adoption of open educational resources
  • Special Populations: Cover the costs of textbooks or digital course content for special populations (e.g., dual enrollment students, incarcerated students)

Other Legislative Actions (Laws, Regulations, and Rules)

  • Establish course marking rules for course schedule information for all state schools
  • Establish state OER councils and commissions
  • Establish statewide digital libraries or repositories
  • Require textbook and instructional materials affordability policies, procedures and guidelines
  • Require review and reporting on affordability for all state schools
  • Require identification of high impact courses
  • Establish virtual community colleges, colleges, and universities which 
  • Establish requirements for textbook publishers to unbundle and to share information about what updates occured between editions of textbooks

Further Reading

  • OER State Policy Tracker (SPARC) - consult this list of previously enacted OER-related policies by U.S. state governments for guidance in developing legislative proposals

Funding comes from a wide variety of internal and external sources who are collectively motivated to support the reduction of educational costs and the promotion of equitable access to resources.

Internal Funders

  • University Libraries: Often spearhead OER initiatives and may secure funding from within the institution to support these projects.
  • Provost's Office: May allocate funding as part of broader educational initiatives.
  • Faculty Development and Teaching/Learning Centers: Provide grants focused on improving pedagogy, including OER integration.
  • Student Government: Student senates or associations might fund OER initiatives as part of efforts to reduce textbook costs and improve educational equity.
  • Technology and Innovation Offices: University offices focused on digital learning and innovation may offer grants or support for OER projects that leverage new technologies.

External Funders

  • Foundations: Non-profits like the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which has been a significant supporter of OER initiatives globally.
  • Government Entities: Federal and state governments may offer grants aimed at increasing the adoption of OER to reduce educational costs.
  • Non-Profit Organizations: Entities like SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) advocate for and fund OER projects.
  • For-Profit Entities: Some educational companies may offer grants or partnerships to promote the use of their platforms in conjunction with OER, though these come with varying degrees of openness.