Open Educational Resources (OER) and open textbooks hold significant potential to make education more equitable, particularly for students facing economic challenges. By providing free access to high-quality educational materials, OER eliminates the financial barriers associated with traditional textbooks and ebook access codes, which can be prohibitively expensive. This increased accessibility ensures that all students, regardless of their financial situation, have equal opportunities to succeed academically.
Unlike commercial textbooks, OER can be customized to meet diverse learning needs, fostering inclusivity and allowing educators to adapt materials to better serve underrepresented or marginalized groups. By reducing costs and promoting adaptability, OER contributes to a more inclusive and equitable educational environment, where every student can thrive.
Since 2017 I have worked with the Office of Faculty Development, the Distance Learning Committee, and the Provost’s Office to promote faculty adoption of OER, encouraging our faculty to consider open textbooks–such as the high-quality, free options provided by OpenStax– instead of a pricey commercial textbook.
Progress on campus has been steady but uneven. As more high-quality OER appears online, more faculty are ditching their commercial textbooks and making the switch. At the same time, many remained skeptical or couldn’t find existing open textbooks suitable for their upper-level courses. Other faculty have lowered the financial burden on students by eschewing textbooks altogether, depending instead on portions of copyrighted materials uploaded to BlackBoard or other freely available material found online. An analysis of Fall 2022 syllabi revealed that 22% of undergraduate courses offered that semester had zero textbook cost, yet only 6% incorporated open textbooks.
When I speak to faculty members about open education and open publishing, I have always stressed that the promise of OER extends beyond just free textbooks. Proponents of OER, including myself, love to talk about the “5 Rs of Open Content”: Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute, and Retain. The “5 Rs” indicate that not only are OERs free to assign to your students and often free for your students to download and “retain” beyond the duration of the course, but many OERs can be adapted, modified, revised, remixed, or recombined to produce new derivative works customized to the professor’s unique instructional goals. This freedom to customize open textbooks to the pedagogical demands of the course is impossible with copyrighted learning materials, such as traditional commercial textbooks.
While it has always been exciting to speak to faculty about the potential of OER, I understood from the beginning that if Saint Peter’s University faculty were going to embrace the full potential of this new landscape, they would need the support of publishing tools, like Pressbooks, that would allow them to author or adapt accessible, interactive open textbooks. Fortunately, forward-thinking administrators including former Associate Provost, Dr. Mildred Mihlon, included an OER in the 2020 United States Department of Education Title V Grant, “Ensuring Success for the New Majority Student.” Through the support of this expansive grant, Saint Peter’s acquired a site license to Pressbooks, the leading publishing tool for creating and adapting open textbooks. The grant also supports mini-grants for faculty who commit to converting a course to OER by authoring or adapting open textbooks and contributing them to the Saint Peter’s Pressbooks network, benefiting educators and students on our campus and beyond.
This summer I led our second OER Faculty Institute which supports faculty mini-grant recipients with training sessions and a learning community centered around open education practices. Most faculty are still working on their texts, but a few completed works from last year’s institute are available on the Saint Peter’s Pressbooks Network site, and are already being used in the classroom.
Faculty who want to learn more about OER development and great sources for existing OER, please check out the library’s OER Research Guide. For more information on Pressbooks or to set up a Pressbooks account, please contact me, Library Director, Daisy DeCoster.
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