Open@VT
Open Access, Open Data, and Open Educational Resources
OER and Open Textbooks included in Virginia Tech University-level Promotion & Tenure Guidelines, starting FY2025-26
In the course of their careers, if not daily, higher education faculty navigate layers of reward and incentive structures. In an effort to productively expend limited time, attention, and resources we faculty like everyone else must choose what to prioritize and what to decline. Some activities are clearly defined and have clear consequences–positive and negative: Meeting the terms of employment contracts, producing grant-funded deliverables, showing up to teach classes and attend meetings, and working at the level required to meet promotion and tenure goals. For other activities the subsequent reward structures are more intrinsic and integrated; still highly valuable and critical for faculty work, some activities’ external benefits are not as obviously defined: gaining the respect of colleagues, teaching effectively, gaining political mastery, managing one’s self well, expanding one’s capacity in their field, collaborating across and beyond the institution, mentoring students, and service to one’s institution and community. Personal goals and commitments outside of work– as well as the need to find meaning in it all–also play a role in faculty decisions.
Valuing OER for Promotion and Tenure
As pre-tenure and other busy faculty may be hesitant to author open educational resources (OER) when the relative value of the work is unclear with regard to tenure and promotion, efforts to develop clear valuation for OER are especially helpful for pre-tenure and yet-to-be-promoted faculty (Skidmore & Provida, 2019).
University-level clarification valuing OER contributions by authors and adapters follows a rising trend of engagement by professional associations with regard to open educational practices, for example: the American Institute of Mathematics Open Textbook [review] Initiative (AIM, n.d.), guidance for preparing for ABET accreditation campus visits (ASEE, n.d.), and creation of professional association finding guides for open educational resources (Association of Leadership Educators, n.d.; ASEE, n.d.).
Open education practitioners have long highlighted the lack of explicit inclusion of OER in tenure and promotion guidelines (Walz et al, 2016, p.25). Internationally, some institutions have explicitly included OER and OEP in tenure and promotion guidelines across areas of research, teaching, and service (Hendricks, et al., 2001; Engle, 2023). Others have prioritized methods for communicating methods for faculty self-advocacy, generally in the forms of faculty lived-experiences (McKinney, 2024) and development of matrixes (DOERS3, n.d.; Affordable Learning Georgia, n.d.).
Faculty decisions to engage in Open Educational Practices (OEP)
Subject to the same pressures as other opportunities under consideration, faculty have decisions with regard to engagement in open educational practices (OEP).
| Open educational practices (OEP) is a broad descriptor of practices that include the creation, use, and reuse of open educational resources (OER) as well as open pedagogies and open sharing of teaching practices. (Cronin, 2017) |
The decision to engage with open educational practices can be incremental:
- – It can include actions as small as engaging in a conversation, attending a workshop, engaging in independent learning, or searching for open educational resources;
- – Within a course, engagement OEP may include small or large changes such as converting a highly-directive assignment to an equally productive and more engaging student-led activity, using portions of an openly-licensed resource instead of a fee-based resource, or listing a vetted open textbook on one’s syllabus as an equivalent option to a more costly commercial textbook;
- – Larger changes to courses may involve redesigning courses to enhance student agency and hands-on learning, or replacing fee-based course materials with zero-cost to students openly-licensed resources. For example, some faculty may choose to invest time in curating existing openly-licensed materials into a coherent whole that fits their course and share it with the world. Others may choose to solo or collaboratively-author original course materials and release them under an open license such as a Creative Commons license;
- – And, some faculty and graduate students may choose to conduct and present research on teaching and learning related to openly-licensed course materials.
Support for faculty engagement with Open Educational Resources (OER)
While Creative Commons licenses are easy to append to a slide deck, course notes, conference poster, article, book chapter, interactive learning module, or textbook, creation of the learning resource is not that simple. It is decidedly not easy to create well-crafted, lengthy openly-licensed learning resources (Moore & Baker, 2024), more commonly known as open educational resources (OER), open-source textbooks, or open access textbooks. Doing so requires significant effort.
| Open Educational Resources (OER) are freely accessible and publicly available teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with others. Open textbooks are one type of OER. (Definition adapted from the Hewlett Foundation) |
Faculty workloads, time limitations, and resource constraints are significant, leading to many faculty–in my direct experience–being overscheduled. In recognition that faculty time and attention are highly valuable resources, open education practitioners have developed significant strategies and programs to lessen the burden and at least partly compensate faculty engaging in open educational practices. At Virginia Tech and through the Open Education Initiative these have included:
- – Moderated and self-paced learning opportunities;
- – Consultations on copyright, open licensing, project planning, design, publishing, and accessibility;
- – Collaborative grant-writing support;
- – Scaffolded and supportive OER development processes;
- – Grant funds for qualified project-related work (including student workers);
- – Hosting solutions for a wide variety of content types;
- – Usage and self-reported external OER adoption and interest tracking;
- – Support for ancillary development and sharing;
- – Innovative pilot projects to meet faculty and student needs;
- – Opportunities for collaboration in state and national-level supportive initiatives;
- – Management of peer-review, copyediting, and publishing.
| These activities are officially sanctioned by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors in the Virginia Tech Guidelines for Open Educational Resources and Open Textbooks as part of “facilitating the adoption, adaptation, creation, maintenance, and public sharing of Open Educational Resources (OER) and open textbooks by Virginia Tech faculty, staff, and students.” [p1] |
The Virginia Tech Guidelines for Open Educational Resources and Open Textbooks (2020) were approved by the Board of Visitors in June 2020. The guidelines were written through a collaborative process in response to the Virginia General Assembly. (Code of Virginia §23.1-1308, Subpoint E.)
Evaluation Practices for Faculty Tenure and Promotion
Career progress and tenure and promotion processes loom large for faculty at many institutions. In my experience faculty have often wondered aloud about prospective open education-related activities–how their engagement with OEP or OER are perceived by the institution and valued by those reviewing their trajectory at the institution as relates to promotion and tenure. This line of thinking is not unique to Virginia Tech.
Tenure and promotion practices at higher education institutions vary by faculty type, discipline, and institution. As with other large research institutions, at my home institution dossiers for tenure and promotion are evaluated first at a department level, then college level, then university level, and finally make their way (if they have made it through the process that far) to the Board of Visitors for a final decision. The relative valuation of a research/teaching/service contribution can in-practice be valued differently from institution to institution, especially when they have varying classifications and areas of focus (American Council on Education, n.d.). The same is true in comparing Departmental-level review criteria with College-level, then University-level, and Board-of-Visitors-level criteria; Each unit and level has their own tenure and promotion criteria.
Making a case for Open Educational Resources in Tenure and Promotion processes
Over the past several years faculty authors and adapters have made their own case for including OER activities in their promotion and tenure documentation. They have requested information from me regarding the impact of their open educational resources for various faculty-evaluation procedures: faculty activity reports, award nominations, tenure, promotion, and emeritus dossiers. I have made this data–downloads and views of their created works–available to them, and more. (Data may also include self-reported adoptions by other institutions, geographical distribution of readers, documentation of adapted versions, etc.)
Sources of External Validation
While most of the OER authored or adapted at Virginia Tech has been peer-reviewed, likely the most respected marker of scholarship, not all of the OER coming out of the Open Education Initiative have been externally peer-reviewed. However, as affirmed by recent changes to university-level promotion and tenure guidelines at Virginia Tech (p18 & 19) large numbers of downloads and the widespread adoption and use of OER at other educational institutions and documentation there of can also be viewed as an external source of validation. While not mentioned explicitly in the revised guidelines, awards may play a role in external validation of open educational resources.
Examples (selected)Even before clarification of the guidelines, Virginia Tech faculty have listed OER-engagement activities with their other accomplishments on dossiers for promotion, dossiers to emeritus status, faculty activity reports, and award nominations. For example: Edited Volume
High impact OER (adaptations)
Peer-reviewed open textbooks
Collection of Musical Scores
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Changes to University-level Tenure and Promotion Guidelines and Templates
In an attempt to clarify where the institution stands with regard to valuing the impact of open educational resources Virginia Tech recently amended university-level promotion and tenure guidelines to indicating where on dossiers, and with what supporting data externally-validated open educational resources may be presented.
There are three additions (highlighted below) to Virginia Tech’s University-level Promotion and Tenure Guidelines:
Heading: Research and Creative Activities
Subheading: List of publications and creative scholarship
- The following phrase is added to “Textbooks authored” and “Textbooks edited”:
“(including peer-reviewed open [access]* textbooks)”
- The following publication type is added, with a note indicating the type of supporting documentation allowed:
“Open educational resources (OER) beyond peer-reviewed open [access]* textbooks, original or adapted, and shared beyond the instructor’s own courses. Supporting quantitative data may be included (e.g. times cited, downloads, and external adoptions) for open [access]* textbooks and other open access educational resources to demonstrate impact.”
Heading: Intellectual Properties
- To Software, the clarifying phrase is added “(including open source software)”
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*There are several classifications of faculty. The word “access” is included only in the guidelines for Teaching and Research Faculty.
These clarifications align with the Virginia Tech Guidelines for Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Textbooks (2020) which takes a stance in encouraging OER and open textbooks, stating:
For OER to be more widely adopted at Virginia Tech, we need to develop an institutional perspective on their role in teaching and scholarship. It is critical that faculty and administrators resolve concerns about OER, such as their quality or impact compared to traditional means of disseminating scholarship, among other issues. Broad agreement on how the Virginia Tech academic community views OER is a first step in developing guidelines for the coordinated evaluation of OER in promotion and/or tenure cases at the department, college, and University levels.
The Open Education Initiative (and this author) looks forward to continuing the conversation regarding open educational resources and their relevance to tenure and promotion processes at the university.
Advancing Learning
The University Libraries at Virginia Tech offers Virginia Tech faculty, staff, and students a variety of support and consulting services through its Open Education Initiative.
- – Self-directed learning
- – Mediated sessions via the PDN system and other training opportunities
- – Consultations on finding, adaptating, and planning OER projects, copyright, open licensing, design, publishing, and accessibility;
- – Collaborative grant-writing support;
- – Scaffolded and supportive OER development processes;
- – Grant funds for qualified VT project-related work and referrals to external grant opportunities;
- – Hosting solutions including Pressbooks, VTechWorks, and others for a wide variety of content types;
- – Metrics and data on Usage and OER adoption and interest tracking;
- – Expertise regarding accessibility of STEM content;
- – Research collaborations and in-class research / student focus groups;
- – Support for ancillary development and sharing, including homework software alternatives;
- – Innovative pilot projects to meet faculty and student needs;
- – Publishing referrals;
- – Opportunities for collaboration in state and national-level supportive initiatives.
Questions? Please contact us at openeducation@vt.edu
The Open Education Initiative at Virginia Tech (OEI) for its first ten years (2013-2024) focused on awareness, discovery, development, adaptation, peer-review and mediated student review, layout & design, accessibility markup, publication, and broad distribution of open educational resources in conjunction with its grant program. As core publishing processes and staff developed by the OEI were transferred to Virginia Tech Publishing in 2024 in an effort to form a university press, OEI continues to offer grants and now focuses on outreach, project acquisition, and content development support for peer-reviewed publications, and author and publication support for course materials that are not peer-reviewed or otherwise deemed ineligible as a university press title or project. Many of OEI’s published works are introduced via the Open@VT Blog. The Press’s “Open Education Series” links to works developed and produced through the Open Education Initiative for which Virginia Tech Publishing served in a capacity as copyeditor coordinator and print-on-demand coordination prior to 2024. From August 2025 Virginia Tech Publishing and/or Virginia Tech Press is the named the exclusive publisher and is responsible for publication steps starting with peer review.
For the most complete list of past and forthcoming publications created through by OEI grantees, see the Virginia Tech OER Showcase.
