SPARC OER Leadership Pilot - Capstone Project Proposal

For my capstone project, I will develop an OER grant program for faculty interested in incorporating open resources and practices into one of their courses. The grant program will be jointly run by the library and Gettysburg’s Johnson Center for Creative Teaching and Learning, a partnership which I’m hoping will facilitate an emphasis on pedagogical innovation made possible by the use of openly licensed resources. This pilot program will offer two grants, likely of $500 each, and recipients will be supported by the Scholarly Communications department in consultation with the director of the Johnson Center.

I intend to spend next semester pitching ideas to stakeholders and preparing the necessary documentation, from program goals and application instructions to eligibility requirements and FAQ. Two other grants offered jointly by the Johnson Center and the library will serve as my guides, but I hope to model our program on successful ones at other schools and especially at liberal arts colleges. The grant programs at Macalester and Davidson, as well as some at large universities like Iowa State, Missouri, Florida State, and Oklahoma, contain elements which I believe would work well at Gettysburg. The pilot would begin in Fall of 2018 with applications ideally opening at the end of next semester.

By the end of next semester I will have created an online presence for the grant, completed creating all the necessary forms, and finalized the basic concepts and goals of the program in conjunction with the Director of Scholarly Communications and the Director of the Johnson Center. I also intend to gather data from the bookstore and registrar that will illustrate the need for more OER on campus, especially in certain disciplines and courses where they can potentially have the most impact in terms of student savings and improved learning outcomes. 

Currently there are a handful of faculty at Gettysburg College who are utilizing open educational resources (OER) in their courses. In large part, this has resulted from continued outreach efforts by the Scholarly Communications Department (ScholComm) of Musselman Library over the last few years. While interested faculty currently are invited to contact ScholComm for assistance finding and using OER, there is no formal support program in place offering funding and guidance. There is also no mechanism for assessing the impact of OER use on book costs, class dynamics, and student learning outcomes, nor is there a platform through which Gettysburg faculty can share stories about their experiences with OER and thereby foster a community of practice on campus.

My capstone project will seek to achieve four goals:

Goal 1: Design an OER Grant program that is well suited to a liberal arts college environment in terms of its emphasis on individualized learning, small class sizes, and undergraduate research.

Actions:

• Research programs underway at other liberal arts colleges

• Talk to faculty already utilizing OER

• Compile a list of open educational practices and sustainable assignments from across 

        the three divisions upon which faculty can model their own efforts.

Goal 2: Create a web presence for the grant and write all the necessary documentation, from application guidelines to assessment strategies, as well as a step-by-step guide.

Actions:

• Determine a proper platform (e.g. libguide, page on CMS, Moodle site)

• Draft copy for each document and add content to guide each day/week

• Discuss criteria, guidelines, and general structure with JCCTL

• Ask colleagues to comment on documentation and make revisions

• Once close to completion, run the basic idea by faculty for feedback

Goal 3: Establish a working relationship between ScholComm and the Johnson Center for Creative Teaching and Learning in order to promote and support faculty OER efforts at Gettysburg.

Actions:

• Analyze other grants jointly offered by library and JCCTL

• Discuss pedagogical principles with Julie Hendon

• Determine how support will be handled as a team

• Discuss how this grant fits in with the long-term plans and other initiatives of the JCCTL

Goal 4: Craft an advertising and outreach strategy to get word out about the new grant.

Actions:

• Use faculty feedback and interviews with OER users to determine best promotional strategy

• Get faculty with experience using OER to help spread the word

• Employ a multimedia approach including flyers in mailboxes, messages in the daily digest, 

        announcements on the homepages of the library and the JCCTL, as well as targeted emails.

Keys for Sustaining OER Initiatives: Compensation & Recognition

While there is healthy debate about what it takes for an OER initiative to be sustainable, I would argue there are two components that must be present - no matter the underlying model - for there to be interest among faculty year after year: compensation and recognition.

In an excellent study from 2007 entitled "On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education," David Wiley makes the point that compensation can and should take forms other than money (6-7). Providing release time or credit towards tenure and promotion are a couple of ways that colleges and universities can reward time and energy spent creating OER or new courses based around them. For many already over-burdened and over-scheduled faculty, these are much more attractive than a stipend that traditionally ranges from $500 to $2000. A stipend is irrelevant if the recipient has no free time to do the work. Furthermore, faculty without tenure must know that their department will value their work with OER in some fashion when it comes to their review for promotion and tenure. 

Once the OER is created or the course redesigned, faculty must be recognized for their work in ways that will lead their peers to see what they've done and hear how it went. There is no better method for recruiting new faculty to an OER initiative than having their peers share their experiences and talk about how OER have helped them and their students. As a condition of participation within the initiative, faculty should be required to take part in a video interview wherein they answer a series of questions designed to help others understand the process, recognize the benefits, and think through whether incorporating OER would be right for one of their courses. These interviews should go on the school's website and be released in conjunction with an event, attended by high-ranking administrators like the provost, during which the participating faculty join a few of their students for a conversation about the impact and potential of OER in the undergraduate classroom. The higher the profile of the event, the more likely it is that faculty will pay attention and desire to be included themselves.

Through a combination of non-monetary compensation and campus-wide recognition, OER initiatives can be sustained without a major hit to the budget. While other factors are undoubtedly important, the presence of these two will go a long way towards ensuring a sustainable initiative.

References

David Wiley, "On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education,"  The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2007. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/38645447.pdf

Open to Creativity: OEP in the College Classroom

There are many good definitions and explanations of “open pedagogy” or “open education,” but far fewer curated lists of examples of what have been termed open educational practices (OEP) - the assignments, readings, projects, and products through which educators put the theory of open pedagogy into action. In attempting to compile inspiring examples of OEP, however, I was struck by both the variety I found and the consistent presence of one feature that tied the best of them together: creativity. That seems like a simple, even trite observation, but it nevertheless captures the essence of what OEP brings to college courses. In this post I’d like to think about how OEP benefit both students and faculty in reciprocal ways that are grounded in the way that open resources facilitate creativity.

The pedagogical power of creativity affects students and faculty, both groups benefiting from the freedom that working with openly licensed texts and tools provides. While those benefits are different for each group, they are also interrelated. The improved learning outcomes, grades, and subject mastery that can accompany more engaging assignments will likely translate to higher enrollments and better course evaluations for the faculty members who employ them. But there are other benefits - less measurable but arguably more impactful - for faculty who experiment with OEP, especially within courses they have taught many times. To think them through, I offer the following thought experiment:

Instead of critiquing term papers on identical topics year after year, many of which students never pick up let alone read, imagine spending your Sunday grading multimedia, digital essays which build on the best work of your previous students and therefore have different arguments and foci. The quality of the papers is likely to increase since your students can examine successful examples combining creativity and criticism from prior semesters, can work in media with which they may have more skill than writing, and can scour the internet for sources which they then evaluate for inclusion based on license as well as authoritativeness. This is all without mentioning the added effort often seen when students know their work could be seen by peers or future classes. Now imagine your grading being made even easier and more enjoyable by the student comments already added through the peer review process, feedback that the author had to incorporate and respond to in advance of final submission. Now think about how the time you spend grading the final papers of one semester is actually also preparation for the following semester since you’ll be adding the standouts to the collection of works on which future classes will build. Furthermore, uploading the drafts and iterations of each work, accompanied by your comments, will be a wonderful way to demonstrate your grading rubric and assignment expectations to new students. While the public would see the polished finished products that will serve as exemplars for later classes, the students will be able to see behind the scenes and, in so doing, gain a better understanding of how authority functions and knowledge is created and continuously revised.

Some you might be thinking that this can all be done with non-open resources, but I would argue that it is precisely the openness - or even more precisely, the ability of the students to understand intellectual property and navigate copyright implications - that makes this all possible and pedagogically effective. One class cannot build on the works of another without the proper licensing in place, and projects cannot be publicly posted on the web if they are in violation of copyright. But more crucially, without the permissions provided by open licensing, faculty could not set them lose on the internet and tell them that they should use their years of web surfing experience to find the perfect assortment of multimedia resources out of everything the internet has to offer. Only then can faculty hope and expect to be continually impressed by the creativity with which their students approach the same assignment semester after semester.

There is much debate around the idea that our students are now “digital natives” who come to college with a set of computer skills and technological concepts that we need to tap into rather than teach. While the curricular response might need a good deal more work, the motivating principle is valuable: college students arrive on campus with a profoundly different understanding of the ways that technology, information, and knowledge fit together. They also arrive to have their intellectual horizons widened, a goal at odds with the outdated constraints commonly put on their coursework. The freedom that comes from understanding and using OER has the potential to recenter creativity in the undergraduate curriculum while also reinvigorating the faculty members responsible for teaching it.

References

Jhangiani, R. (2015, Aug. 23). Pilot testing open pedagogy. Retrieved from: https://thatpsychprof.com/pilot-testing-open-pedagogy/

Wiley, D. (2013, Oct. 21). What is Open Pedagogy? Retrieved from: https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975

OER Authorship in 15 Steps

If you're interested in creating a new open textbook, there are several good guides that can walk you through the process. One such text is Authoring Open Textbooks by Melissa Falldin and Karen Lauritsen. They include a fifteen-step checklist (p. 4) of actions that should be taken when putting together a new OER, from licensing and accessibility checks to understanding how choice of platform influences final product. I list them here with some additional commentary geared towards faculty at Gettysburg College.

1. Familiarize yourself with open licenses, if you haven’t already. Select which license you’d like to use, as it may impact what openly licensed material you can include in your work.

Visit the Creative Commons website to review the four licensing conditions - Attribution (by), ShareAlike (sa), NonCommercial (nc), NoDerivatives (nd) - and how those conditions can be combined by the copyright holder to create a license that grants users permission to use the work in some ways but not others. 

For example, combining Attribution (by) and NonCommerical (nc) creates a CC-BY-NC license that allows free re-use of the work as long as the user attributes that work to the author and does not profit from its re-use. Therefore, those who want to profit from their work - by selling print copies of their open textbook, for example, in addition to offering it free online - could not use material licensed as CC-BY-NC. 

Similarly, someone wanting to employ a NoDerivatives (nd) license to their work, so as to make it impossible for that work to be rearranged or revised by users, could not include in that textbook material licensed as CC-BY-SA because the ShareAlike condition means that reuses of the material must be licensed the same way, i.e. CC-BY-SA. 

For additional examples and more detailed explanations, see the Creative Commons webpage dealing with the different licenses.

2. Learn where to find openly licensed material you can use. Librarians can help! You can also search Google by license. If you will be creating material (photos, for example) consider how to openly share those assets with others (like Flickr). 

 There are many good websites for finding quality OER. A few of them are:

OER Commons

https://www.oercommons.org/

Open Textbook Network

https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/

OpenStax

https://openstax.org/

MIT OpenCourseWare

https://ocw.mit.edu/

Open Yale Courses

http://oyc.yale.edu/

BCcampus OpenEd

https://open.bccampus.ca/

3. Decide where you plan to share your completed open textbook and what those repositories, libraries and distributors may require.

Your OER will live in The Cupola, Gettysburg College’s institutional repository, where it can be linked to and its usage can be tracked. Like most other IRs, The Cupola is an open access repository, meaning it contains works that can be freely viewed in their entirety. It also contains metadata only records for works by faculty and students that are currently embargoed or behind a paywall.

Your textbook may also live within the repository or commons of the community that created the tool you used to create it (see #12 below).

4. Consider who may be able to offer help at your institution. Reach out to librarians and instructional designers, for example.

The Scholarly Communications Department at Musselman Library can provide support at multiple points in the process, but we are particularly adept at locating open resources, evaluating licenses, weighing the pros and cons of a given authoring platform, and ensuring OER adhere to accessibility guidelines.

5. If working with others, take the time to meet and clarify expectations and roles. Draft and sign a contract or MOU. 

Less formal than a contract, a memorandum of understanding (MOU) is a great way of ensuring that all parties involved know and agree to their roles during the creation process but also in future revisions and ongoing updates.

6. Develop a timeline for textbook production. Include writing time as well as editing, proofreading and peer review time.

7. Develop a plan for your textbook’s design, including how you want to define the content and element structure. Each chapter needs to be consistent with the next so that students know what to expect.

While the textbook should be organized in an understandable manner for students, don't fall into the trap of creating an open textbook that is identical to the one you are replacing. One of the major benefits of authoring your own open textbook is the ability to tailor it so that it perfectly suits the schedule of your course and the learning goals of your students. If you've always wanted to experiment with new textbook designs, now's your chance! Remember that, unlike with a traditional textbook, you will be able to revise this one easily, meaning that novel features can always be replaced by more trusted ones if they prove ineffective.

8. Decide which style guide you’d like to use for your textbook and use it as a reference.

9. Commit to making your textbook accessible for a range of students.

Use the BC Open Textbook Accessibility Toolkit to ensure that all users can access your work and easily use it in a course.

10. Make a plan for how you’re going to handle updates and revisions so that your textbook stays up-to-date.

Unlike traditional textbooks, open textbooks can and should be updated so that they stay current in terms of text and illustrations or examples. This is a wonderful benefit but only if it taken advantage of by authors. To do that, you must incorporate revisions into your standard scholarly workflow. But what if you have no interest in revising the book after you have used it to teach a few times? In that case, you should make sure that others are able to update your work for use in their own courses. Make sure they are legally able to do that by licensing your work accordingly (see Step 1 above).

11. Create a list of peers who are willing to review your textbook and offer constructive feedback.

12. Find a community who can support your work. Decide which tool or tools may be helpful for writing your textbook. This may differ depending on whether you’re writing solo or with others.

Open textbook creation is often a collaborative endeavor and several tools have been created as part of a community of practice surrounding OER creation. Some tools and platforms can only be used if the user agrees that members of the community can not only access but adapt and revise the works created using them. The Rebus Community for Open Textbook Creation is one example.

13. Survey which publishing tools look like a good fit for your textbook. Consider their capabilities related to your planned textbook content and elements.

 A few options include Google Docs, WordPress, PressBooks, and the Open Author tool at OER Commons. 

14. Jump in! 

15. Share lessons from your experience with your colleagues....

The Scholarly Communications Department at Musselman Library would love to hear about your experiences and help you share the knowledge you've gained with your peers!

From Authoring Open Textbooks by Melissa Falldin and Karen Lauritsen (2017). Available at https://press.rebus.community/authoropen/

5 Tips for Faculty Working with OER

1. Know your rights as a copyright holder

US law states that a copyright owner "has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:

• to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords; 

• to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work; 

• to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending; 

• in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly; 

• in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly; 

• in the case of sound recordings, to perform the copyrighted work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission."

 https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106

2.  Defining Openness: The 5 R’s

The term "open" gets used a lot, but it should be reserved for works that allow for the 5 R's:

Retain - the right to make, own, and control copies of the content (e.g., download, duplicate, store, and manage) 

Reuse - the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video) 

Revise - the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language) 

Remix - the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup) 

Redistribute - the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

--David Wiley, http://opencontent.org/definition/

3. Understand the different open licenses

There are several different kinds of Creative Commons licenses. Each one grants a different range of permissible uses and places certain conditions on that usage, but all are comprised of a combination of the following four elements:

CC BY Attribution: Users must cite the author(s) of the work when reusing it 

CC NC NonCommercial: Users cannot charge a fee for reusing the work 

CC SA ShareAlike: New works based on the original must use the same open license 

CC ND NoDerivatives: The original work cannot be used to create a derivative work

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-types-examples/

4. Remix works with the right licences

Not all open licenses allow unrestricted remixing of content, those with an ND license (above) being an important case in point. Use the following matrix from Creative Commons to determine if the two works you want to combine are licensed to allow for it.

https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Wiki/cc_license_compatibility

5. Remember that format and technology choices affect openness

David Wiley reminds us that a work can be openly licensed yet remain closed to most would-be users if that work is produced in a format or using a technology that restricts remixing to those who can afford to purchase the proprietary tools or platforms needed.

Access to Editing Tools: Is the open content published in a format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that are extremely expensive (e.g., 3DS MAX)? Is the open content published in an exotic format that can only be revised or remixed using tools that run on an obscure or discontinued platform (e.g., OS/2)? Is the open content published in a format that can be revised or remixed using tools that are freely available and run on all major platforms (e.g., OpenOffice)? 

Level of Expertise Required: Is the open content published in a format that requires a significant amount technical expertise to revise or remix (e.g., Blender)? Is the open content published in a format that requires a minimum level of technical expertise to revise or remix (e.g., Word)? 

Meaningfully Editable: Is the open content published in a manner that makes its content essentially impossible to revise or remix (e.g., a scanned image of a handwritten document)? Is the open content published in a manner making its content easy to revise or remix (e.g., a text file)? 

Self-Sourced: It the format preferred for consuming the open content the same format preferred for revising or remixing the open content (e.g., HTML)? Is the format preferred for consuming the open content different from the format preferred for revising or remixing the open content (e.g. Flash FLA vs SWF)?

http://opencontent.org/definition/

Finding and defining “quality” OER

Never judge a book by its cover. It’s a truism that bears repeating in the OER context, especially at this relatively early stage of development, because many OER have zero hope of competing with their expensive counterparts when it comes to shelf appeal. 

If you’re hoping to find an open textbook that is as aesthetically pleasing as those produced by the big publishers, the options are pretty slim. I know because that’s exactly what I tried to do for Open Access Week this year. Ultimately, I chose three hardcover Openstax textbooks to display as part of our programming. They seemed an ideal choice because, in addition to being used in courses here, all three books looked very similar to the ones costing $200 or more in the bookstore. Throughout the week I would demonstrate the quality of the open textbooks by asking folks to pick them up and flip through them, to check out the many cool infographics and eye-catching illustrations, not to mention the attractive covers. When I told them that they cost between $30 and $50, and could be accessed for free online, I was usually met with wide eyes and open mouths. It wasn’t until the end of OA Week that I learned how my well meaning attempt to legitimize open textbooks by comparing them to traditional ones was problematic.

By equating quality with appearance, I was reinforcing the logic that commercial publishers have been pushing for decades. With their enormous budgets and huge staff, it is easy for them to produce textbooks with high shelf appeal. The trick is getting professors and students to judge books by their covers, to see such external features as reliable indicators of the quality of the content itself. This is also easier to do with textbooks because they, by their nature, are meant to impart basic concepts and established principles. And while it is true that snazzy illustrations can help students learn those concepts and principles, it is also true that they cannot be an accurate metric by which to judge the quality of a book. But what is the proper criterion?

In the same blog post that opened my eyes to the problem of OER shelf appeal, David Wiley writes about using student learning outcomes as the best measure of the quality of a textbook, whether traditional or open. The better students learn from a book, the higher quality it is. Wiley offers two, interrelated ways of understanding this definition of quality:

One is to realize that no matter how beautiful and internally consistent their presentation may be, educational materials are low quality if students who are assigned to use them learn little or nothing.  The other way to think about it is this: no matter how ugly or inconsistent they appear to be, educational materials are high quality if students who are assigned to use them learn what the instructor intended them learn.

I would point out that this definition does not exclude the possibility that some of those color images and full-page graphics are a sign of quality, but that quality would be a function of the extent to which they helped readers learn better. To quote Wiley again, 

Publishers put forth the beauty = quality argument because they have the capacity to invest incredible amounts of money in graphic design and artwork that visually differentiate their textbooks from OER. But when learning outcomes are the measure we care about, we see over and over again that many OER are equal in quality to commercial textbooks. (That is, over and over again we see OER resulting in at least the same amount of learning as commercial textbooks.)

So when we evaluate OER for their quality, we need to remember to value pedagogy over prettiness. While the simplistic design of many OER might initially be off putting, we must look past the “cover” and judge it by the learning outcomes its adoption will produce within the unique context of a particular course. And if you believe that infographics would really improve those outcomes, have your students produce them as a course assignment and incorporate the best ones into the textbook so that each new class can benefit from the work of those who went before them. That’s just one way that students can engage with and learn from open textbooks, and just another example of why we should never judge a textbook by its visuals, cover included.

David Wiley, "On Quality and OER," Iterating Towards Openness Blog, 10 October 2013. Retrieved from https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2947

From Open Pedagogy to OER

In my last post I talked about the pedagogical benefits of OER and how they could be a much more persuasive selling point for faculty than the promise of saving students money. I would like to focus on faculty again, this time by discussing an excellent article from last year that sheds a great deal of light on why we have not seen faculty adoption of OER at the rates we would like.

In a 2016 article titled “Incentives and barriers to OER adoption: A qualitative analysis of faculty perceptions,” Belikov and Bodily provide a critical overview of the range of receptions that OER have received from a diverse group of 218 faculty. Studying and coding all of the responses allowed Belikov and Bodily to determine the top ten most common judgments, and their data is invaluable for those of us trying to crack the nut of faculty adoption. While the article deserves to be read in its entirety, I would like to focus on a table they include on page 239 and which I have reproduced here:

Comments that fall under the heading of “Need more information” constitute a clear front runner, appearing more than twice as often as the second most popular category of comments, “Lack of discoverability.” While there is definitely value to be gained from distinguishing between knowledge of OER and the ability to find them, these two categories could both be placed under the broader heading of Awareness. The same could be said of the third most frequently made comment, in which faculty judged OER as digital resources without making - or understanding - the distinction. Adding up the numbers from each of these three categories gets a total of 144, meaning that 66% of the faculty respondents lacked fundamental awareness of OER and how to find them.

For those of us who have been beating the OER drum, that is a very surprising figure. There’s a natural  temptation to think that the faculty on one’s own campus would not be equally unaware of the basics of OER. But I’m writing to say that we must resist it and instead embrace the idea that there is still much consciousness raising work to be done. The counterargument, of course, is that we’ve been doing that work all along and it has apparently not been effective. It’s a valid point, but also one that should lead us to reevaluate our efforts rather than abandon them or keep doing what we’ve always done. So what changes could we make in our outreach and advocacy efforts? The rest of Belikov and Bodily’s table can give us some clues.

Looking at the bottom of the table shows that “Pedagogical benefits” and “Lack of OER quality” are tied for last place, each having been mentioned by 20 different faculty. While it is wonderful that so few faculty members had a problem with the quality of the OER they evaluated, it is just as troubling that an equally small percentage of them wrote about the pedagogical benefit that could be gained through the use of OER. The argument I would like to make here is that we need to improve our advocacy efforts by placing Open Pedagogy in the spotlight and moving the Open Resources to the wings to play the supporting roles that traditional textbooks play today.

I am not suggesting that we stop promoting OER, but rather that we lead with the concrete and inspiring ways that OER can dramatically improve the quality of the education that faculty are providing their students. So instead of promoting an Openstax textbook, we could share information about how a course or assignment had been improved by virtue of switching to an open textbook and all the customization for which it allows. Below each example would be information about the resources that made such changes possible, and that’s where faculty could find a link to the open textbook as well as other links taking them to a copy of the assignment, the syllabus, and other discrete resources which would allow them to open up their own courses. 

By appealing to pedagogical principles with concrete examples, we also make it easier to sell deans and provosts on the idea that OER offer much more than monetary savings for students. And this is especially true at liberal arts colleges, given their focus on individualized learning and innovative educational experiences. Instead of advocating for OER, we should be promoting the “Pedagogical benefits” that college students will receive as a direct result of their adoption, and doing so with real examples with which faculty can relate. 

Why OERs Matter: Economics and Academics

Open educational resources “matter” for many reasons. At the moment, with the textbook crisis getting exponentially worse by the year, the most common and convincing argument in support of OERs is their potential to save students money. A significant example of this is the recently reintroduced Affordable College Textbook Act. 

The bill itself, H.R. 3840, was written to “expand the use of open textbooks in order to achieve savings for students,” and its authors cite the claim that “expanded use of open educational resources has the potential to save students more than a billion dollars annually” (Sec. 2.5). This savings does not just mean less debt for students, badly needed as that is. It also means less chance they’ll perform poorly in a course because they could only afford half the assigned texts, and less chance that their course selection will be based on publisher pricing rather than personal and professional interest. It’s therefore hard to think of a better reason for advocating OERs than the possibility that they’ll go a long way towards alleviating the far-reaching effects of the textbook crisis.

But there is another reason that OERs matter, and it arguably has a better chance of rallying support and getting OERs into the college classroom. The economic argument, strong as it is, fails to capture the promise that OERs hold for revolutionizing the way courses are structured and assignments conceived. By implicitly equating open textbooks with free ones, the student savings argument for OERs reinforces the idea that open texts are the same as closed ones. While they can certainly be used as a substitute for traditional, closed textbooks, OERs possess amazing potential for transforming how students engage with course content by virtue of being open and digital. 

Be it Physics or Philosophy, an open textbook can easily be updated to keep readings responsive to changes in the field or in the way faculty decide to teach it. Student assignments can be incorporated into the text and future classes can see and benefit from the work of their peers. Each semester’s students could add a new data visualization, for example, or create a digital companion volume to the textbook that subsequent sections would add to and edit. Each member of an English class could be asked to select a short story and produce a critical edition of it, the best of which to comprise a digital collection linked to the main course text so future classes could model their work on it. The possibilities are really endless.

We are really just beginning to see examples of the enormous pedagogical potential OERs contain, but we would be wise to recognize the power of these examples for proving to professors, deans, and provosts that OERs “matter” for academic as well as economic reasons.