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Inequities find their way into student experiences in many ways. Language barriers, lack of decent internet access at home and, of course, ancillary costs.

Under that final category, one often finds the price of textbooks. According to the College Board, the average student budget for books and supplies at a four-year public institution is $1,240.  have found that nearly two-thirds of students skip buying required materials because of the costs, even when they know this will negatively impact their grades. 

One way to beat the cost of textbooks is to provide alternatives, such as open educational resources, or OER. These are free, online textbooks and materials that faculty can use to save students money. Their growing availability (and resultant competition in the marketplace) means textbook prices have dropped in recent years, some as much as 40 percent or more.

“Many of our faculty are rethinking their courses, examining them through an equity lens,” said Dr. Cindy Kane, assistant provost for strategic initiatives at Bridgewater State University. “OER removes that roadblock of cost and provides faculty the opportunity to make their own work more culturally responsive.”

As some in the OER movement put it: Faculty can now “replace” and “remix” in order to customize their materials.

“The flexible nature of OER means faculty have more options with regard to more diverse authors and more culturally responsive course material,” Dr. Kane said.

Despite the other reasons educators embrace OER, price – and its corollary, equity – are key to faculty members like Dr. J.R. Webb, a professor in the Department of History.

“I’m in this because I care about the costs for students,” he said. “In some of my courses, I still use a traditional textbook, though I seek out low-cost ones or earlier editions. For other courses, I gather together resources from a variety of places, including the public domain and materials under fair-use copyright, to provide free materials to students.”

When there isn’t a readymade textbook for a given course, it can be OER to the rescue. Likewise, these outside resources can help fill in gaps within the pages of the usual texts. For instance, if an environmental science textbook does not have up-to-date information about the impacts of climate change, a faculty member can pull that information from elsewhere to augment the course’s assigned material.

OER is not new. The first known use of the term was at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s 2002 Forum on Open Courseware, which also gave us the first definition: “Open Educational Resources are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.” 

Locally, it was five years ago that the state Board of Education endorsed the recommendations of a working group established by Commissioner Carlos E. Santiago. That report recommended expanding the use of these alternative resources at public colleges and universities. 

To help move the use of OER forward at ŷ������, Dr. Kane facilitated a course-transformation grant from the Davis Educational Foundation of $191,000 – now in its third and final year – to help faculty integrate OER into their lesson plans. She said there are three steps faculty tend to take before making use of OER materials: 1) deciding to replace some or all of a course’s material, 2) adapting available material, and 3) creating content of their own to share with others. Some faculty around the country who have authored traditional textbooks have converted some or all of their titles to open-source, making it widely available for free to classrooms beyond their own.

Dr. Jessica Birthisel, a professor in the Department of Communication, has been using OER for a dozen years. For her, it’s always been about teaching about and promoting equity. She and Dr. Webb have been named OER Faculty Fellows, and they have been busy spreading the word around campus about the benefits of OER.

“In the early days, the focus was about the cost,” she said. “They can be prohibitive for our students, and students often choose to not buy the book because they can’t afford it. That’s still a huge part of it. Now it’s about representation within the sources. These materials are things you curate. You handpick the chapters and assignments, and you begin to think about things beyond cost, such as whose voices are featured.”

Dr. Birthisel teaches digital media and social media, and the content “changes by the week,” she said. “For me to find textbooks that are really of the moment can be challenging. Using free and no-cost materials, I can try to keep my classes up to date and fresh.” 

There are obstacles to be overcome when trying to convince others to try OER materials. Some (about 40 percent of faculty nationwide) believe they are substandard compared to traditional textbooks. Dr. Birthisel said that’s not the case. Meanwhile, Dr. Webb said OER is simply what you make it.

“Sometimes OER comes up in general discussions and some people champion it and some deride its quality,” he said. “In my experience, the quality is highly variable. There are bad OER and there are good OER. What we try to do is allow faculty to use their own expertise to make the determination of what’s right for them and their students.”

The Davis grant provides the funds to help ŷ������ faculty members explore these issues and find possible ways in which OER might fit into their toolkits. Dr. Birthisel encourages her colleagues to give it a try.

“It doesn’t have to be all or nothing,” she said. “Most of my classes are some kind of mix.”

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