We are in a perfect storm. The confluence of Open Education Week, a pivot to a new LMS, and FLCC’s commitment to free and low-cost materials (backed by financial incentives for faculty who develop these courses) is here. Since we’ll all be spending time tweaking our courses and preparing for the fall’s move to Brightspace, you might consider the opportunity to introduce open materials into your courses.
There is a misconception that OER (open educational resources) content is solely to save the student money; the notion of open extends deep into pedagogy, student motivation, and access.
Sure, a free textbook is better for the students. Not only can students save money but they can have the course materials on the first day of the semester (Barnes & Noble says 85% of students delay purchasing required course materials and 50% of students report that this negatively impacted their grades). And the Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that 70% of students have skipped buying a textbook because of the cost. And OER courses benefit retention efforts. And courses with OER tend to have fewer failure and withdrawal rates. And using OER in place of traditional textbooks helps create more equitable and inclusive learning experiences for marginalized students. And courses with OER – at their worst – show that student performance does not decrease; they do no harm.
But OER is so much more! OER potentiates our classes. One of the problems with traditional textbooks is the pedagogical limitations. Sure, we can teach a course with a textbook that is strictly aligned with our methods, but what happens when there is a cavernous dissonance with the book and how we teach? Maybe the order of the chapters doesn’t match the progression we use. Maybe their examples (or worse yet, their sole example) isn’t as good as what we can dream up. Or maybe there are typos. Or maybe their test banks have errors.
One of the promises of using OER is the ability to modify content. You don’t like something in the book? Change it! Put your own stuff in there. Make the book yours. Soften the language. Make it more approachable. Add content that the book doesn’t cover.
And this goes for entire courses. Endeavors from Lumen Learning, CMU’s Open Learning Initiative and SUNY make high-quality courses available – in most cases, for free – to us. And they plug right into Brightspace!
Another piece of the OER puzzle is open pedagogy. This is an idea that students in the course engage in curating and creating content for the course. Faculty Focus ran a piece in February 2022 (Empowering College Students to be OER Creators and Curators) promoting the pedagogical implications of educators leverage content creation by the students as learning experiences. The idea that students discover open content and synthesize it to the guardrails of the course is known as open pedagogy, though that is not a strict definition (for more information, consult your friendly librarian).
While the Faculty Focus article focused on open pedagogy, there are smaller steps you might consider that have high payouts. Note that these experiences don’t rely on open pedagogy but they do share DNA with the idea:
- Have your students share a “TL;DR” for each section of the textbook. “Too Long, Didn’t Read” is internet speak for a brief and meaningful summary. Now they are providing valuable takes on content they’ve read. Perhaps as an exercise the class shares all their TL;DRs and they intentionally craft a succinct TL;DR for each section (this can be read by students in future classes). If you’re using an OER textbook, you could add those TL;DRs into the book. Did someone say media literacy?
- Ask students to author questions for each section of reading or each unit of study. Sure, you might have to front load a lesson or two on crafting good questions, but the payoff is incredible. You get bigger question banks. You get targeted question banks. You get novel questions that won’t appear in Course Hero or Chegg. You get to see what information students think is important. And the best part – you don’t have to write any questions!
- Perhaps you have an OER textbook (or you are starting to compile one based off all the content you’ve generated after decades of teaching). You could establish a framework (chapters, some intro text, sections, some framing text) and assign small passages to each student. Sure, you might have to clean it up and sure, you might have to change the voice a bit, but you could wind up with an approachable textbook for future students.
- Ask students to be on the lookout for improvements as they wade through the experiences you’ve designed for them. Award “bug bounties” for any factual errors (or grammatical errors) they find.
If you have time, be sure to read the short piece at Faculty Focus. Even if you aren’t in the market for some OER solutions, you might want to peruse some of the sites listed below and check out their resources – there is inspiration in everything.
