1 Megan Ashcraft – Student Outreach Through Talkback Boards
Goal:
The goal of this project is to determine student’s perceptions on the cost of class materials like textbooks when contrasted against personal needs like rent, groceries, and other bills
Smart Goals Outline:
Smart Goal: To introduce the idea of OER to students at Pima Downtown and Pima West via talk back board
Specific Steps I Can Take:
- Getting in touch with both campuses
- Gathering prompt Ideas
- Attending to the boards semi-regularly
Potential Collaborators & Resources:
- Campus Librarians
- UAL UX designers (to ask how they find success with their boards)
- Other interns
Potential Barriers:
- Area Permissions
- Campus availability
Questions/Issues I Need to Resolve:
- Possible Vandalism
- Joke responses
Desired Outcome(s):
- To have students thinking about how OER can positively affect their education
Implementation:
Set Up:
To begin, I created Zero Cost Flyer. This flyer shows students how to find Pima Community College classes with zero textbook costs using the course catalog. I also created two TalkBack Prompts to be interchangeable on the boards that require the student to self-reflect about their college expenses. By combining to the Zero Cost flyer and self-reflection prompts, I hope for students to become aware of their current college expenses and how picking classes that use zero-cost materials like Open Education Resources can create room within their budgets.
I contacted both Emily Besich and Christopher Schipper, the Heads of the Downtown and West Campus Libraries respectively, about the possibility of posting the flyer and prompts at each location. Once they agreed, I was able to visit each library to put up the prompts.
Downtown Campus Before: “What would you have bought instead of textbooks?”
Downtown Campus after: 55 total responses
Downtown Campus pt. 2: “How much did you spend on textbooks this semester”
Before: (image not available)
After: 2 total responses
West Campus Before: “How much did you spend on textbooks this semester?”*
*The one response on the board for $185 was written by me as an example and will be deleted from the data
West Campus After: 2 total responses
Data:
Prompt 1:
The prompt I presented to the Downtown Campus library patrons was “What would you have bought instead of textbooks?”. I presented this prompt to get an idea of where students personal priorities lie when compared to having to buy materials for class. I received 55 responses varying in seriousness. As expected, there were six answers that were off topic in nature so I have excluded them from the main comparison of data for the purposes of the assignment.
The data showed a great variance in the needs of students, yet each response is valid in its own right. For every “candy & chips” post-it there was a “food and gas” response. A few that stood out are:
“gas & new clothes for my daughter”
“I would have paid off some of my existing debt.”
“I would buy my younger siblings all the things they ask me to buy for them when I have no money in my pockets”
Prompt 2:
The prompt I presented to the West Campus Library patrons was “How much did you spend on textbooks this year?”. I only received one response on this board, I believe this was due to the location of the board and it not being visible to library patrons unless they went looking for it.
The one response I received was:
“$125 [for 1]”
This price is around 44% of the national average costs for the amount of money students spend on textbooks per academic year according to educationdata.org.
I had similar results at the Downtown Campus when I posted the same prompt. I received two responses:
“None because I forgot to buy them”
“ZERO: But the free eText is full of typos!”
These responses are concerning. The first response is vague but one possibility for forgetting to buy the textbook could have been that at the time of enrollment or at the beginning of class they did not have the financial ability to buy them. The second response is very concerning, we want to be supplying our students with high quality materials and typos indicate a lack of quality. The student left no indication of which eText they were using but hopefully they informed their professor of the mistakes and they can either be corrected or replaced with a better quality text.
I believe the lack of responses on this board was due to the timing of the prompt. This board was up from mid-November to early December. It is likely that students would have forgotten the costs of their textbooks by the time November came around. To remedy this in the future, putting this prompt up earlier in the semester may be more beneficial for data collection and student engagement.
Internship Final Thoughts
I thoroughly enjoyed this internship. Through it I have been able to hone my understanding of Open Education Resources, join conferences and fundamentals courses, and create my own student engagement activity through a venue I have never taken before. I have been able to make connections to the great world of librarianship, academia, and OER through this internship, met others in the field and created a network from that. I will value the skills I have learned from this internship for years to come!
Working with Chelsea James on this internship was an incredible experience. I loved being able to bounce ideas off of her with her full support for what ever I wanted or needed to do to gain good experience in my field. I was also able to meet with her to discuss OER careers and what it means to take on a project as big as Open Education Resources. I also enjoyed working with my fellow interns throughout the semester. Even with the majority of them being remote students I still felt connected to them and to our community through them. Pippa Thorogood-McLennon, Samuel Hickcox, and I have submitted a proposal to next years OERizona Conference in February to discuss our internship with the community!
