During the 2024/2025 academic year, the Iowa Open Education Action Team ran our third Communities of Practice program, bringing together instructors across the state to share their interest in open education.
This year, we coordinated three cohorts for instructors in the disciplines of Business, Mathematics, and Nursing. 19 faculty and staff from 8 institutions participated in the program, including representatives from Des Moines Area Community College, Dordt University, Kirkwood Community College, Iowa State University, Mount Mercy University, Southeastern Community College, University of Iowa, and University of Northern Iowa.
The participants in this year’s OER Communities of Practice program shared positive notes about their experience engaging with their peers and facilitators. As one participant noted at the end of the program,
“The facilitators of the CoP for Math & Stats that I participated in were excellent. They fostered a welcoming environment, communicated the program schedule clearly and efficiently, and encouraged meaningful, engaging discussions.”
Other feedback shared included notes expressing appreciation for having a space to discuss discipline-specific OER needs, interests in learning more about how to create and publish OER, and requests to extend the program through the summer for even more engagement with peers. These comments were great for us to hear, and the Iowa OER team will be exploring ways to further improve the program for next year’s cohorts.
Case Study: Tara Allen
Tara Allen, Lead Faculty Program Coordinator for Marketing Management at Kirkwood Community College, had this to share about her experience participating in the 2023 and 2024 cohorts:
“I’ve had the privilege of participating in the Iowa OER Communities of Practice for two terms. Since relocating to Iowa in 2023, I began transforming our curriculum to align with OER principles, starting with Principles of Marketing. Through cross-institutional collaboration and ongoing professional networking, I continued converting Social Media in Business, Principles of Advertising, and the Internship course.
During this most recent term, I completed OER transitions for Principles of Retailing, Content Marketing, and the Marketing Management Capstone. Last month, I proudly shared with our advisory board that the entire Marketing Management program is now OER-based. This shift enhances affordability, equity, and adaptability, ensuring our curriculum stays relevant and agile in response to industry needs and technological evolution.
The Iowa OER Communities of Practice has been instrumental in supporting this mission and fostering a statewide culture of open, accessible education.”
Building Competencies and Confidence
The program for the Communities of Practice this year followed a flexible curriculum based on the OER Modules on our website. Each month, participants completed readings and optional assignments to build a strong understanding of open education basics before diving into deeper discussions about topics such as implementing open educational practices in the classroom or developing custom open educational resources (OER).
To explore how the communities of practice program supported participants’ competency development, participants completed a pre-test and post-test about their level of confidence in their knowledge about key open education topics: open educational resources (general), Creative Commons licenses, open pedagogy, the disciplinary relevance of OER, and how to create or revise a course to implement OER. Participants scored their understanding of these concepts from 1 to 4. In order, these categories include 1 (No knowledge), 2 (Very little knowledge), 3 (Adequate knowledge), and 4 (Advanced knowledge).
To assess the results of our program on the participants’ confidence with open education, a t-test was used to review the mean scores in each category before and after the participants completed the program (Figure 1).
Participants rated their confidence in each category higher after participating in the program, with the greatest difference in the scores visible in the areas of open pedagogy (1.18 point difference) and implementing OER in a course (1.23 point difference). In contrast, most participants felt somewhat confident in their general knowledge of OER before coming into the program, so the scores in that topic area grew less than 1 full point.
To further explore these results, we looked at the variance among the responses to the pre-test and post-test (Figures 2 and 3). This allowed us to get a better understanding of the difference in experience levels that instructors brought with them to the program.
The variance in responses was much lower in the responses at the end of the program. This could mean that the professional development provided through the program equalized the knowledge of the already-proficient participants and those who were more new to open education. However, we would need to do additional testing to determine this for sure. Regardless, the feedback we received on this year’s program was heartening, and we look forward to running a new set of cohorts in 2025/2026!
Interested in the Communities of Practice?
Recommend a discipline or subject area you’d like to see us support in our next round!