Background

Eastern Connecticut State University is the only public liberal state university of the Connecticut State Universities and Colleges (CSUC). The CSUC system is composed of four state universities, 12 community colleges, and an online institution. Eastern’s pedagogical mission is to provide a liberal arts education “practically applied” to all our students. Eastern is a member of the Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges, an organization promoting the value of liberal arts education in student-centered residential institutions. Our institution also focuses on undergrad research and employability. At Eastern, I am an associate professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Criminology, and Social Work. This case study describes what I did to receive tenure and promotion in 2022 and what I am currently doing to prepare my application to become a full professor.

At Eastern, tenure and promotion includes four categories: Teaching, Creative Activity, Service, and Professional Activity. Eastern has a mission to provide students with a transformative learning experience; therefore, Teaching takes on the most important categorical role in the promotion process. Of course, Scholarship and Creative Activity is valued as a close second by the faculty and administration in order to promote academic excellence.

At Eastern, individual faculty and some departments included OERs in the curriculum. Our institution is looking at ways to support OER adoption, training, and assessment. In my tenure and promotion (T&P) package, I frame my use of OER and OER-enabled pedagogy (OEP) through the lenses of the university’s mission statement and core values as well as the senate bill [PDF] that delineates our requirements for tenure and promotion.

Approach

To ensure my work in OER was accepted and valued by the university, I closely aligned my activities with the university’s core values and the university’s mission statement. By positioning the OER activities so that they correspond with the values of the university, I demonstrated the validity and worth of these projects to the P&T committee in a language they understood.

At Eastern, inclusion is one of our core values. Our institution provides “educational access while building a campus community that embraces diversity and differences.”^[1] In order to address accessibility, I ensured that my teaching narrative in my application describes how OER are inclusive of every student’s socioeconomic status and learning style. I started my narrative by stating that commercial textbooks are so expensive that some of our students are not able to buy them, and that exclusion affects not only their academic performance in the course but also how they perceive themselves as students. I also correlated institutional values to the importance or the worth of OER. For example, I stated that OER save money for every student and that low-income students are the ones who benefit the most from these resources. Additionally, in my narrative, I included my assessment of their cost savings as well as some of their comments collected during the semester to support my claims. Many of their quotations were similar to the following one: “OER significantly eases my financial stress. If every class I took used OER, I would save about one month’s rent per semester. Every class that uses OER allows me to work fewer hours so I can concentrate more on my education.”

Inclusion as an institutional value also implies the support of various learning styles as well as accommodating students with accessibility needs. In my teaching narrative, I discussed my use of openly licensed course materials in different formats to respect the learning style of every student. In Blackboard, the learning management system that we use, students can find a digitally accessible version of the course materials, which supports the educational experience of students using a screen reader; an audio file, which benefits the audio learners; and a braille file, which benefits visually impaired students.

Engagement, as another one of the university’s five core values, is also emphasized in the university’s mission statement: “Eastern engages students from diverse backgrounds in a transformative, liberal arts learning experience.”^[3] Engagement is defined as developing our student learners “intellectually, creatively and socially” through learning experiences that involve both “individual and collaborative research” as well as active and reflective learning.^[4]

In my teaching narrative, I explained that I use OEP to help students be engaged academically and socially when creating OER. Working together in teams, my students and I created a test bank, wrote PowerPoint lectures, and selected YouTube videos to illustrate sociological concepts and theories for the textbook Introduction to Sociology, 3rd edition from OpenStax,^[5] and the anthology Classical Sociological Theory and Foundations of American Sociology, edited by Allison Hurst.^[6] Through this work of creating material for future sociology students, my students mastered the material intellectually, as well as worked with one another collaboratively to brainstorm, draft, and edit the OER products.

Consequently, because of their investment in their academic work, I made sure to point out in my P&T material that the student engagement derives not only from their in-class social connections but from their awareness that they are creating openly licensed academic products that serve a greater audience. For example, during the pandemic, when my students worked with the Center for Community Engagement at Eastern to create educational videos for K–12 students of the local community,^[7] they demonstrated the institution’s value of active and engaged learning. They understood the importance of the resources they were providing others and took their work seriously.

In contrast to traditional methods of teaching, OER-enabled pedagogy requires students to create knowledge rather than be passive recipients of the knowledge I give them. Because OEP differs from traditional methods of teaching, the responsibility was on me to explain OEP in my promotional material, to provide my audience with examples, and also to collect data to show how this teaching method promotes social and creative engagement. I copied quotations from students’ end-of-the semester reflection essays and incorporated their quotations as evidence of their greater course involvement than regular classes. Students chiefly identify their greater engagement due to knowing their work will be shared with others. As one student expressed, “I viewed this a particularly valuable experience because it was a form of learning I haven’t had in any other course. From a student perspective, this form of education centers more on applying yourself based on the knowledge you’ve learned as opposed to memorizing and matching terms as many other courses do.” The more the students trust that their work will be shared with others, the more effort they put into these projects.

Consequently, because of their investment in their academic work, I made sure to point out in my P&T material that the student engagement derives not only from their in-class social connections but from their awareness that they are creating openly licensed academic products that serve a greater audience. For example, during the pandemic, when my students worked with the Center for Community Engagement at Eastern to create educational videos for K–12 students of the local community,^[8] they demonstrated the institution’s value of active and engaged learning. They understood the importance of the resources they were providing others and took their work seriously.

In contrast to traditional methods of teaching, OER-enabled pedagogy requires students to create knowledge rather than be passive recipients of the knowledge I give them. Because OEP differs from traditional methods of teaching, the responsibility was on me to explain OEP in my promotional material, to provide my audience with examples, and also to collect data to show how this teaching method promotes social and creative engagement. I copied quotations from students’ end-of-the semester reflection essays and incorporated their quotations as evidence of their greater course involvement than regular classes. Students chiefly identify their greater engagement due to knowing their work will be shared with others. As one student expressed, “I viewed this a particularly valuable experience because it was a form of learning I haven’t had in any other course. From a student perspective, this form of education centers more on applying yourself based on the knowledge you’ve learned as opposed to memorizing and matching terms as many other courses do.” The more the students trust that their work will be shared with others, the more effort they put into these projects.

In addition to matching the OER work in the classroom with the university’s mission statements, I carefully aligned my work in OER with the categories from our senate bill [PDF], clarifying requirements for P&T. Searching under the categories of Creative Activity, Service to the university, and Professional Activity, I strategically coordinated my activities with the specific language given in our senate bill.

For example, one criterion under the category of “Teaching” indicates “mentoring student research toward presentation of completed work.” Because I have taken several teams of students to OER conferences over the past four years, I have ample data to show how I educated and guided students to discuss their experiences creating OER in the classroom. Mentoring this next generation of OER advocates, I have prepared students to present at conferences,^[9] speak in panel discussions,^[10] or write blog posts.^[11] These opportunities provide them with professional experiences to include on their résumé, or they prompt them to consider graduate work, but perhaps less obviously, these research presentations on OER shape their principles about open access materials. For example, during the 2020 Open Ed Conference, two of my students and I discussed the creation of educational videos for the K–12 local school district. We argued that service learning and OER shared fundamental practices by sharing resources as a way to enhance communal ties. As I mentored these students in OER projects such as these, I helped them absorb one of the key tenets of sociology as a discipline: how social processes shape human lives. Thus, I indicated in my material how my mentoring students helps them both professionally and personally to think sociologically.

In the P&T category focusing on “Service,” I drew attention to the criteria: “Presenting demonstrations, workshops, and panel discussions or providing consultations for the university community.” For this category, I described how I educated colleagues about OER from our 17 institutions of the Connecticut State Universities and Colleges (CSUC). Years earlier, I joined a team that created the Open CSCU Blog to promote and discuss the work of faculty who are using OER and OEP.^[12] I also created a monthly virtual Sociology OER Open Café for any sociology instructor interested in discussing topics related to OER and OEP.

Finally, in the last category of the P&T criteria outlining the requirements for “Professional Activity,” I described my participation in the Northeast Regional OER Summit to coincide with the category’s language: “Membership and service in appropriate professional organizations.” Northeast Regional OER Summit is a multistate collaborative event for OER advocates who want to learn and share effective practices in awareness building, implementation, collaboration, strategy, and research. For this summit, I assisted in soliciting proposals, recruiting reviewers and providing them with proposals, writing acceptance letters to speakers, and creating the schedule of the conference. By carefully outlining the work I do for such professional events, I educate the P&T committee on the academic nature of OER conferences and initiatives.

Results

As a result of my commitment to OER and OEP, I received tenure and promotion in 2022, and I continue my work in order to obtain promotion to full professor. For example, I am currently writing a translation for the Creative Commons Certificate Program that educates instructors and librarians on attribution licensing practices. I will defend this translation work as an example of “Creative Activity” (i.e., “Scholarship”) in my promotion material because of its impact and its importance as a cross-cultural document.

Recommendations

For those applying for P&T, these are my recommendations:

• Ask the members of your department and the tenure and promotion committee what they think of OER and OEP. As you ask them questions about the expectations of tenure and promotion, be sure to help them understand your work. Do not wait until putting together your promotional packet to hope they will understand. I did not do that before applying for T&P. This recommendation is the fruit of the conversations I had with my colleagues after they read my application.
• Read the mission or vision statement of your university carefully, as well as any statement of values. Find ways to connect OER and OEP to the mission statement, vision, and core values of your institution.
• Use OER-enabled pedagogy to create new OER with your students. Determine the service requirements for tenure and promotion, and find ways to promote OER on your own campus. Write blog postings or book reviews of OER material. You do not need to write scholarly articles in OER, just participate in the conversations. Join local or national OER groups or conferences. It may provide you with some writing opportunities, as well as constitute your professional service for promotion.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the reviewers for their thoughtful comments, especially Merinda McLure and Shannon Smith. I also would like to thank Kevin Corcoran, who has been my mentor in the OER community and the architect of many OER initiatives in the State of Connecticut. Finally, I would like to thank Miriam Chirico for all of her support in my journey in American Higher Education.