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From: Beth McMurtrie
Subject: What Exactly Is a ‘Free’ Textbook, and Other Questions About Open Resources
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You’re reading the latest issue of Teaching, a weekly newsletter from a team of Chronicle journalists. Sign up here to get it in your inbox on Thursdays.
This week:
A few months ago, we asked you to tell us about some of the teaching experiments taking place on your campuses, so that we could share the lessons you’ve learned. One popular project, we found, is to switch from traditional textbooks to open educational resources, or OER.
While those experiments are just beginning, I decided to get an early take on how things are going. Are people excited? Frustrated? Confused? Who is doing the work, and how will you know if you succeeded? I reached out to a number of the readers who wrote in about OER. Here are their initial takeaways.
In some cases, a single professor is swapping out a costly textbook for a free one. In others, a campus is engaged in the process of reducing the cost of classroom materials. Either way, people undertaking OER experiments do so because what they have isn’t working for them.
In most cases, the high cost of textbooks is a major driver. “We live in a pretty poor area,” says Philip Smith, a teaching-and-learning specialist at East Tennessee State University, which is scaling OER across 17 courses this year. “There’s a general feeling of, We’re doing this to help our students.”
Some people feel that they could improve upon the textbooks being used. That’s the case at Boise State University, where Teresa Focarile, an adjunct professor teaching a theater-history course online, wanted to increase student engagement and reduce the rates of failure and withdrawal in her class. She decided to create her own. “The textbook we used before was often too detailed,” she says. “It would cover something in 40 pages, when 20 would do.”
The same holds true at Rowan University, which is switching to a homegrown OER book in its required first-year writing program. Jude Miller, a lecturer overseeing the project, says faculty members already had “mixed responses” to the textbook they were using, and wanted to create one that emphasizes research-based writing.
Rarely is OER adoption as simple as swapping out a traditional textbook for a free one. At Northeastern Illinois University, a psychology professor is experimenting with an OpenStax textbook in one section of her introductory course. But those involved want to know: is it effective? In that case, Alyssa Vincent, a digital-scholarship librarian, is helping design an experiment to compare student grades and satisfaction between a section taught with the traditional textbook and one taught with the free one. (To control for student costs, the college is paying for the traditional textbook.)
Librarians are, in fact, playing a central role in these experiments. They are running workshops to explain open educational resources to faculty members, connecting to state and national open-resource networks, and searching for OER textbooks and other free materials.
Librarians and other specialists participating in campuswide initiatives say these efforts have sparked useful conversations with faculty members. Professors want to know what, exactly, makes something “free,” which has led to discussions about Creative Commons licensing. “The tricky part is explaining what is truly open,” says Vincent. “You can’t take an NPR podcast and add your own content.” A truly open resource is freely adaptable, reusable, and shareable.
Some experimenters are turning to outside groups for support. East Tennessee, for example, joined the Open Textbook Network, which helped train Smith, so he could help guide faculty members through the process of transitioning to OER.
Another challenge for almost every group has been finding or creating materials. This has been particularly true for courses outside of STEM — like the one at Boise State on theater history — and for upper-level courses, in which professors might need more-tailored materials. In those cases, experimenters tell me that professors have found it quite time-consuming to research and compile relevant materials that are also free. That’s where librarians and other specialists have stepped in to help.
Still, faculty resistance, or at least skepticism, can arise. East Tennessee is sweetening the pot by giving instructors $1,000 to adopt an existing OER textbook, $3,000 to adapt one, and $5,000 to create one. So far no one has taken them up on the $5,000 offer. But the program has led to helpful conversations about how to think about course materials. Some professors have decided that they’re OK with, for example, using a free article from The New York Times even if it doesn’t meet the criteria for openly licensed material.
Ohio Dominican University is addressing those issues by supporting OER through faculty grants but also talking with faculty members about inclusive access options, says Kelsey Squire, an associate professor of English. The price of textbooks is folded into tuition at a reduced cost through volume discounts. That option may be preferred, she says, in courses where professors need a lot of ancillary materials like test banks.
Every college has its own criteria, of course, but there are some common themes. For one, colleges want to reduce the cost of textbooks. That’s easy to measure. They also want high-quality materials. That’s more challenging to find.
They also want to increase student engagement. That might come by looking at the percentage of grades of D, F, or W for particular courses, surveying students, or studying test scores — comparing the results between the current semester and earlier ones.
One big question is this: Given how much work it takes to transition to OER — and to keep course materials up to date — how can colleges support such efforts over the long term? “We aren’t going to keep paying people to do this,” says Smith, at East Tennessee. “How can we incentivize faculty to see the value of it for its own sake?”
I plan to check in with these folks early next year, to see how the transition to open educational resources is going.
Readers, what are some of the questions you have about these experiments? Drop me a line at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, and I’ll go in search of answers as I track the progress.
In November, I’m headed to the annual POD Network conference, in Pittsburgh. It’s my first time at the event, which is focused on teaching and learning, and I’m looking forward to hearing from the experts and meeting some of you in person. I’m interested in learning more about topics that are staples of the newsletter, like how to foster meaningful classroom discussions and how to promote the value of good teaching at research-intensive universities. I’m also looking forward to hearing about the work of teaching-and-learning centers.
If you have suggestions on panels to attend or want to meet up, drop me a line at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com. I hope to see you there.
In keeping with this week’s newsletter theme, I wanted to point readers to three items related to open educational resources.
On another note, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have released a guide to effective mentorship in STEM and medicine.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
—Beth
