By MARTY LEVINE
Open educational resources (OERs) — educational materials licensed to be freely used and adapted, from online textbooks to problem sets and classroom activities — are adaptable to a specific course and can be adopted in sets or sections, but instructors need to examine them closely for current and error-free content, said members of a panel on OERs hosted by the University Senate’s Library Committee on April 4.
The panel’s student member, Akshita Pawar (a sophomore and campus relations coordinating intern of the Public Interest Research Group), noted that she and her classmates must sometimes buy a published textbook, but the instructor may use only half of it. OERs are certainly more affordable, Pawar said — an advantage especially for general education classes, which are required but whose instructional materials may not be something students wish to keep.
“It’s not even necessarily that,” added panelist Sera Thornton, chair of the provost office’s Open Educational Resources Standing Committee and instructional designer for the Health Sciences Library System, who has been involved in many OER-related projects. “You might expect that all of your students are just buying the textbook ... but a lot of students are just pirating it, which we don’t want to happen. And a significant number of students are simply not having the textbook. Using textbooks with this high pricing (from publishers) is actually exacerbating the equity problem” in higher education.
Biological sciences faculty member Linda O’Reilly, another panelist, is teaching two classes using OER and appreciates that, “I don’t feel like I need to be tied to a particular book. I can cut and paste.” She also reported that, in designing foundational biology classes for 200 to 300 students, specifically designed OERs can help some with different skill sets than others.
Pawar observed that OER use is not widespread in her classes, and sometimes OERs offer fewer details on a subject than a publishers’ offering, such as fewer illustrations or diagrams. Because of that, one of her professors uses OERs only as supplementary, rather than required, course material.
Such OER limitations, Gunn said, affect “how much you enjoy spending time with this resource and how much you trust it.”
Also, Thornton said, the text of an OER may not be changed by its original author to keep up with the latest research, forcing the instructor to make such modifications, whereas publishers employ authors to update new textbook editions. The provost’s office OER committee gives out small grants each year to help instructors make such improvements or do other OER-related tasks “but we know it is not paying for the entire work.”
“I think this old adage, ‘you get what you pay for,’ is at work here,” O’Reilly said.
“The time investment is pretty high in the beginning” of adopting an OER, added Karen Shephard, information services librarian at the Barco Law Library and one of the panel organizers, “but the fact that you can take it and tweak it” is an OER’s most valuable advantage.
“You find lots of errors in publisher paid textbooks also,” Thornton noted, which are more easily and quickly fixed in an OER.
One of Gunn’s favorite OERs, she said, offers ways to structure classroom activities: “I find that someone else has already muddled through it” and discovered and fixed anything that didn’t run smoothly on first try.
And, Gunn said, OERs have “modularity: being able to pull out one piece that is relevant” to classroom use, using that piece alone.
To find such individual OER pieces, Thornton said, try searching YouTube for videos created under a Creative Commons License, or search Google images and look at those labeled for reuse or as educational resources.
There are websites dedicated to OERs, such as MIT OpenCourseWare and OpenStax, as well as Pitt’s own compendium. Some OER platforms even have peer-reviewed offerings.
Gunn observed that “free to me doesn’t necessarily mean free to make — that kind of work isn’t always recorded as traditional publishing” on CVs or in promotion and tenure review, and ought to be, panelists concluded.
“I would definitely toot your own horn” making known that you created valuable OER, said O’Reilly, and the University ought to offer more grants for faculty to create OER, she added.
Faculty should consult the University Center for Teaching and Learning for their guidance on evaluating teaching resources, Thornton advised. Or, to learn the breadth of OER on your particular subject matter, she said: “Talk to your librarian.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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