Background

East Tennessee State University (ETSU) is a four-year public institution with over 13,000 undergraduate and graduate students. ETSU has a university-wide tenure policy and promotion policy. In addition, each department creates its own criteria that its faculty must follow to achieve tenure and/or promotion. ETSU has 10 colleges and administrative units (e.g., Charles C. Sherrod Library) that include over 50 departments with their own unique criteria. I (Ashley Sergiadis) have experience with ETSU’s tenure and promotion criteria. First, I obtained tenure and was promoted to associate professor during the 2022–2023 academic year. Second, I became ETSU’s Watermark Faculty Success Implementation Coordinator in which I manage the Faculty Activity Reporting system that faculty use to submit their tenure and promotion dossiers.

East Tennessee State University primarily promotes the use of OERs through its Open and Affordable Course Materials Initiatives. These initiatives include membership to the Open Education Network, workshops on OER, an awards program that offers stipends to instructors adopting/adapting/creating OER, and library e-textbook reserves. I colead the initiatives in my role as digital scholarship librarian alongside several colleagues from Charles C. Sherrod Library and the Center for Teaching Excellence.

Approach

As a coleader of ETSU’s Open and Affordable Course Materials Initiatives, I have heard faculty mention that creating OERs did not count toward their tenure and promotion. These experiences aligned with my own, as Charles C. Sherrod Library’s tenure and promotion criteria do not mention OERs. When tenure and promotion criteria and policies do not explicitly include certain activities, it adds a level of complication for faculty by requiring them to receive special permissions for that activity to count. This can discourage a faculty member to explore activities not listed in their tenure and promotion criteria. In my case, I had to ensure that my review and editorial activities for MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching) would count toward tenure and promotion by discussing and approving the activities with my supervisor. While I was able to make the argument that these activities aligned with my librarianship, it was an extra step I had to take before volunteering for these activities.

During the summer of 2020, I was a member of a work group in the Open Education Network that was exploring the issue of including OER in the category of research, scholarly, and creative activities. One of our activities was to investigate the policies at our own institutions regarding this matter. For my institution, I created and conducted a content analysis of the university-wide and department criteria for tenure and promotion in order to understand the prevalence of OER within those documents. The following instructions outline how the content analysis was conducted with some edits so others can replicate it at their own institution.

First, I created a spreadsheet with the following headings:

• Department
• College
• Level of criteria (i.e., department, college, other unit, etc.)
• URL to tenure criteria
• URL to promotion criteria
• Criteria mentions course/educational materials in research, scholarly, and creative activity
• What do the criteria state about course/educational materials in research, scholarly, and creative activity?
• Criteria mentions open or affordable educational resources in teaching or research, scholarly, and creative activity
• What do the documents state about open or affordable educational resources in teaching or research, scholarly, and creative activity?
• Additional notes

Second, I assigned a graduate assistant to enter the following information into the spreadsheet. This assignment did not take the graduate assistant very long to accomplishment (less than a work week or 20 hours).

1. Find the tenure and promotion policies or criteria for your institution and individual units (schools, colleges, departments, etc.). Add the available information in the Department, College, URL to tenure criteria, and URL to promotion criteria columns. In some cases (especially at ETSU), URL to tenure criteria and URL to promotion criteria led to the same or a very similar document.
2. Search each document for the mention of creating or publishing course or educational materials in the research, scholarly, and creative activity section. This may involve searching the document for keywords such as “teaching,” “education,” “course,” or “textbooks.” This may also involve manually skimming through the section to identify relevant information. Write N (No) or Y (Yes) in the Criteria mentions course/educational materials in research, scholarly, and creative activity column based on if you were (un)able to find course or educational materials mentioned in the research, scholarly, and creative activity section. Copy and paste the relevant passages that mention course/educational materials in the What do the documents state about course/educational materials in research, scholarly, and creative activity? column.
3. Search each document for the mention of open or affordable resources within the teaching and research, scholarly, and creative activity sections. This may involve keyword searching “open” or “affordable” or “OER.” This may also involve manually skimming through the sections to identify relevant information. Write N (No) or Y (Yes) in the Criteria open or affordable educational resources in teaching or research, scholarly, and creative activity column based on if you were (un)able to find open or affordable resources mentioned in these sections. Copy and paste the relevant passages that mention open or affordable educational materials in the What do the documents state about open or affordable educational resources in teaching or research, scholarly, and creative activity? column. It may be appropriate to search other key terms based on the language used at your institution for OERs. For example, ETSU uses the term “Open and Affordable Course Materials,” so I based my search terms based on this language.
4. Consider customizing the fields based on the needs of your institution. Use the Additional notes section to add relevant information that does not fit within your initial categories. You may be able to use the Additional notes section to determine additional fields and relevant information to collect.

Results

Course/Educational Materials as Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

The university-wide tenure and promotion policies as well as almost half of the departments had criteria indicating that educational materials can be counted toward research, scholarly, and creative activity. The criteria primarily focused on textbooks. Three departments only mentioned reviewing a textbook as a research activity. The rest of the departments that had educational materials count toward research, scholarly, and creative activities focused on creating textbooks. Of the departments that included the creation of textbooks, many departments discussed caveats that faculty had to satisfy in order to count them. Four departments connected “peer review” or “clear evidence of quality of work,” and five departments connected “nationally published” to textbooks. Specifically, the university-wide tenure policy states, “Appropriate textbooks or educational articles in one’s own discipline and innovative contributions to teaching, if published or presented in a peer-reviewed forum, constitute scholarship of teaching.” In addition to textbooks, a few of the departments included other types of educational resources, such as test banks, courseware, and software. The Department of Health Sciences had the most robust examples of educational resources: research-related textbooks, software, or other technology to improve teaching (which gets wider recognition/use), course- or discipline-specific web page, and experimentation of new methods of instruction.

OER as Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Although the criteria might have acknowledged educational resources, the Department of Mathematics was the only department that mentioned open materials anywhere within the tenure and promotion documents. Specifically, the department listed the development of open-source materials (e.g., software, books, manuals, tutorials, etc.) as an appropriate research, scholarly, and creative activity. Aside from this one mention of open, none of the university-wide or department tenure and promotion criteria explicitly mentioned OERs.

Although not necessarily a mention of “open,” mathematics also mentioned self-published works (as did literature and language). Mathematics states, “Self-published books are given credit pending on review letters of experts on the field.…However, books under contract with a publishing company and articles in refereed journals, reviewed by recognized scholars, are looked upon more favorably than those that are not subjected to such rigorous examination.” Faculty publishing OER without a traditional publisher could use this information as a precedent on what documentation may be needed.

Discussion

Based on this analysis, most faculty at the present time would have to advocate for OERs to count toward tenure and promotion, as the term is not explicitly mentioned in their department’s policies and criteria. Furthermore, educational resources mentioned within the research, scholarly, and creative activities are primarily textbooks. OER is much broader in scope than simply textbooks, meaning that faculty would need to confirm with their department chair that OER other than textbooks would count. Lastly, the policies and criteria sometimes discuss the need for rigor with standards that fit within the traditional publishing forum. For example, one could assume that sharing an OER in the Open Textbook Library or MERLOT that publishes reviews of OER would constitute a peer-reviewed and nationally published product. A faculty member who does not want to (potentially erroneously) assume would need to prove that their OER can be credited according to the definitions included in the criteria. This ask is an unnecessary effort of faculty when the criteria could simply address OER instead.

The return on investment of this assignment has been good. The content analysis was an easy assignment to give to a graduate assistant (if the tenure and promotion criteria are readily available online). For a relatively short work assignment, I can now confidently present information and evidence when the topic of OER and tenure and promotion arise. I have been able to mention these results in meetings and presentations with committees that are part of the governance structure (e.g., Faculty Senate, Academic Council). I hope to use this information during my discussions on needed changes within the newly adopted Faculty Activity Reporting system (Watermark Faculty Success). Unfortunately, my analysis has not influenced tenure and promotion policy or criteria changes. ETSU is currently in the process of revising its tenure and promotion policies, and departments might modify their tenure and promotion policies and criteria to adhere to the university-wide changes. These potential changes provide me with even more of an opportunity to discuss the importance of OER in tenure and promotion as the new policies and criteria make their way through ETSU’s governance structure.

Recommendations

• Become familiar with the scope of an institution’s tenure and promotion criteria and policies. This knowledge can be beneficial when advocating for the recognition of faculty adopting, adapting, and creating OER.
• Use the words “open educational resources” (and an accompanying definition) within tenure and promotion criteria and policies in order to encourage faculty to adopt, adapt, and create OER. If OER is not mentioned in the criteria, the faculty member has an additional responsibility to ensure that their work with OER will be counted toward tenure and promotion. This is an extra barrier that may hinder the faculty member from pursuing OER.
• If including “open educational resources” as an option for research, scholarly, and creative activities, acknowledge how OER may be placed within the spectrum of those activities and be deemed as reputable. Clear guidance on how to demonstrate that OER is reputable will help faculty during the development of their OER and related activities.