In advocating for OER on my campus, I’ve run into many misconceptions. I’ve also found a few people in influential positions, with influential reputations, who are actively spreading these misconceptions. This FAQ is a useful document for addressing some of them.
OER help “to ensure that resources are up-to-date”
How up-to-date are commercial textbooks? There is an investment of time and money that goes into revisions and printing new editions, so publishers don’t want to do that any more than necessary. They also have a vested interest in eliminating the market for used books, so there is a financial benefit to updating editions frequently. Faculty can OER whenever they please, due to the Creative Commons permissions. Some may see this as a drawback, if they would rather have someone else be responsible for keeping materials current. I can see benefits to building the updating process into a course though. Students could look to current research, events and issues to see how they intersect with course subject matter, and be charged with proposing revisions. This type of an assignment would have them actively thinking about the relevance of what they’re learning, how they are learning it, and how to get ideas and concepts across to others. Students would gain experience in managing their own learning processes at the some time as they learn the course content.
“Can OER be high quality if it is free?”
Are commercial textbooks high quality because they’re expensive? What kind of review process do they actually go through? How do we rate quality anyway? What factors are considered important? What matters is student learning and student success. Writing, editing and design will have an impact on that. So will accessibility and cost. I imagine it is relatively easy to compare textbook A to textbook B and decide which is better based on content and presentation. It would be more difficult to determine if textbook A is $100 better than textbook B, or if students would derive $100 more of value from it. Due to CC permissions, OER can be modified to fit the needs of an institution, a department, an instructor, and a group of students. They can be continually modified to improve student success.
OER, which is an acronym for Open Educational Resources, seems like a no-brainer to me. In my 30+ year career teaching Principles of Economics, I have used a variety of books, including traditional commercial textbooks, books written on economic subjects for lay audiences (in lieu of a standard textbook), and no text book at all. I’ve concluded that most intro books are pretty much the same, and that any experienced instructor can teach effectively using pretty much any intro text. Why then should we ask our students to use commercial textbooks that cost $75, $175 or $375, when there are free or very inexpensive alternatives available? Yes it takes some time and effort to adopt and transition to using a new text. I don’t discount this, but as professionals don’t we have an obligation to do that if we think it would be better for our students?
