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.