Invitation to Join in Two Surveys

[Robin Donaldson]

Make sure your students’, faculties’, and administrators’ voices are heard!  The Florida Distance Learning Consortium will administer two surveys. One is for college and university students on textbooks, open textbooks, and OpenCourseWare (OCW). The other survey is for faculty and administrators on digital textbooks, open textbooks, open educational resources (OERs), and OCW. These will be administered to all of Florida’s 28 public colleges and 11 state universities. This is our second round of these surveys, and we used the data from the first round (download the student survey report) to improve the items for this round.

We would be pleased to administer the same survey to other states, countries, or institutions so our
community could gain a global, national, and state understanding of the awareness and use of OERs and OCW. In the interest of openness and free sharing of research data, we would make the raw data available for other researchers, as well as the analysis of the aggregated data for a national or worldwide perspective. Participating institutions would be provided with their raw data and our analysis methodology. Our goal is to administer these surveys annually, worldwide.

We are currently working on the process for making the surveys available to other institutions. To
accommodate the schedules of various institutions and our grant deadlines, our goal is to enable other institutions to administer the surveys as early as December 2011 and as late as the end of March 2012. The surveys are part of our Open Access Textbook project, supported by the Fund for the Improvement of
Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), to develop a national model for open access textbooks with the eventual goal of making open textbooks available for the 50 most attended general education courses. We are working with the University Press of Florida and an international group of over 20 university presses toward that goal. Institution representatives who would like to take part in these surveys or interested university presses are welcome to contact us. 

David W. Nelson is the Project Manager ([e-mail]) and I, Robin Donaldson ([e-mail]) am the Project Director. We look forward to working with
anyone who wants to take us up on our offer to administer the surveys.

Robin Donaldson, Ph.D
Florida Distance Learning Consortium
http://rdonaldson.com

The Orange Grove, Florida’s Digital Repository
http://florida.theorangegrove.org/