TAP Blog
OER: Increasing Academic Freedom for Faculty & Student Learning
By Barbara Illowsky, Ph.D.
In this post, Dr. Barbara Illowsky shares insights into affordances of OER, in addition to affordability, that can support academic freedom.
When I first became involved with OER in 2006, and continuing to this day, my main interest has been in saving students money. I strive to help students obtain their educational goals. I am deeply concerned about students who cannot afford their educational materials. They are at a disadvantage to those students who come prepared to learn with their course materials on Day One of the course. Often, by the time their, if any, financial aid arrives, these students are too far behind in the course to catch up and succeed.
After one to two years involved in the OER movement, I learned from others, especially Dr. Judy Baker, who was then Dean of Distance Learning at Foothill College, Dr. Lisa Petrides, the founder and CEO of ISKME, Dr. David Wiley, then at Brigham Young University, and Dr. Cable Green, Director of Open Content at Creative Commons, about the beauty of the Open movement to increase academic freedom, student-centered teaching and learning, and innovations in pedagogy. Yes, my – and many faculty members’ – main goal is to save students money, but we can also customize our open textbooks, insert our content, and remix content from several sources. In other words, we can make our courses our own instead of teaching “from the textbook.”
Yes, my – and many faculty members’ – main goal is to save students money,
but we can also customize our open textbooks, insert our content,
and remix content from several sources. In other words, we can make
our courses our own instead of teaching “from the textbook.”
When faculty claim that they don’t want to use an open textbook because “I don’t have to - I have academic freedom to choose my textbook,” I explain how the Open movement increases their academic freedom. When inserting content with a Creative Commons open license, faculty no longer risk violating copyright laws by copying commercial publishers’ content. Faculty can make the course truly their own. In fact, as an open textbook author, I’m excited when I learn how other faculty customize their course materials with either their own or found open content. That action can promote active learning and student interest. As for myself, I sometimes adopt colleagues’ additions and content to improve my teaching and my students’ learning.
Michael Polanyi, who argued that academic freedom was a fundamental necessity for the production of true knowledge. 1933. Original author is unknown, Manchester archives. Public Domain.
As I wrote and published in 2015, open textbooks, such as Introductory Statistics by OpenStax (disclosure - I am a co-author), with a CC BY license led to numerous innovations I would not have been able to develop myself. For example, Dr. Larry Green, faculty at Lake Tahoe Community College, created a multimedia version of the textbook, hosted in LibreTexts. Anyone worldwide can access Dr. Green’s version, adopt it, and modify it for their use. His version leads to increased student interactivity and faculty freedom.
WebAssign became the first commercial company to create a homework grading and learning system for the textbook. That system increased student interactivity and learning by providing immediate feedback. Faculty could customize homework and assessments to meet their needs. Apple added highlighting and formative assessments for the open textbook using its iPads. And now MathGPT offers outstanding AI tutoring, increasing learning 24/7 in a patient, comprehensive environment.
Another of the greatest non-financial advantages of open textbooks is the movement around developing culturally relevant practices.
Another of the greatest non-financial advantages of open textbooks is the movement around developing culturally relevant practices. When you examine Introductory Statistics you can find several such practices. Many of the word problems (starting with #88) in the hypothesis testing chapter were written by my students. These students were so excited to have their work become part of an open textbook that future students would learn from. When I was teaching the Binomial Distribution around 1990, it was just around the time of the Vietnamese celebration Tết, and my students brought in a gambling game they played during the holiday.
Bầu cua tôm cá is a Vietnamese gambling game that involves using three dice. It is traditionally played during Tết. Image created 2014. Public Domain.
I realized that the game followed the binomial distribution. The students and I collectively wrote a lab that later became part of the textbook. The above examples are practices that would later be identified as part of the open pedagogy movement. When we wrote the textbook we integrated the word problems and lab to enhance our students’ learning. Another example is the Open for Antiracism (OFAR) program that CCCOER teaches and sponsors. Faculty work together to learn and implement anti-racist pedagogy into their curriculum. Again, the open movement provides the structure for such activities. As far as future benefits for students and faculty coming out of the Open Movement, read my next post!
Dr. Illowsky is co-author of groundbreaking statistics textbooks published by OpenStax, the first of which is considered the first open, accessible textbook in the U.S. She has served on the international Board of Directors for the OpenEducation Consortium (now Open Education Global). Dr. Illowsky has been a mathematics and statistics professor at De Anza College since 1989. She is a past president of several organizations, including the California Mathematics Council, Community Colleges. She has been on loan to many projects, including the CCC Chancellor’s Office and the CCC Online Education Initiative as its Chief Academic Affairs Officer. Dr. Illowsky was the inaugural OER and Innovation Fellow for the Michelson 20MM Foundation. She spends her days advocating for and promoting adoption of OER/ZTC and mentoring colleges on their paths to reducing textbook costs for students and increasing success in mathematics programs.