Our Journey, Day 58
It's day 58, and I'm in Mankato preparing to give two presentations. The first, in the morning, will be to faculty about Textbook Affordability. The second, after lunch, will be to Library Faculty and Administrators, about Z-Degrees. I'm going to try to record the talks and post videos of them.
A challenge of this type of talk is deciding at what level to pitch it. I've heard that some of the people who will be attending are people I already know from Learning Communities sponsored by the system office, in which we've actually been writing OER. I imagine (I hope!) some others will be folks who are just beginning to think about the issue and consider the possibility. So there will be a wide-ish range of familiarity. I've got about 45 minutes, I think, to present and then about 15 to answer questions. I made a dozen PowerPoint slides for each session. And I have a bunch of websites to show, of my OERs and other sites like OTL and OpenStax.
As I was pulling together the conclusion of the Z-Degree talk, I grabbed a pdf of the Minnesota State system map to use on a slide. I've hear it said it's the second-largest state system in the US, after SUNY. As I was looking at that map, it was pretty clear to me that what we need is for someone to travel around to all these places and evangelize for Open Ed. Meet with people on each campus who are excited about OER and increasing affordability for students. And then publicize those meetings. Put them up on a podcast or on YouTube. We spend so much time at our campuses, thinking about posting cute Instas or TikToks to make places like BSU seem like fun communities for students. There's nothing wrong with that. But we should also put some effort into making a name for ourselves as an affordable education where people are working toward that goal.
BC Campus in British Columbia is known globally as a leader in Open Ed. That didn't happen by accident. A lot of work went into that. But they also talked about it constantly. Said "we are BC Campus. We do OER." Minnesota State serves 300,000 students annually. It would be great to make Z-Degrees available to a few thousand of them. If the average student pays $1,250 annually for textbooks, that could add up. A thousand getting a Z-Degree would save $1,250,000. But imagine if by shooting for that goal we were able to reduce textbook cost for ALL students by an average of -- something modest like 10%. That would be $125, times 300,000 students. $37,500,000. Annually. Seems like a worthy goal.