Adopting OER

Stephen Craig Finlay

32 Adopting OER

Video Interview with Angelika Stout

—Angelika Stout, Marketing and Entrepreneurship in the College of Business Administration at University of Nebraska at Omaha, was a lead in a project to convert all sections of business communications and here she describes the project from the perspective of a faculty adopter.

Discovering OER

Repositories of OER Material:

Read through Abbey Elder’s OER Starter Kit “Repositories and Search Tools.” This list of resources will provide you and your campus with a place to begin discovering OER. Some may be familiar, others may not be (and you are welcome to explore them, as each name will be linked to the source).

Also, take a look at the offerings from the following:

*OER repositories — pre-filled data*
Repository	About the OER Material
	OpenStax, an OER publisher run in cooperation with Rice University. With instructor-only content, test banks, learning management system content, discussion prompts and slides, many OpenStax titles are considered the gold standard for the areas they cover.
	OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational materials. OER Commons will return massive result lists for many searches. As would be expected, the quality of sources varies widely, as OER commons is simply finding openly-licensed educational materials. You’ll find quality textbooks, and you also might find resources that aren’t as high-quality. Searching on OER Commons gives good insight into the challenges many adopters face when they start searching for materials.
	Search the Pressbook Directory to find open materials that (most commonly) faculty have assembled for their courses. Pressbooks is an online book publishing system built on WordPress. It provides individuals with an easy way to publish their own educational textbooks online.

Faculty and the Curriculum

OER awareness and adoption rates among faculty are on the rise, and this has been a huge win for students all around the globe. However, there are still significant and valid reasons why some faculty haven’t embraced OER in lieu of traditional textbooks. Many faculty members still haven’t heard of OER, and there is an opportunity to host professional development, create learning circles, and engage faculty as creators of open content.

But, as we know, most people are naturally skeptical of new things. They may have hesitations about the source of OER, whether it is quality, and whether it has been peer-reviewed. This is understandable, given that faculty live in a world steeped in the idea of peer review. You may also have heard the sentence “anyone can publish anything on the web.”

Faculty will likely want some assurance that what they are providing their students has the most reputable information. Thus, the traditional tendency is to choose texts they have had a chance to explore, that are written by well-known authors in the discipline, and have received favorable reviews from peers they trust.

One strategy is to provide faculty with sources that deliver OER that meet these expectations. For example, the Open Textbook Library, which you looked at earlier, provides both a vetted list of open textbooks and reviews of the books written by faculty. Open Education Network actively encourages faculty to provide reviews of open textbooks to help promote that trust from the peer-review process. This is a good way to show that OER are quality.

But what is quality, really?

Almost everyone would agree that quality means that the information is factually correct. But often people jump to other factors that aren’t related to the information. Are there pleasing illustrations? Is the paper glossy? Is it nicely typeset? Does it come with ancillary items that make faculty’s job easier? In some cases, people might even associate high cost with quality (i.e., “you get what you pay for”).

At the end of the day, these are all proxies for the one thing that really matters when it comes to quality: whether a material helps students learn. This post summarizes this argument.

There is a growing body of peer-reviewed research that measures perceptions and outcomes of students using OER. You read some of it in your readings.

At the end of the day, faculty are the ones to choose content for their courses. Our job is to help narrow down their choices, point them in the right direction, and help frame the way they look at OER.

Another factor holding back faculty is that they often do not like to change textbooks because that may require work to change lectures, quizzes, tests, and assignments. But, many OER providers such as OpenStax are starting to provide such ancillaries, and repositories such as OER Commons are seeking to build collections of ancillaries for specific subjects.

Pedagogy and Assessment

Free access to materials is not the only benefit provided by using OER. Another aspect of OER that is commonly commended by instructors is the academic freedom that using openly-licensed content affords them in taking control of their classroom and engaging students in learning.

—Attribution: “Open Dialogues: How to engage and support students in open pedagogies” by Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, University of British Columbia is licensed CC BY 3.0.

Innovation in the Classroom

The open licenses on OER allow instructors to adapt and integrate materials into their classes in new ways, incorporating topics of local interest or translating content into another language.

Instructors who teach graduate-level courses or courses in niche subject areas are often drawn to OER for two reasons:

They can adapt existing materials to meet the specific needs of their class.
They can share created materials with other instructors in their subject area around the world.

Developing new open educational resources can be incredibly impactful, especially for instructors who feel they are underserved by the traditional textbook model and market.

Open Pedagogy

Using open educational resources in the classroom can make it easier for students to access and interact with course materials. However, another major aspect of Open Education asks not “what you teach with” but “how you teach.” The set of pedagogical practices that include engaging students in content creation and making learning accessible is known as open pedagogy.

As DeRosa & Jhangiani explain, “one key component of open pedagogy might be that it sees access, broadly writ, as fundamental to learning and to teaching, and agency as an important way of broadening that access.”¹ DeRosa & Robison expand on this topic, explaining that:

“Students asked to interact with OER become part of a wider public of developers, much like an open-source community. We can capitalize on this relationship between enrolled students and a broader public by drawing in wider communities of learners and expertise to help our students find relevance in their work, situate their ideas into key contexts, and contribute to the public good.”²

Depending on the source you consult, open pedagogy might be a series of practices, a learning style, or a state of mind. For this lesson’s sake, open pedagogy is defined as a series of practices which involve engaging students in a course through the development, adaptation, or use of open educational resources.

One method of engaging in open pedagogy is developing renewable assignments, which students create to share and release as OER. These can range in content from individual writing assignments on Wikipedia to collaboratively written textbooks.^{3 4}

Wiley & Hilton compiled the criteria in the table below to distinguish between different kinds of assignments, from least to most open.⁵ You can explore more examples of open pedagogy in action in the Open Pedagogy Notebook.

References for the previous section:

DeRosa, Robin and Jhangiani, Rajiv. “Open Pedagogy and Social Justice.” Digital Pedagogy Lab. June 2, 2017. http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/open-pedagogy-social-justice/
DeRosa, Robin and Robison, Scott. “From OER to Open Pedagogy: Harnessing the Power of Open.” In Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science, edited by Rajiv Jhangiani and Robert Biswas-Diener, 115–124. London: Ubiquity Press, 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/bbc.i.
Villeneuve, Cassidy. “Editing Wikipedia in the Classroom: Individualized Open Pedagogy at Scale.” Open Pedagogy Notebook. May 17, 2018. http://openpedagogy.org/course-level/editing-wikipedia-in-the-classroom-individualized-open-pedagogy-at-scale/
DeRosa, Robin. “Student-Created Open “Textbooks” as Course Communities.” Open Pedagogy Notebook. March 18, 2018. http://openpedagogy.org/course-level/student-created-open-textbooks-as-course-communities/
Wiley, David and Hilton III, John. “Defining OER-Enabled Pedagogy.” The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning 19, no. 4 (2018). http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3601/4724.

Wiley & Hilton’s (2018) Criteria Distinguishing Different Kinds of Assignments:

*Assignment and criteria — pre-filled data*
	Student creates an artifact	The artifact has value beyond supporting its creator’s learning	The artifact is made public	The artifact is openly licensed
Disposable assignments	Yes	No	No	No
Authentic assignments	Yes	Yes	No	No
Constructionist assignments	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Renewable assignments	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Tools for implementing renewable assignments

Hypothesis: One of the tools commonly used for open pedagogy projects is Hypothes.is. Hypothes.is allows users to annotate websites and online readings easily. Using hypothes.is can let students engage with your course readings and each other in a more interactive way than discussion boards might allow.
Wikibooks: Wikibooks and WikiEdu are both excellent tools for working with students to create a text. Alternatively, short student projects, such as annotated bibliographies, can be done via Wikipedia by adding context and citations to short or underdeveloped articles. This not only gives students the opportunity to get experience explaining concepts for a public audience, it also increases the available public knowledge on your course’s topic!
Google Drive: Google Drive provides various tools that can be used for collaboration on text-based projects, as well as slideshows and spreadsheets.
YouTube: Student-made instructional videos or class projects can be incredibly useful to showcase for future students in the class, or to use as supplemental materials for explaining difficult concepts.

Assessment

An essential component of any OER initiative is assessment of impact. Assessment typically takes two forms. The first, and easiest, is to track financial impact. If a course with a $150 textbook adopts instead a freely available textbook, then one can multiply the cost of the old materials by the number of students. This is valuable, and gives us eye-catching bullet points to trumpet our successes.

The second, and harder, is to assess impact on student success. At the University of Nebraska, we recently completed a study on the impact of OER adoptions on student success. Across the University of Nebraska, students were generally less likely to withdraw or fail classes and more likely to earn A’s. At UNO specifically, compared to students in non-OER sections, students in Open Nebraska sections: