Module 3: Why OER?

Understanding the why behind adopting OER

Before we discuss the benefits of OER in detail, please take a few minutes to watch this video from Abbey Elder, Open Access & Scholarly Communications Librarian at Iowa State University. The video reviews the definition of OER but also provides a broad overview of why OER is an effective solution in addressing student barriers to high-quality learning materials. The video also provides examples of how faculty can use OER to enhance their teaching and improve student learning.

You’ll notice that this module contains many external links to additional readings on the impact and benefits of OER. Take the time to read these resources to explore further the concepts and points presented in this module. There is no quiz at the end of this module; your activity is to explore the supplemental reading. 

Benefits for Students

Using OER can both provide tremendous cost savings for students and impact student success and completion rates. The cost of textbooks can be a huge financial burden on students, which not only affects student success, but could also delay graduation for students who are taking fewer classes per term because of that cost, further increasing financial costs for students over time. OER provide students with day-one access to free course materials, and research reviewed by the Open Education Group shows that most students perform as well or better using OER course materials compared with students using traditional textbooks.

The Florida Virtual Campus’ 2016 and 2018 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey demonstrates that the cost of commercial textbooks continues to negatively impact student access, success, and completion.

Student engagement and advocacy are another key benefit to OER. Including your students’ voices in the conversation surrounding affordability and inclusive course materials is critical. Consider reaching out to your Student Government Association and other student groups to get them involved. National groups like Student PIRG have an active campaign on textbook affordability with resources and strategies for students to use. Faculty and administrators can also invite students to serve on planning committees related to OER and textbook affordability. Other ideas for student engagement and advocacy can be found in these resources: 

• OpenStax National Student Internship Program

• CCCOER Student Planning

• BCCampus OER Student Toolkit - an advocacy guide for student leaders

• #TextbookBroke campaign on Twitter

Benefits for Faculty

Imagine being able to edit, modify, update, and improve your course materials so the learning outcomes are met and the course material’s content is “exactly the way you want it.” OER allows for this!  

The faculty member in this video shares his experience with learning material he’s curated over the years and why he chose to adopt OER. Can you relate? {view snippet 0:00 - 1:40}

Faculty using OER enjoy great freedom in selecting course materials that they customize to fit the specific needs of their students and the goals of their classes. Since most OER permit adaptation, educators are free to edit, reorder, delete from, or remix OER materials. OER provide clearly defined rights to users, so educators are not faced with interpreting Fair Use and TEACH Act guidelines. 

Open educational resources also provide increased opportunities for faculty to engage in open pedagogical practices with their students. As mentioned above, students play a vital role in OER. Student involvement also creates effective and successful open education programs at your institution. Open pedagogy focuses on instructional approaches which allow students to use, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute open content. In other words, students move from knowledge consumers to knowledge creators. The ability for students to engage more actively with the OER is a key pedagogical benefit for faculty and students - one that commercially published copyrighted course materials do not provide. To explore the power of open pedagogy further, take a look at the recent publication Open Pedagogy Approaches: Faculty, Library, and Student Collaborations. This comprehensive collection is full of practical tips, ideas, and inspiring stories for faculty. 

Other key benefits to faculty include:

Use, Improve, and Share

• • Save time and energy by adapting or revising resources that have already been created 

  • Tailor resources to fit specific context within your courses and research

  • Expand interdisciplinary teaching by integrating resources from multiple disciplines

Network and Collaborate with Peers (professional development considerations)

• • Access educational resources that have been peer-reviewed by other experts in your field

  • Explore reviews and annotations that provide more in-depth knowledge of the resource

  • Collaborate on creating new resources that can be used within or across disciplines

Lower Costs and Improve Access to Information

• • Reduce the cost of course materials

  • Enable all students to have equal access to course materials

  • Provide students with the opportunity to explore course content fully before enrolling

Benefits to Institutions

The decision to use OER can occur via a single departmental adoption or it can happen on a college or university-wide scale. Both of these examples require support and investment at an institutional level. This commitment has benefits to institutions as well. For example, OER can increase student retention, progress, and completion by decreasing student costs. Additionally, a recent report from Achieving the Dream, OER at Scale: The Academic and Economic Outcomes of Achieving the Dream’s OER Degree Initiative, reveals that when institutions strategically support and provide OER courses for students there is opportunity for financial return on investment for the institution. Students who enrolled in OER courses tended to enroll in more course credits than students who enrolled in non-OER courses, thus generating additional tuition revenue.

OER: Equity & Openness

When discussing open educational resources and exploring their use and benefits, remember that access and equity are not the same.  This video, Equity in Open Education, explores how equity intersects with open education.

The video above references challenges to OER, such as inequitable access to technology and resources among students and institutions. In addition to this barrier, there are other challenges related to equity in open educational resources. While open educational resources and open practices present opportunities to create and share diverse and inclusive resources, inequities in OER exist. For example, the open community is lacking in diverse voices who author OER as well as advocate for and lead Open Education practices and policies. There also are known difficulties finding openly licensed content that is culturally relevant and inclusive. Representation matters and there is work to do in this area! 

One groundbreaking contribution to broadening representation and highlighting the work of diverse leaders of the Open Education movement is OERigin Stories: Pathways to the Open Movement, edited by Ursula Pike. Created by Pike as part of SPARC’s Open Education Leadership Program, OERigin Stories explores the history of six women of color working in Open Education. As Pike states in the openly-licensed resource, her interviews with these women “illustrate that there is no single story for Open Education, especially when using OER to address long-standing equity, diversity, and inclusion issues in higher education.” 

The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) has collected resources and articles exploring OER through the lens of equity, diversity, and inclusion. These resources are included (and continue to expand) on their Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion blog.  

As you learn more about OER, consider how open education practices and the use of OER can enhance your own teaching practices and learning materials to become more equitable, diverse, and inclusive. The DOERS3 Collaborative, a group of public higher education systems and organizations promoting OER creation, created the Equity Through OER Rubric, a comprehensive tool for assessing and improving an institution’s use of OER to advance equity, diversity, and inclusion. As an OER champion, work consciously to resolve the known inequities that exist in open educational resources. Make them truly culturally relevant, inclusive, and representative. 

...OER provide a unique opportunity for educators to access learning materials, and then tailor them to the specific needs of their classroom. This is particularly important for teaching diverse groups of students. Where culturally-responsive curriculum redesign must include funding to print textbooks that often fail to reflect student diversity and quickly become outdated, OER could instead be used to give students access to high-quality learning materials that educators could then continue to adapt as understandings of student needs and identities change. 

~ Prescott, S., Muñiz, J. & Ishmael, K., 2018

The Value of Open Demonstrated During a Pandemic & Rapid Shift in Teaching & Learning 

Beginning in early 2020 the world experienced a public health pandemic. Globally, researchers frantically turned to data, research, and reports to better understand the novel coronavirus and find a vaccine. In many cases research existed behind paywalls making critical scientific data and research inaccessible or unaffordable to researchers. Members of the scientific community responded by sharing their pre-print publications and datasets online (often via Twitter). Individuals used such hashtags as #preprint, #openaccess, #openscience #opendata, and #covid19 to share their research openly. Other examples of communities sharing research and data during this crisis include the VODAN Network (Virus Outbreak Datanetwork), ASAPbio, and the WHO’s global research on COVID-19 database. 

As the impact of the pandemic grew, schools around the world from K-12 to colleges and universities closed their campuses. Institutions rushed to transition to remote learning and services in a matter of weeks. For students who previously relied on college and university libraries for access to physical copies of commercial textbooks (in collections or on course reserve), this access no longer was available. Within days of institutions announcing their transition to online learning, commercial publishers and vendors aggressively marketed their resources and products to students and faculty as freely available for a limited-time (often with other hidden restrictions). Libraries responded by reaching out to faculty and students to connect them to freely available open educational resources or library-licensed content. An example of this communication is articulated in this blog post from Florida State University Libraries, Supporting Students Through Open and Affordable Materials. 

2020 and 2021 were a time of radical adjustment for individuals and institutions. For many colleges and universities, remote-only learning continued into the Summer and Fall 2021 semesters, often blending remote (synchronous and asynchronous), hybrid, hyflex, and face-to-face instruction and learning. The reliance on flexible, affordable, digital course materials still exists. Publishers, who early on offered limited-time free access to textbooks and course materials , eliminated this option several months after they offered it. This added to the financial burden for students, many of whom lost their jobs or were unable to work during the pandemic. A transition to open educational resources and a commitment to making open the default for research and education, provides students with access to online course materials which are always free and affordable.

Open education is not a short-term fix to a passing problem—it is a long-term solution to ensuring equitable, inclusive access to effective educational resources and learning opportunities.  ~ Vézina & Green, 2020

Bayview Analytics released a report in 2020 titled Digital Texts in the Time of COVID: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2020. This report provides a comprehensive overview of how faculty selected, used, and adapted their course material during this rapid time of transition to remote-only learning. 

Explore Further

Additional research and videos discussing the impact and benefits of OER for faculty and students are linked below.

Bali, M., Cronin, C., Czerniewicz, L., DeRosa, R., and Jhangiani, R. (2020, August 17) Open at the Margins. Rebus Community.

Carpenter, F., Davis, W.P. & Sicre, D. (2017, November 15) How OER can Support Student Equity and Diversity. CCCOER Webinar. 

Colvard, N., Watson, C. & Park, H. (2018) The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Student Success Metrics. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 30 (2), 262-276.

Garth-McCullough, R. & Sebastian, R. (2020 November 9) Using Open Content to Create a Culturally Relevant Classroom. OpenEdu20 Conference Presentation.

Grimaldi, P., Basu Mallick D., Waters A., Baraniuk, R. (2019, March 6)  Do open educational resources improve student learning? Implications of the access hypothesis. PLOS|One

Hilton, J. (2016) Open educational resources and college textbook choices: a review of research on efficacy and perceptions. Education Tech Research and Development, 64(4), 573 – 590.

• • • This video synthesizes the research results discussed in John Hilton’s article above,  A Review of the Effectiveness & Perceptions of Open Educational Resources As Compared to Textbooks

Reynado, Kharl. (2018, October 11) OER Diversity Discourse: Bring in the Student Advocates. OpenStax Blog.

Seaman, J.E. and Seaman, J. (2021) Digital Texts in the Time of COVID: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2020. Bay View Analytics.

Seaman, J. E. and Seaman, J. (2020) Inflection Point: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2019. Bay View Analytics. 

Vézina, B. and Green, C. (2020, March 31) Education in Times of Crisis and Beyond: Maximizing Copyright Flexibilities. Creative Commons Blog.

Attributions

Information for this module was consulted and adapted from

"An Introduction to Open Educational Resources" by Abbey Elder is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"Leveraging the Benefits of OER" in Welcome to Understanding OER by SUNY OER Services is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"Open Education" by SPARC is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"Why Open Education?" by CCCOER is licensed under CC BY 4.0

“Why Open Education Matters Even More” by Dr. DeRionne P. Pollard is licensed under CC BY 4.0