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