Embedded Files
The decision to use OER can occur via a single course or 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 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.
Openness
Openness
There are challenges to OER, such as inequitable access to technology and resources among students and institutions.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. 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!
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 & Openness blog.
As OER users and promoters, faculty can work to resolve the known inequities that exist in educational resources. Creating or revising OER allows educators to 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redesign must include funding to print textbooks that often fail to reflect student diversity and quickly become outdated, OER could instead be used to give students access to high-quality learning materials that educators could then continue to adapt as understandings of student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
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