4 Survey Results: Executive Summary
training faculty and library staff, funding student assistants, and purchasing multi-user e-textbooks or
open textbook examination copies. Faculty course release and equipment were spending categories for
fewer than 20% of respondents.
Approximately three-fourths of respondents reported there are funding continuation plans. The
remaining respondents indicated that they have dedicated funding for a period of time and will need
to refine their funding model and/or seek future financial support from campus senior administration.
Others reported that future funding may be contingent on program evaluation, or that the status of
continued funding is currently unknown. Some respondents indicated that core operating expenses
would be self-funded and projects would be grant funded. Others are negotiating support from campus
senior administration and other academic units. We suspect that continued funding goes hand in hand
with formalization of special initiatives or pilot projects into regular services.
Faculty Incentive Programs
Anecdotal evidence suggested that faculty incentive programs have been an important and widely used
early strategy for many libraries and institutions and the ACC/OER survey confirmed this conclusion.
Three quarters of the responding libraries with activity in this area indicated their campuses provide
an incentive program for faculty to adopt, adapt, or create affordable course content/open educational
resources. A majority of the incentives offered (25 or 80%) were financial incentives (grants, stipends,
etc.) or instructional design support (17 or 55%). Five programs use some funding for faculty course
release as well. Several respondents also report they help faculty find and identify affordable/open
content, connect faculty with additional support/services on campus (graphic design, academic
technology, teaching and learning), and work with the Open Textbook Network to introduce faculty to
open textbooks in their discipline and engage them via a review of a specific open textbook. Licensing,
copyright, and publishing support are other areas noted here and later in library support services.
Details related to financial incentive grants indicate the amount and number awarded varies
widely across institutions. Twelve institutions reported average grants of $1250 or less with a total of
approximately 288 awards. Two institutions reported larger incentive grants averaging ~$3000 and $4500
while still providing numerous awards (23 and 15, respectively). Three other institutions reported even
more substantial awards of $5000, $10,000, and over $15,000 but awarded fewer grants overall to date (1,
5, and 2, respectively).
The trend of offering more numerous, small incentive grants or fewer large grants was supported
by the comments in this section of the survey as well. For example, one institution noted, “Three types
of grants: $12,000, three grants awarded $7,500, three grants awarded $1,000, nine grants awarded.”
Respondents’ comments also indicate that several institutions have plans to implement an incentive
program on their campus in the future, or extend or provide more awards at similar levels used in the
past. Some incentive programs are intertwined with larger campus efforts that include ACC/OER content
as one option among other teaching and learning transformations that qualifies for an award.
The requirements for faculty incentive grant programs, while numerous, are not universal across
the responding institutions. By far, the requirements implemented at the most institutions are that faculty
provide data about the course size and the cost of the existing textbook (17 responses, or 61%) and submit
updates about their projects (14 or 50%). About a third of respondents indicated they also require faculty
to apply an open license to newly created works, assess student learning, share content within their
institution, use only openly licensed content, and report usage of ACC/OER for a number of years. A
number of institutions indicated that they don’t “require” the items listed in the survey but obtain similar
results through consultation with faculty as part of their incentive programs.
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