By Danielle Leek, PhD and Heather Blicher, MLIS, Director, CCCOER
In the spirit of Open
This spring, Executive Council members and staff of the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER), a regional node of Open Education Global (OEGlobal), partnered with an external consultant to review and update the design of the Annual Member Survey. We wanted to continue using survey results to guide CCCOER programming yet we also wanted to explore new possibilities for our approach.
We started with three broad questions:
- Could more open-ended questions be asked so that members could share their ideas for professional development topics and resources? Past data was useful but felt limited by answer options pre-selected for response options.
- Could we expand the survey’s reach? Past survey results made clear that CCCOER’s impact stretches beyond its membership. The 2023 report, for example, concludes that CCCOER has grown to be “… a vital, dynamic professional organization and the leader in supporting Open Education at community colleges across North America” ( Findings from the 2023 Member Survey). Similarly, attendance at CCCOER webinars and data from the CCCOER YouTube and website confirms that people from across the U.S., and around the world, find value in the organization’s programming and resources.
- Could past data collection continue to inform future conversations about OER institution/program trends? We knew of significant changes in designated institutional OER representatives and had concerns about how new respondents could answer questions about changes on their campuses. We wanted to explore survey designs that could account for these personnel changes.
Our conversations led us to redesign the 2024 survey with Openness in mind.
We chose to focus our attention on two areas:
- What topics are most important for CCCOER to explore in the next year?
- How can we best engage the community on these topics?
We chose to open the survey to any respondent with an interest in open education, rather than limiting the survey to individuals from CCCOER member institutions. We also included write-in options for almost all questions to encourage participant engagement and opinions.
These choices led us to eliminate most past questions about the status of open education activities at a respondent’s institution. We needed to make the survey response time manageable and avoid the data issues that can occur when two individuals from the same institution respond to the survey. We recognize the importance of reporting on these metrics and plan to revisit opportunities to assess our institutions’ work on efforts like course marking and adoption rates in future surveys.
The survey was sent out through the CCCOER listserv and posted to the OEGlobal web and social media sites. The link was then shared with multiple other higher education online groups including the Higher Education Service-Learning listserv, the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network, and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) listserv. CCCOER and OEGlobal staff also sent the link to other professional networks.
These changes to the survey inspired an increase in the number of responses to the survey. The results show that open education practitioners and scholars are interested in CCCOER continuing to provide guidance and training for those that are developing or maturing in the field. This support is best provided in digital formats as those are considered most accessible for the community.
Key Findings & Insights
Opening the survey significantly increased the total number of responses we received (from 38 in 2023 to 186 this year). Of the 186 respondents, 59 represent CCCOER member institutions (approximately 32%).
We also had a sizable response to our prompt encouraging participants to share their contact information if they had questions about CCCOER or wanted a member from the organization to reach out to connect about upcoming opportunities (64 respondents shared their email address and/or other contact information). Therefore, one unintended effect of the survey may be to promote CCCOER and its efforts beyond its assumed audience.
The largest number of respondents identify as librarians (43%) followed by instructional faculty (24%) and administrators (12%).
Our respondents were also asked about their level of knowledge about open education.
42% of participants identify as “Maturing – I have expertise in some areas, but there are areas where I need a deep dive” and 33% say they are “Developing – I have a strong handle on the basics, but I have a lot to learn” (See Figure 2). Only 17 respondents consider themselves novices who “just started learning about open education.”
Similarly, respondents overall most often identified faculty buy-in (28%), staff & faculty burnout (16%), and funding (14%) as the “biggest challenge to growing and sustaining” open education at their institutions.
These challenges may be shaping the areas respondents were most interested in when asked about research on “the use, efficacy and impact of open education.” Over 60% chose “reports from institutions that are assessing outcomes of open education” with 56% interested in “new instruments to measure the impact of open education.”
Turning to professional development, respondents were offered a choice of 11 different topics and asked to mark as many as they felt would be of interest to their personal development goals. The topics that received the most “yes” votes were “Equity, Diversity & Social Justice promotion through open education,” “Promoting/Scaling open education,” and “Artificial Intelligence and its application in open education” (See Table 1).
| Topic | # Yes Votes |
|---|---|
| Equity, Diversity & Social Justice promotion through open education | 127 |
| Artificial Intelligence and its application in open education | 136 |
| Promoting/Scaling open education | 135 |
| Funding sources for open education work | 113 |
| Course design frameworks for open education | 100 |
| OER Policy and regulations | 98 |
| Publishing open education course materials | 96 |
| Finding and locating open education resources in my field | 87 |
| Creative Commons/Open licensing | 81 |
| Global Issues | 53 |
| OER in K12 | 19 |
Respondents who selected “yes” for certain topics were asked to consider those areas in greater depth.
Which of the following topics related to equity, diversity and inclusion are of interest to you?
For example, respondents interested in “Equity, Diversity & Social Justice promotion” selected Culturally responsive pedagogy, Universal Design for Learning, and Anti-racism as their areas of greatest interest. Open textbook grants and federal funding took the top spots for “funding sources.” In the area of policy and regulation, institutional OER development/adoption policies received a significantly higher percentage of “yes” interest than other options. In all cases, raw data was shared with CCCOER’s staff and committees to support program planning for fall 2024 through spring 2025.
Questions in the survey were also intended to understand how to promote and present CCCOER’s programming.
CCCOER seeks to make its learning opportunities open and accessible. Which modalities are accessible for your needs?
We asked about how to make our work accessible and all 186 respondents replied. 86% (161 respondents) chose webinars, 66% selected “newsletter” and 59% (110 participants) chose a hybrid conference. Notably, only 26% selected “In-person conference (See Figure 3).
CCCOER’s webinars also were mentioned in multiple positive comments provided by respondents. The emphasis on digital work is consistent with results showing that 96% of all respondents choose Email as their preferred way to hear about professional learning opportunities.
“Continue to do the good work you have been doing. I recommend to my staff to attend your webinars…”
I glean a lot from all of the webinars you offer. (I especially appreciate that they are recorded so if I miss one I can “attend” at a later time.)
Moving Forward
How are our results informing our work?
We don’t want to lose momentum from the survey experience. The increase in response rates shows that there are people who want to connect with CCCOER and need their voices to be heard. Some of those people are from our member institutions and others we haven’t met yet. The CCCOER and OEGlobal crew are committed to reaching out to every person who shared their contact information through the survey. We will ensure you know how to access our resources, join our events, and provide information about signing up for a CCCOER membership.
We also see ways to focus on a target audience. Our results’ small number of novice respondents tells us to focus less on introductory OER knowledge, informing how we might design our upcoming programming and materials. We can point newcomers to our excellent “getting started” resources available on the CCCOER website and look into partnering with organizations and campuses that offer training for those new to OER rather than creating those workshops ourselves. Our work in the upcoming year can be centered on the developing and maturing audiences who are the majority of respondents to our survey.
We will also use results to narrow our agenda. By focusing our programming on topics that rose to the top of interest lists we can maximize the use of our time and financial resources. Here are some examples of how we are listening to results and focusing our agenda: Equity will remain primary in our work, we will have more conversations about AI, and we are planning sessions that explore OER impact and assessment research to help the community institutionalize open education efforts on your campuses.
We will also use digital connections, whenever possible, to make our resources and development opportunities accessible and impactful. The overwhelming number of respondents who not only prefer to receive their information electronically but find digital interaction more accessible is an important outcome of our survey findings.
Comments provided through open-ended responses are also inspiring new ideas about how we can improve our efforts to support members and the broader open education community. We look forward to sharing updates on this work, and future changes to our survey in future news posts.