Expanding “free” to mean more than cost-saving

If you’ve been around OER for a while, you’re probably pretty familiar with the idea that OER, open textbooks in particular, are a great cost-saving alternative to commercial textbooks. Numerous studies around the world have shown the triple benefit of free and immediate access to course materials (see the resource list below to dive into this further):

1. Attracting prospective students to a course – and keeping them
2. Increasing student success rates
3. Reducing the gap in academic performance between marginalised and non-marginalised student groups

However, you may be less familiar with the myriad benefits beyond cost. I recently gave a talk on this topic and found there was so much to explore that I couldn’t fit it all in. As such, I turned it into a (rather giant, oops) blog post so you can explore these ideas with me – please reach out if you have further ideas or join the conversation in the EmpoweredOER Hypothes.is group and add comments all over the page!

Ok, let’s break this down.

In an effort to make this accidentally-very-long blog post less overwhelming, I’ve made the headings below selectable so you can zoom down to the section you’re interested in. Otherwise, read on!

• Equity (and Amplifying Voices through OER)
  Everyone is free to create, share, and glean knowledge
• Innovative (and Transformative) Pedagogy
  Educators are free to explore methods of teaching in flexible and transformative ways
• Student Success (OER and UDL)
  Learners are free to succeed without the unnecessary barriers of cost and access to course materials
• Resources
  Further resources to dive into for background research and deeper learning

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Equity (and Amplifying Voices through OER)

There are so many facets to equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility – and so many ways in which OER address them. However, here, I want to highlight just a few.

Aboriginal Ways of Knowing and Being and Decentralised Knowledge Creation

Traditional textbook publishing and review often silence marginalised voices or inappropriately share knowledge without consent from the people involved. OER democratises content creation, dismantling the conventional gatekeeping mechanisms and empowering diverse voices.

Celebrating and sharing in the knowledges of Aboriginal communities, OER provides a platform for Aboriginal narratives to be interwoven with non-Aboriginal knowledges, bringing rich context and depth to courses.

Furthermore, the Creative Commons licensing of OER re-empowers Aboriginal peoples to decide which knowledge is shared (and which is not) and how. See the text Gems and Nuggets: Multicultural Education for Young People for an example of using the “No Derivatives (ND)” licence option on an openly licensed book. This is an unusual licence for an OER, but it speaks to the power OER creation can give back to marginalised people – you get to choose what you say, how you say it, and how that knowledge is then reused and shared further.

Check out the following EmpoweredOER pages for more examples and further discussion:

• Counter-Hegemony – in Equity Dimension 3: Culturally Sustaining
• Pluralism – in Equity Dimension 3: Culturally Sustaining
• Sustainment – in Equity Dimension 3: Culturally Sustaining

Breaking Traditional Review Paradigms, Building Collaborative Frameworks and Institutional Evolution

Further challenging traditional gatekeeping, OER can adopt open peer review where a diverse group of interdisciplinary teams, industry professionals, community leaders, and students themselves are engaged to evaluate and enhance content. This way, quality assurance becomes a community-driven effort, ensuring relevancy and rigour, and reducing unconscious bias.

The Open Textbook Library provides excellent examples of this process in action. For example, Introduction to Criminology has in-depth reviews from educators using the text in their courses, thus providing meaningful insight from relevant sources for any other educators deciding whether to adopt the text.

Universities and industry can work together, review each other’s work, and share and refine OER materials, promoting a unified approach to content creation, where a text created in Melbourne finds resonance in Perth, is contextualised in Adelaide, and expanded upon in Sydney.

A living example is the wonderfully collaborative text Legal Research Skills: An Australian Law Guide where seven universities across the country came together to develop a text that would resonate in multiple legal jurisdictions. The team continues to refine and build upon the text by inviting authors from other jurisdictions to add their content into further editions.

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Innovative (and Transformative) Pedagogy

Academic freedom. Through OER, educators are unbound (heh) from the limits or entirety of a text. If the text is too long or has unnecessary chapters for your needs, you can simply chop the chaff. You can ask such questions as:

• Does this text use gendered/binary language that will alienate my trans, gender diverse, and non-binary students?
• Are all the images in the text of White, able-bodied people?
• Does the text only include reference to people with disabilities when the chapter is specifically focused on disabilities?

When the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, OER provide an avenue for recourse – you can change it.

Let’s look at some of the other ways OER can open (full of puns, today) the possibilities for teaching.

Beyond the Classroom Walls, Contextual Learning and Student Engagement

Teaching doesn’t have to remain in the classroom. At last year’s Cal OER conference (check out keynotes on YouTube), Cynthia Orozco, Librarian for Equitable Services and Associate Professor of Library Science at East Los Angeles College, gave an enlightening presentation OER to Support Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in Local California Contexts where she discussed the power of local primary examples and using open pedagogy to get students excited about their learning, to feel included and represented. Some examples included:

• Using local businesses or big businesses that started locally as the case studies for a business or sociology course.
• Setting tasks using the local archives scavenger-hunt-style. The students are given some information about a local historical news article and they have to answer questions about the event by finding the original article and other primary evidence. This can include interviewing older family members who lived through that period of time and could convey the true context of the time. This has the culturally sustaining benefit of contesting mainstream narratives and the written historical record.

OER paves the way for contextually rich, real-world learning experiences. By permitting curricula to be rooted in local histories, economies, and socio-cultural dynamics, OER makes education more relevant and engaging for students.

Interactive and Dynamic Learning

Another great example came out of this year’s Cal OER conference where Kelsey Smith, OER Librarian at West Hills College Lemoore, showcased the latest CC ECHO projects. One of the projects under construction was a California Geography textbook where the author, Jeremy Patrich from College of the Canyons, includes numerous embedded video tours of various regions in California where they explain the aspects of geographical significance to their students. For students who are unable to travel to these areas, these videos provide valuable context for the concepts they are learning about in the course.

OER supports many types of interactive modules and formats – think of virtual botany explorations of Australian flora, or H5P quizzes to scaffold and reinforce learning. For another Cal OER conference example (it’s on my brain and I can’t resist telling you about this one!), Kelsey Smith also showcased the work of Tarrant Country College Librarian, Phil Jensen: Creative Commons. A LibGuide Play in Five Tabs. This LibGuide was created as part of the assessment for the Creative Commons Certificate for Librarians course and is currently my favourite OER in existence. It is a stunning (and amusing) exemplar of OER: providing flexibility of form; enabling students as co-creators of knowledge; and influencing engaging assessment pieces. Check out the Collecting My Thoughts tab for a delightful librarian soliloquising with humourous flair.

Educators can combine inclusive open pedagogy and authentic/ meaningful assessment by setting Wikipedia assignments that encourage the exploration of diverse topics. Yet another Cal OER conference example (It was a really good conference! You should check it out next year!), came out of the keynote 21 Years of Scaling OER presented by Curt Newton, Director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW). Many brilliant projects and applications of MIT OCW were explored in the presentation, but one which particularly grabbed me was an assignment where students were asked to research any woman in STEM and write a new Wikipedia article about them, thus promoting the active inclusion of women in STEM as well as building the students’ skills in research, information literacy, critical evaluation, and digital literacy. Plus, now the world gets to learn about a dozen or so women in STEM plucked from obscurity.

The flexibility of OER encourages educators to create dynamic and interactive content and allows students to become collaborators in content creation, thereby fostering a deeper understanding of subjects.

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Student Success (OER and UDL)

I know I said we were talking about benefits beyond cost, but let me just take a moment to go down one related thought path to really explain why even unlimited-licensed textbooks subscribed to by the institution’s library are still not enough in terms of fully removing barriers to access.

All options lead to further barriers to access.

These scenarios don’t even touch on added accessibility factors such as large print physical textbooks for students with vision impairments, alternative font type options in ebooks for students with Dyslexia, audiobook options for students who typically use screenreaders, and many other needs.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the wonderful ways OER leverage Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles to remove barriers and increase access to information for student success.

Flexibility in Representation

OER materials can be presented in multiple formats, ensuring content is accessible to learners with varying preferences and needs as well as helping to make clear connections between new and prior learning.

Check out the following EmpoweredOER pages for examples and further discussion:

• Access – in Equity Dimension 1: Learner-Centred
• Funds of Knowledge – in Equity Dimension 1: Learner-Centred
• Representation – in Equity Dimension 4: Universally Designed for Learning

Diverse Means of Engagement

OER supports the creation of content that caters to the emotional and interest-based needs of all students, a core tenet of UDL.

Check out the following EmpoweredOER pages for examples and further discussion:

• Interests – in Equity Dimension 1: Learner-Centred
• Personalisation – in Equity Dimension 1: Learner-Centred
• Connections – in Equity Dimension 3: Culturally Sustaining
• Engagement – in Equity Dimension 4: Universally Designed for Learning

Multiple Means of Expression

OER can facilitate assessments that offer students varied methods to demonstrate their understanding, aligning with UDL’s emphasis on flexibility in student responses.

Check out the following EmpoweredOER pages for examples and further discussion:

• Agency – in Equity Dimension 1: Learner-Centred
• Meaning Construction – in Equity Dimension 1: Learner-Centred
• Value – in Equity Dimension 1: Learner-Centred
• Divergence – in Equity Dimension 2: Critical
• Action & Expression – in Equity Dimension 4: Universally Designed for Learning

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Resources

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Image by Ian Dooley on Unsplash.