Why Not OER?
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Why Not OER?
Many observers find it baffling that faculty in higher education have been slow to adopt open educational resources (OER). The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a private foundation that makes grants to expand access to learning materials, defines OER as:
Teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.1
OER offers many advantages. For example, it ensures that every student can afford access to course materials. OER also enables faculty to create materials customized for their classes. Despite these potential benefits, adoption of open educational resources remains limited. Some of the greatest OER use and adoption has taken place in community colleges, primarily pointing to the rising costs of textbooks and community colleges' concern for their students' financial needs.
How can information professionals move OER farther into the mainstream? This is not only an academic issue but also an essential issue of economic fairness for students and for the entire world. The Babson Survey Research Group at Babson College, a private business school in Babson Park, Massachusetts, examines the attitudes, opinions, and use of OER among teaching faculty in United States higher education. The group published a pivotal report titled "Opening the Curriculum: Open Educational Resources in Higher Education, 2014." The report was created with support from the Hewlett Foundation, which also provided its assistance in framing the project and handling the data analysis.
The Babson Survey Research Group's report identified that faculty lacked awareness of open educational resources. Once understood, they appreciated the concept and found that OER is roughly equivalent to traditional resources. The largest barrier to OER adoption is faculty. Their perception of the time and effort to find and evaluate the resources hinders wider use of OER.2
A literature review and conversation with colleagues helped me glean useful information about current OER opportunities and challenges. I am the associate university librarian for engagement and learning at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe, a [End Page 665] major research institution with the largest course online presence in the United States. My colleagues and I embrace the notion that every one of our users is online. To widen our users' access to education, we must continue to forge ahead in creating innovative strategies and partnerships with campus members as a team.
North Carolina State University (NCSU) in Raleigh is a successful research institution with an excellent reputation for success with OER. In April 2017, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded NCSU one of its National Leadership Grants for Libraries. NCSU received the grant in collaboration with the American Psychological Association; the University of North Carolina Press; the Student Public Interest Research Groups, independent statewide student organizations that work on poverty and other issues; the Open Textbook Network, a group of universities and library organizations that support use of open textbooks and practices; and the new preprint service PsyArXiv, a free preprint service for the psychological sciences. What a great team of collaborators! I contacted the principal investigator, Will Cross, director of the Copyright and Digital Scholarship Center in the NCSU Libraries, to respond to a few questions about OER. He kindly agreed and asked his co-principal investigator, Mira Waller, the associate head of collections and research strategy in the NCSU Libraries, to participate. The following is a synopsis of the questions I asked and Will and Mira's responses.
Though studies have shown that students perform as well or better in courses using open educational resources (OER), instructors at American universities are hesitant to replace their course materials with open resources. What do you see are factors that cause this hesitancy?
The Babson Report puts a lot of weight on faculty concerns about quality and discoverability, and those are obviously important issues. I think rather than asking "Why not?" we need to answer the question "Why should I bother changing?" The status quo is...
