Group items tagged

can all commercial materials be replaced with open educational resources? The answer to this question is no, but perhaps not for the reason you suspect.

In summary, in circumstances where (1) the primary object of study is not an idea, but is a specific creative work which is still under copyright and (2) the copyright holder has chosen not to publish the work under an open license, it is literally impossible to replace all the commercial content in that course with OER.

The library may be able to purchase or license copies of these commercial materials and make them available to students for free. In fact, they may have already purchased or licensed copies which are just waiting to be used. The library is a trusted, capable, and unfortunately often overlooked potential partner for closing the access gap to commercial materials. (Your library may also be curating OER you don’t know about – libraries are actually leading the charge toward OER on some campuses.)

We need to tell the OER story in a wide range of ways. Most importantly, we have to know who we’re talking to and what language they speak. For some audiences, we will need to speak the language of experimental design and quantitative efficacy studies published in peer reviewed outlets. For others, we will need to use the language of anecdotes combined with first hand student accounts. Legislators and administrators will care about funding, costs, and parent and student attitudes. Faculty will care about efficacy and academic freedom. Students will care about costs, grades, and time to graduation. As a community we must be conversant in these different languages so that the stories we tell are both comprehensible and compelling.

I cannot stress this point enough – telling the OER story in terms that speak to us personally will only work on those rare occasions when we’re speaking to other people just like us. We can only create recognition of the value of OER by telling the OER story in terms of the values of our immediate audience.

Who controls the incentive architectures for faculty and students? How might we nudge them toward adjusting incentives to become supportive of OER-related work? Once they have recognized the value of OER, we need to provide them with models for the kinds of incentives they might include in their broader incentive architectures.

Faculty Perceptions of Quality: 100% said they will use OERs again 100% found the quality of materials to be equal or better than non-OERs 100% continued in the program. Among the comments made by faculty were: “This project has been my most rewarding professional experience.”  ”This is an issue of social justice. How, in good conscience, can we not contribute to this movement?”

Specifically, I think there’s a huge opportunity for bookstores to offer optional print-on-demand to students when faculty adopt OER in place of commercial textbooks.

Here’s the insane part: the college bookstore actually makes more pre-tax profit on the $18 print-on-demand open textbook than they do on the $150 publisher biology book, while earning the same per-book percentages for overhead and personnel.

Across all three subjects students in OER classrooms performed better than students in normal classrooms--a difference that was statistically significant.

More importantly, given the other benefits of OER--chiefly, enormous cost savings--the key finding may simply be that the students who used OER didn’t perform any worse. As long as OER textbooks are just as good (or better), schools can use them to save money, then put the funds toward increasing achievement in other areas.

“teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Open licensing is built within the existing framework of intellectual property rights as defined by relevant international conventions and respects the authorship of the work”;

007 Cape Town Open Education Declaration, the 2009 Dakar Declaration on Open Educational Resources and the 2011 Commonwealth of Learning and UNESCO Guidelines on Open Educational Resources in Higher Education;

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.1