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.