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.