OER tutorial: A self-paced guide for faculty

In the previous module you were introduced to OER. In this module you will learn about the benefits of using OER to faculty and students. 

By the end of this module you should be able to: 

1. Articulate motivations for OER adoptions and use
2. Describe the benefits of OER for faculty
3. Describe the benefits of OER for students
4. Explore further benefits that OER use supports, such as equity and inclusion

Why Use OER?

OER supports a future where students and instructors have free access to a wide variety of high-quality educational resources that have been collaboratively developed, reviewed, revised, and shared across institutions. A future where educational resources can be easily adapted to fit within the context of specific courses, and to meet the needs of specific students. A future where the cost of creation, use, and maintenance is much lower than the current rising costs of textbooks and other classroom resources.

OER advocacy organization SPARC summarizes the reasons why OER adoption can benefit both students, faculty, and even the larger community:

• Textbook costs should not be a barrier to education
• Students learn more when they have access to quality materials
• Technology holds boundless potential to improve teaching and learning
• Better education means a better future

Watch the video "Why OER?" to learn more:

Benefits

The following are just some of the benefits of using OER for both faculty and students:

Students: Cost savings

Using OER can provide tremendous cost savings for students, and can impact student success and completion rates. We know that the cost of textbooks can be a huge financial burden on students. Research highlighted in the 2022 Iowa OER Survey shows the ripple effect of lightening the financial burden by use of OER:

• Student retention rates are as good or better in courses using OER when compared to courses using traditional materials (Colvard, Watson, & Park, 2018).
• Students who enroll in more than one OER course take more credits than their peers (Griffiths et al., 2020).

Students: Improved Learning Outcomes

OER provide students with day-one access to free course materials, and research reviewed by the Open Education Group shows that most students perform as well or better using OER course materials compared with students using traditional textbooks.

"When faculty use OER, we aren't just saving students money on textbooks: we are directly impacting that student's ability to enroll in, persist through, and successfully complete a course." (Jhangiani & DeRosa, 2017)

The Florida Virtual Campus' 2016 and 2018 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey demonstrates that the cost of commercial textbooks continues to negatively impact student access, success, and completion.

Faculty: Freedom & Empowerment

Faculty using OER enjoy great freedom in selecting course materials that they can customize to fit the needs of their students and their teaching goals. Since most OER permit adaptation, educators are free to edit, reorder, delete, or remix OER materials. OER provide clearly defined rights to users.

Faculty: Collaboration

The open community is a wonderful place to share and communicate with others. It allows for peer reviews and collaborations within and across disciplines. If you would like to learn more, check out "How to Connect" from the Learning Portal OER Toolkit.

Equity & Open

More and more, discussions of OER bring in issues of equity and diversity. OER champion Quill West states the significance of equity and inclusion within the OER movement like this:

As important as access is to students and to institutions, it is a starting place for leveraging other benefits of OER, and I hope that our conversations about [open education] go beyond access, because savings money on materials doesn't address bigger issues in student persistence and completion. (Quill West, "Overview of EDI and Open Education", 2018) 

While OER can help with the challenge of access to relevant educational resources, it is important to consider that not everyone has access to technology. There are also challenges related to equity in the OER themselves: For example, the open community generally lacks diversity in OER authorship, and there are known difficulties finding openly licensed content that is culturally relevant and inclusive. Representation matters and there is work to do in this area.

Good work is also being done through many colleges and consortiums. Here are some examples:

• CC ECHO (California Consortium for Equitable Change in Hispanic Serving Institutions) received a grant to implement a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) framework for OER to design 20 high impact courses. 
• Open for Antiracism Program (OFAR) emerged as a response to the growing awareness of structural racism in higher education. The program provides a supportive and safe environment where faculty can learn about antiracist teaching and pedagogy, and apply it in their own classrooms. 
• Open Pedagogy can be a powerful tool for letting students take control over how they engage with and relate to their course content. In some ways, engaging students in the creation of OER can be seen as the ultimate way of allowing them to see themselves reflected in their work. 

As Prescott, Muniz and Ishmael state in their article "How to Bring Equity and Inclusion to the Classroom":

OER provide a unique opportunity for educators to access learning materials, and then tailor them to the specific needs of their classroom. This is particularly important for teaching diverse groups of students. Where culturally-responsive curriculum redesign must include funding to print textbooks that often fail to reflect student diversity and quickly become outdated, OER could instead be used to give students access to high-quality learning materials that educators could then continue to adapt as understandings of student needs and identities change.

Information for this module was consulted and adapted from:

"An Introduction to Open Educational Resources" by Abbey Elder is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"Leveraging the Benefits of OER" in Welcome to Understanding OER by SUNY OER Services is licensed under CC BY 4.0

"Open Education" by SPARC is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Understanding OER. by SUNY OER Services. in OER Community Course. CC BY: Attribution

"Why Open Education?" by CCCOER is licensed under CC BY 4.0