OER and the mission-driven university

One of my passions in my work is expanding the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). It’s not only the cost savings to students that drives my interest in this, although at the most basic level that is what started my interest. Every week I read about an institution or a public system announcing that it has saved its students a million dollars or five million or whatever, which is great. But emerging from that initial proposition, there are other aspects of OER that are worth considering. For example, if you are a faculty member or instructional designer, there are the opportunities to collaborate with other like-minded professors and course designers on creating or tailoring OER materials to your students’ interests and needs. Collaboration can support a sense of community across institutions and within them. You can also adapt OER to improve classroom teaching and research. For example, if the course materials can be modified, students can be part of the process of reviewing, researching, and creating new content. This process can transform learning from a passive, consumer-oriented process to one in which learners become producers. That's what our mission should be.

Then there’s also just the power you get by taking control over your courses from the large commercial publishers. Their work is created at scale to serve a generic classroom in whatever general topic you teach, but what ends up happening is that many instructors are forced to bend their teaching to what is covered in the textbook. In fact, many courses are just designed around the textbook the instructor chooses: 

Week one, cover chapter 1. 

Week 2, chapter 2. 

Homework assignments: see the instructor’s manual for the textbook for a paper topic designed to measure knowledge of the textbook. 

Test questions: see the publisher-supplied test bank. 

Sure, that’s convenient, but I am not sure it’s why we went into higher education. I think it allows us to be lazy. On the other hand, adjunct instructors who get no prep time as part of their payments don’t always have the wherewithal to put aside the time to find course materials, develop creative assignments, and reflect on pedagogical approaches. But it does a disservice to students, and it begs the question of what education is.

OER gives both students and faculty the opportunity to be what they are supposed to be: lifelong, active learners. Commercial textbooks, controlled by others and closed to modification, turn both the student and the instructor into passive recipients of established knowledge, limiting the ability to challenge established conventions and discouraging curiosity. OER allows learning materials and approaches to be customized and tailored to fit local and individual needs. Teaching US History, but want to incorporate material on local participation in World War II? Remix and revise the content. Trying to respond to current events like the removal of a statue of a Confederate General? Modify the unit on Reconstruction. Add new material on Black Lives Matter. And update it again next year when new evidence emerges, or you have to teach this whole thing via Zoom.

Education is more than just transmitting content. It is teaching people how to continue to learn. When students graduate from your institution and go into the labor force, they are not done learning. You have not taught them everything they will ever need to know. You need to have taught them information literacy—how to evaluate information and determine what is valid and what is not. And those bits of information will change as circumstances and the economy and the politics of our society change. Information, as Stewart Brand said, wants to be free: it will evolve and be transmitted in ways that you are unable to predict. OER provides a better blueprint for the world in which information is free and not static, allowing students to be active producers of knowledge, not passive consumers.