What I imagined doing when starting my affiliation with the Hub was to get in contact with some people I know on campus who I felt might be receptive to Open Education Resources (OER) in their classes, get them set up with some good open-source materials, and then sit back and watch as the use of OER propagates throughout campus. After all, if you don’t have a financial investment in the resources you have been using and you can find material of comparable quality that you not only can edit and revise but give to your students for free, why wouldn’t you choose that option?
Now, nearing the end of my days as an affiliated operator (pun only for operator algebraists), I have to admit to almost total failure along the lines I described above. In fact, were it not for Ed Williams in Business attending an OER social, the failure would have been total: I would not have been able to find one resource that makes the people I was looking on behalf of even remotely happy. If you’re curious about the potential success, it is in Introductory Business Statistics through OpenStax.
So why did things turn, as they say across the Atlantic, pear-shaped? Well, sometimes I couldn’t even find any resources available. I was confident that Merlot, with its array of well-indexed resources, would provide an opening, and after that fizzled, I turned to the nigh-overwhelming Mason OER Metafinder. What I learned from using the latter tool was that sometimes, when you ask for “Open”, instead you get “Free”, and when you look at a seemingly still copyrighted resource that you can download from a questionable-looking site, you realize that might not be the best thing to recommend to your peers…or anyone, for that matter.
But what if resources are out there but your colleagues just don’t like them? I came to the realization that a quote one of my wiser friends made about mathematicians can be extended to academics in all fields of study: we are cats.
No, not that kind of cat. This kind:
When faculty members are assistant professors (pre-tenure), sometimes we don’t want to rock the boat too much for fear of damaging our tenure prospects. Once we’ve got tenure, for some of us, we have the chance to teach our classes the way we’ve always wanted to teach them: OUR way. I ditched lectures in favor of group work, and only a pandemic made me turn back to lecturing. Want to interest me in a resource I’m not already using? It better tick all of my boxes or it won’t see the light of day in my class.
What can we do, then, as a teaching community, when our standards butt heads against what may be better for our students? I don’t have a very good answer, but I’d still like to offer some thoughts. First, if there’s a resource available that matches at least most of the content I need in a course but I either just don’t like the delivery, I should review it so that the next poor soul who comes knocking on the OER door doesn’t have to do so. Second, if I am really serious about bringing OER to my students, I should invest some time in remixing that resource, rather than attempting to create a brand new resource from scratch. This can be fairly easy if you’re using Pressbooks or if you’re comfortable working with the brute code your text comes in.
If either of these activities sound too time-consuming, well, they probably will be. But the nascent OER committee might have some grants to tempt you with come winter to help change your mind. No, you won’t get a course release, but you will get the satisfaction of helping to release the iron grip of publishers on academia while giving your students a product that you can be proud of.
Note: kitty pictures are from Public Domain Pictures and clker.