Thanks to the University of Sheffield Library (Helen Moore and Maria Mawson, Faculty Librarians) for allowing us to repost this blog in relation to Open Access Week.
We’re unlikely to see any improvements unless we’re willing to make some radical changes and look at alternative models of textbook provision.
What is OER?
UNESCO defines OER as “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open licence that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or few restrictions.”
What are the benefits of OER?
They are free for everyone to read, adapt and distribute without limitation. Your students can access open textbooks and other OER at no cost to themselves or the institution
They have a pedagogical impact – you can manipulate OER in a way you can’t commercial textbooks
OER enable your academic freedom and professional autonomy. You don’t have to teach a class based on what a commercial publisher provides, so the material can be adapted to suit the needs of your students, and your learning outcomes
If you want to customise textbook content to suit your curriculum OER allows you full flexibility
Students do just as well, if not better, with OER (see Open educational resources, student efficacy, and user perceptions: a synthesis of research published between 2015 and 2018.
Also, Efficacy of open textbook adoption on learning performance and course withdrawal rates: A meta-analysis – Virginia Clinton, Shafiq Khan, 2019)
They don’t harvest student data unlike some commercial publisher platforms (e.g. SEC fines Pearson $1m for misleading investors over cyber breach)
You can involve students as co-creators and contributors (see Open pedagogy: a guide to making open textbooks with students)
They address the University’s Project Level Approach priorities of:
Employability: students retain access to OER after graduation.
They support graduates who are practitioners and need ongoing access to key texts in their field, and they can be instrumental in lifelong learning.
Inclusivity: many of us are aware that commercially published texts are often US- or Euro-centric. OER present an opportunity to include material that’s more representative of the global scholarly community.
Sustainability: OER can offer longevity. Traditionally published material, particularly in digital format, can be withdrawn with little or no notice, or prices and access models changed to make it difficult to purchase for our institution.
OER are preserved and curated for the long term, always remaining free at the point of use.
How can I find OER?
You can already find freely available material in StarPlus (University of Sheffield Library Catalogue) and there’s an ‘open access’ filter to help you do this.
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy to see at a glance what the licence terms are, so you can’t readily tell whether a work can be modified for your own use.
We’re working on this! In the meantime sources such as the Open Textbook Library, OER Commons, MERLOT, and MIT open courseware are useful starting points.
What’s next?
Our new content strategy clearly states our support for initiatives in the field of open scholarship. We want to hear from you – from the students and staff in our core communities – as we begin to develop the infrastructure and services to support the discovery, use and creation of OER.
We’re working closely with the university libraries of Leeds and York to progress these objectives and have recently launched the White Rose OER Toolkit.
In the meantime get in touch with us, make your views known and let us know about any OER work you’ve created.