Advocates believe that open educational resources (OER) can help counter high textbook prices while providing high-quality, innovative content. Stephanie Robertson said that position can put OER advocates in conflict with those who prefer traditionally published materials—but it doesn’t have to.
“I think that to have a collection that is high-quality and has the layers of complexity you would expect from a collection, you need both OER and traditionally published materials,” said Robertson, assistant professor and outreach librarian at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, in the “It’s Not Either/Or!: How to Include Open Access Materials to Transform Curriculum and Collections” session at the American Library Association’s Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago June 25.
Robertson does encourage OER use, citing as an example how she recently took a Spanish class but lost access to the (traditionally published) materials after the course was over. “Where’s the lifelong learning in that?” she asked.
She also acknowledged the potentially dealbreaking challenges in using open resources, including time constraints, technical incompatibility, a lack of institutional support, misconceptions about OERs, and a lack of necessary know-how to create resources or incorporate them into campus systems.
Robertson and Emily Bradshaw, then an adjunct faculty member at BYU-Hawaii, collaborated to build a community of practice on the campus to explore OER. With limited funding (just enough to provide a lunch) they provided a four-part training, with sections introducing the concept, sharing sources of OER materials, discussing open-enabled pedagogy, and discussing the intersection of OER with culturally relevant pedagogy.
They had planned to start converting materials created for classes to freely available, Creative Commons licensing during the workshop, and some, but not all, participants were receptive. “We had real reticence from Indigenous scholars. They were not eager to license even a worksheet from their classes,” Robertson said. There were clear reasons for this resistance; one colleague shared her experience of having materials wrongfully taken and misused in the past.
“Librarians like to organize things and make them accessible,” Robertson noted. “But what is greater in OER is not to have a librarian-centered approach, but to have a community of practice.” This community could share information and experiences to help each other make decisions appropriate to their needs.
Even faculty members who may not want or be able to share their materials openly, for example, may be able to use other OERs in their classes. As part of the session, Robertson shared sources where these materials can be found.
Session attendees suggested practices like encouraging faculty who use OERs to advocate for them with other faculty members, getting the perspectives of faculty members who have had bad experiences with OERs, and using institutional repositories to host and promote open materials.
