How can you use OERs in your classroom to improve your teaching? What does it mean to incorporate open pedagogy in your course? Here are some suggestions to make collaboration and sharing an integral part of your teaching.
Guidelines for Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher Education
Open educational resources (OER) are materials used to support education that may be freely accessed, reused, modified and shared. These Guidelines outline key issues and make suggestions for integrating OER into higher education. Their purpose is to encourage decision makers in governments and institutions to invest in the systematic production, adaptation and use of OER and to bring them into the mainstream of higher education in order to improve the quality of curricula and teaching and to reduce costs.
Proponents of open educational resources (OER) claim that significant cost savings are possible when open textbooks displace traditional textbooks in the college classroom. We investigated student and faculty perceptions of OER used in a community college context. Over 125 students and 11 faculty from seven colleges responded to an online questionnaire about the cost and quality of the open textbooks used in their classrooms. Results showed that the majority of students and faculty had a positive experience using the open textbooks, appreciated the lower costs, and perceived the texts as being of high quality. The potential implications for OER initiatives at the college level seem large. If primary instructional materials can in fact be made available to students at no or very low cost, without harming learning outcomes, there appears to be a significant opportunity for disruption and innovation in higher education.
The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Various Student Success Metrics
There are multiple indicators which suggest that completion, quality, and affordability are the three greatest challenges for higher education today in terms of students, student learning, and student success. Many colleges, universities, and state systems are seeking to adopt a portfolio of solutions that address these challenges. This article reports the results of a large-scale study (21,822 students) regarding the impact of course-level faculty adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER). Results indicate that OER adoption does much more than simply save students money and address student debt concerns. OER improve end-of-course grades and decrease DFW (D, F, and Withdrawal letter grades) rates for all students. They also improve course grades at greater rates and decrease DFW rates at greater rates for Pell recipient students, part-time students, and populations historically underserved by higher education. OER address affordability, completion, attainment gap concerns, and learning. These findings contribute to a broadening perception of the value of OERs and their relevance to the great challenges facing higher education today.Why Open Educational Resources (OERs) are Important for
Few things annoy me more than burning time on bureaucratic paperwork. Frankly, as an educator, my time and attention should be centered on students and learning — and that includes modifying and selecting readings and resources. Finding fresh critical pedagogical articles that connect pop culture and critical thinking, for example, is not only more interesting to me professionally than revising course outcomes to match accreditation evaluation rubrics, but such articles are more useful and engaging for my students. Plus, such articles can support critical thinking skills and connecting these skills with media in students’ lives. While some administrators might disagree, few educators would. Making this “idealistic” hope happen is a challenge. One possible path to this solution: reconceive how we as individuals approach Open Educational Resources (OERs) and our use of educational technologies. UNSECO defined OERs in 2002 as “technology-enabled, open provision of educational resources for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes.”
Textbooks, OER, and the Need for Open Pedagogy
Textbooks are a social justice issue. The cost of textbooks has increased over 1000% in the last 40 years (3 times the rate of inflation). Over a shorter frame of 10-20 years we’ve seen other non-academic books actually go down in price while textbook prices have continued to go up.
Few things annoy me more than burning time on bureaucratic paperwork. Frankly, as an educator, my time and attention should be centered on students and learning — and that includes modifying and selecting readings and resources. Finding fresh critical pedagogical articles that connect pop culture and critical thinking, for example, is not only more interesting to me professionally than revising course outcomes to match accreditation evaluation rubrics, but such articles are more useful and engaging for my students. Plus, such articles can support critical thinking skills and connecting these skills with media in students’ lives. While some administrators might disagree, few educators would. Making this “idealistic” hope happen is a challenge. One possible path to this solution: reconceive how we as individuals approach Open Educational Resources (OERs) and our use of educational technologies. UNSECO defined OERs in 2002 as “technology-enabled, open provision of educational resources for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes.”
The Review Project
This review provides a summary of all known empirical research on the impacts of OER adoption (including our own). The version below will be periodically updated with new articles as we become aware of them. If you know of an empirical research study on the impacts of OER adoption that is not included in this review, please leave a comment below. An in-depth article focusing on empirical research relating to perceptions and efficacy at the college level was published by the journal Educational Technology Research and Development in February of 2016.
“Open Pedagogy,” as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures. This site is dynamic, contested, constantly under revision, and resists static definitional claims. But it is not a site vacant of meaning or political conviction. In this brief introduction, we offer a pathway for engaging with the current conversations around Open Pedagogy, some ideas about its philosophical foundation, investments, and its utility, and some concrete ways that students and teachers—all of us learners—can “open” education. We hope that this chapter will inspire those of us in education to focus our critical and aspirational lenses on larger questions about the ideology embedded within our educational systems and the ways in which pedagogy impacts these systems. At the same time we hope to provide some tools and techniques to those who want to build a more empowering, collaborative, and just architecture for learning.
What is Open Pedagogy?
Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about open educational resources, but precious little has been written about how OER – or openness more generally – changes the practice of education. Substituting OER for expensive commercial resources definitely save money and increase access to core instructional materials. Increasing access to core instructional materials will necessarily make significant improvements in learning outcomes for students who otherwise wouldn’t have had access to the materials (e.g., couldn’t afford to purchase their textbooks). If the percentage of those students in a given population is large enough, their improvement in learning may even be detectable when comparing learning in the population before OER adoption with learning in the population after OER adoption. Saving significant amounts of money and doing no harm to learning outcomes (or even slightly improving learning outcomes) is clearly a win. However, there are much bigger victories to be won with openness.
Key Takeaways
When no meaningful relationship exists between an educational technology and pedagogy, the tool itself loses value.
We should start with a vision for our courses and curricula, and then identify the technologies or strategies that can help us achieve or further develop that vision.
Open educational resources provide a relevant example of how pedagogy can point toward a richer way to integrate technology into our courses and our teaching philosophies, shifting to a student-centered approach to learning.
Instructor and student experiences with open textbooks,from the California open online library for education
Open textbooks are similar to traditional textbooks except that they arefree of cost and licensed to allow revision and reuse. Adopting open textbooks forhigher education courses is a way to address the growing costs of traditional text-books that lead some students to be unable to access them, and to allow instructorsto tailor the books to their own particular course context. Several empirical studiesover the last few years have shown that open textbooks have the potential toincrease student access to course readings without sacrificing quality. Adding tothese results, this study focused on data from a new source: over fifty e-portfolioswritten by faculty about the use of open textbooks in their courses in several collegeand university systems in the state of California. We studied instructor’s motivationsfor adopting an open textbook for their courses, the cost savings to students as aresult of this adoption, the impact of assigning open textbooks on student learningoutcomes and withdrawal rates, and other benefits and drawbacks of open textbooks.Faculty reported that cost savings was the most important motivation for adoptingopen textbooks, and that students most often reported this as what they appreciatedabout open textbooks. The vast majority of faculty also reported that the quality ofthe textbooks was as good or better than that of traditional textbooks, and thatstudents did as well or better in terms of learning outcomes and withdrawal ratescompared to when the same courses were run with traditional textbooks.
