By Chris Laney

Around 2015 I began testing the water of OER and zero cost books.  I planned one course, Conspiracy Theories in American History, around books that were available to students free through the BCC library’s “ebrary.”  Casting about for OER resources in other courses was frustrating, as I realized the ones I found would require considerable revision and remixing for use in my courses.  Spoiler-alert: This has changed since then!  

From 2016-19 I was out of the classroom.  Growing OER efforts on campus showed that the options were expanding during this time, and working outside my field helped me see the impact of high textbook costs on students across disciplines.  I resolved to explore OER again when I returned to teaching, and found the landscape vastly changed from three years earlier.  When I returned to teaching it was with new OER books: The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook for US History I and II., and World Regional Geography for the World Geography course.  

The benefits were apparent from the moment course preparation began.  You can see one of those benefits in this post, where I can link directly to the books to share them with you.  In the courses, I felt liberated by the ease of linking to sections in the books, with no paywall or password obstacles.   For example, The American Yawp has an astoundingly good Primary Source Reader, which makes it easy to link to sources in American history in discussion boards or other class assignments.  

A week before the courses begin, when I send students a welcome message and FAQ, it’s thrilling to include a link to their textbook letting them know it’s free and immediately accessible.  No more gut-wrenching messages from students asking for an assignment extension because they are waiting on financial aid to get their book.  Because of this, though it may be true that OER-savings are a drop in the bucket compared to tuition and fees, OER has a disproportionate impact on equity in the classroom.

Students are also pretty pleased when they find a mistake in their textbook, we communicate it to the author, and… voila!…The book is updated online, live.  Something like this has happened before with publisher books, but in those cases, the process was more convoluted, and the response was essentially that it would be considered for the next edition in two years.

But perhaps my favorite benefit is one that these books simply are better than the other options out there.  In no way do I feel like I “settled” for a lesser book in order to provide OER for students.  The American Yawp is, for example, my favorite U.S. history text, period.   

I know this is not always the case.  For World History I and II, I simply have yet to find a replacement for the outstanding book Ways of the World, from Bedford St. Martin’s.  The “Value Edition” is low cost, but it still costs.  Thanks to the OER Awareness workshop I may have found a good OER source for World History II (link to Modern World History), with some revision and remixing probably needed.  In the workshop we were asked to use a variety of resources to explore options and make a list.  This not only led me to discover new resources even when I thought I’d already searched thoroughly, I also realized that this is a list that can evolve over time, so I plan to update it semesterly.  The former model, in which publishers send everything to us for review, is over.  But new resources mean it doesn’t have to be so challenging to find what is out there. 

 

The workshop also gave me a thorough introduction to Open Pedagogy.   I had not encountered the term “disposable assignments” (the students do it, we grade it, then it’s gone).  I hadn’t even realized that there are assignments in my courses that are already on the verge of being open pedagogy.  In the Conspiracy Theories course, students contributed to a “Conspirapedia” (using Moodle Glossary), but we only used it for that course (though I did get their permission for future use).  Now I think it would make a lot of sense to use this again as part of an expanding project for future courses.  The students are thus creating “content” for their own course and future courses.  I mean, that’s pretty exciting.  

 

I still have questions about the creation of OER resources, either original or by adapting and revising existing OER resources.  It’s evident that in order to adopt OER for World History, I’m going to have to do more than find something “out of the box.”  This is where supportive funding for faculty can be most useful – it’s one thing to find a resource like The American Yawp and use it, it’s another to take on the daunting task of revising and adapting something, especially if it is to be in a user-friendly online format.  I need help.

 

We were asked to share recommendations or advice, so here goes:  First, I recommend the OER Awareness workshop.  It is stuffed with resources which can be taken away and used.  It drove home that OER is more than “free books for students.”  I also learned that some of what I was already doing is more “OER-ish” than I knew.  Maybe that is true for you too.  Are you already doing things in class that are easily converted to OER?  For example, if you created a lab manual, can it become OER by adding a Creative Commons license?  If you are doing a glossary type assignment, can it take the next step to become open pedagogy?  If you’ve searched for OER in the past and were underwhelmed, try checking every semester – the options really are growing rapidly.  Finally, this advice from the OER Institute this summer:  It doesn’t have to be adopting a textbook – you can start with one assignment, or one course, or one ancillary resource.  “Test the water” and you may find yourself wanting to dive deeper.

 

Featured Image: Photo by Lucas Andrade on Unsplash (CC0)

“Testing the Water” by Chris Laney is licensed under CC BY 4.0