Statement of Purpose

The Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success (DOERS) collaborative is a group of public higher education systems and organizations that are committed to supporting student success by promoting free, customizable open educational resources (OER). Launched in 2018, DOERS helps member organizations implement, scale, and sustain OER by advancing research and policy, sharing tools and learnings, and showing how OER can foster student success for all.

DOERS positions member organizations to realize the promise of high-quality, accessible, and sustainable OER implementations to achieve student success at scale. Leveraging the collective strength of the collaborative, DOERS members build capacity to take established open education initiatives to scale and shape national and state innovation. 

​As a group, DOERS members believe in supporting student success through the implementation of free openly-licensed alternatives to high-priced, all-rights-reserved instructional materials. We recognize that the choice of instructional materials remains the purview of the educators, and that OER are an increasingly viable option for educators seeking to prepare and curate relevant and engaging course materials.

DOERS positions member organizations to realize the promise of high-quality, accessible, and sustainable OER implementations to achieve student success at scale. 

Guiding Principles

The following principles guide DOERS' work and the efforts of the public higher education systems and statewide/provincewide OER initiatives that make up its members. As part of DOERS, member organizations endeavor to:​

• to develop a clear rationale for adopting and scaling OER as an integral component of student success;
• to share learning, tools, and resources within the collaborative and with higher education organizations and the broader OER community as appropriate;
• to collaborate in cross-state/province projects to advance student success, research, and innovation in open education;
• to require all newly created resources supported by OER-designated public funds to be openly licensed, easily discoverable, and fully accessible, and encourage affiliated institutions, systems and organizations to do the same;
• to engage, at the system/state/province level, with OER service providers that provide products that are fully accessible, provide day-one access, allow students to retain content, and make content openly and freely available outside of their platforms, and encourage affiliated institutions within their systemwide/statewide/provincewide initiatives to do the same;
• to drive OER innovation to enhance the higher education ecosystem by identifying gaps and coordinating the development of new content, ensuring discoverability, informing development of platforms and analytics, and developing partnerships with OER vendors and service providers;
• to inform institution, system, state/province, and federal policy with respect to the implementation and use of OER.
  
  

DOERS members collaborate in cross-state/province projects to advance student success, research, and innovation in open education.

Working Definitions

For the purposes of this Collaborative:

Open Educational Resources (OER) are defined as instructional materials that are fully accessible and reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (adapted from the Hewlett Foundation definition of OER).

Fully accessible refers to the practice of designing learning materials that can be navigated and understood by all users, including those who have visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive disabilities (adapted from the National Federation of the Blind and the Rouse and Souza definitions of accessibility).

History

In 2017, the University System of Maryland, City University of New York, and State University of New York announced major expansions of their OER initiatives across all public postsecondary institutions in Maryland and New York. Leaders from these three large-scale OER initiatives met to discuss how they could further advance the role university system and statewide higher education OER initiatives play in scaling and sustaining academic innovation related to OER. Out of these conversations, DOERS recognized that other higher education organizations would find a network of experienced peers to be a valuable resource in their own efforts to advance the implementation of OER programs at their institutions and in their areas. With the support of system offices and state/province governments, and the goal of developing a self-sustaining business model for OER, these initiatives promise to reach impressive scale and improve access, affordability, and achievement for millions of college students.​​​

With the support of their state/province governments, these initiatives promise to reach impressive scale and improve access, affordability, and achievement for millions of college students.