Textbooks are every college student’s worst nightmare. They are expensive, heavy, and sometimes bought and only referenced once or twice throughout the semester. LBCC has been moving in a different direction by trying to get more and more professors to move to OER and the college should continue to do so.
What is OER? OER stands for Open Education Resources. According to The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) OER is, “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.”
Basically, textbooks or other learning materials that can be accessed online for free.
According to Kathleen Scott, who is the vice president of academic affairs and an advocate for OER, the goal of bringing OER to campus is to increase the number of faculty to switch from textbooks to OER on a voluntary basis. Which can make it difficult if a professor is attached to the textbook they’ve been using for however many years.
Allison Murray, who is the OER coordinator at LBCC says that making that switch is also a large investment of time.
“Building a Canvas site for an individual class takes on average 100 hours and that is done outside of our classroom commitment…working in an OER textbook is now adding on hours on top of that 100 hours,” said Murray.
However, there are incentives and grants faculty can apply for that will help them make that leap. They get paid to write an OER if they cannot find one already in existence they like.
“If the textbook is something that requires updating, they can apply for another grant and get compensated for any changes that need to be made. The only people losing money because of OER would be mass market publishers, not the writers,” said Scott.
Another con of OER could be that because it’s online, it might be less accessible to students who don’t have a computer or internet access. And it would be a loss for students who learn better with physical text.
Luckily, LBCC provides many resources to students who may not have a computer or internet access and makes that possible for them.
For students who prefer physical textbooks, Scott mentioned you can get an OER printed from the bookstore for a price as low as $25. And in terms of quality, if professors don’t find something they like, they can get compensated for making their own.
OER has benefits that come in different ways. One of them is accessibility; which was referenced previously as a drawback but it could also be presented as a benefit. Having it be online might make it more accessible than if it was physical.
They would also come at no cost to students, which is a key component since, according to College Tuition Compare, a database that helps college students compare tuitions from various schools, shows that 66% of LBCC’s students receive some form of financial aid.
Scott also mentioned moving to an OER means that professors can divide the chapters in different modules on Canvas which would make them user friendly and organized.
Also, they can use OER to provide more information. “For example, if you’re teaching a higher-level psychology class, the faculty member can also attach a Psych 1 textbook just as a supplement to the course,” said Scott.
Faculty also have the freedom to adopt as many OER texts to their class as they want and if they are writing their own, they can adapt multiple resources into a single text.
In the end, LBCC moving to OER is a positive thing and would make LBCC even more affordable to students.
Already, OER has saved students 1.4 million dollars in unnecessary textbook fees according to Murray. If more students became advocates for OER by educating themselves on it or even by respectfully asking those faculty who are still using textbooks about considering OER as an option, it would help students save even more money.