Curriculum Development with OERs

Do you have students who don’t purchase a textbook because they don’t want to spend a lot of money on a book they will use for just one semester? Do you have students who need to find outside employment and work for several weeks at the beginning of a semester to earn money to purchase the text? If the answer to these questions is yes, you are likely to have students who fall behind and aren’t as successful in your courses as they could be.

Both the engagement and success of these students can be improved with earlier access to course materials. The use of Open Educational Resources (OER) can provide students with this earlier access and result in a more engaging and successful classroom experience.

OER include freely accessible teaching and learning materials, such as openly available textbooks, videos, online articles, review materials, assignments, and many other items. Virtually anything that is freely available and supports student learning can be considered an OER.

Not only do OER allow for earlier and easier access to free course materials, but they also promote equity in student outcomes. The poorest students tend to be the ones who can’t purchase course materials immediately, if at all. These students, in particular, benefit from OER. With OER, all students can engage more fully in the course and complete it successfully.

There are benefits for instructors, as well. For example, many textbooks may contain too much content for a single semester or content that isn’t directly related to the learning outcomes of the course. In addition, instructors may need to supplement the textbook with relevant materials. OER can be curated specifically to align with the learning outcomes of a course.

Please note that instructors must adhere to copyright laws, and intellectual property rights must be respected. The Creative Commons is a way that creators can make their content publicly accessible while retaining some level of ownership rights. It is important to identify the type of Creative Commons license that an OER has before adopting it for your course. Some creators provide for use of the OER as is with no adjustments, while others allow users to edit or make changes to OER.

By leveraging the use of OER even further, instructors can adopt OER-enabled pedagogy. This is a teaching approach that requires students to make their own OER, individually or in small groups. When the assignment involves modifying or creating OER that aligns with course learning outcomes, students must engage in critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration. In addition, this approach helps students take ownership of their own learning.

As an example, I teach first year seminars for students transferring to the institution. One goal of the seminar is to help students acclimate to a large, research-intensive university and develop learning skills that will promote their academic success in this setting.

After several weeks of reviewing effective learning and motivational strategies, students are prompted to reflect on the effectiveness of their own strategies and identify areas for improvement. At the end of this unit, I have structured a class period in which students work together to identify the strategies that will be most effective for students entering college for the first time. They are informed that the result of their efforts will be a tip sheet shared with first-time students in their corresponding seminars.

Students work in small groups to narrow down their lists, write them on flip chart paper, and present them to the rest of the class. The last step in the class period is student vetting of the strategies generated. They are given round stickers that they place next to the strategies they think are most effective.

I then create a shorter list of strategies that students have identified (combining those that are similar) and, using a survey, ask students to rate the most important strategies in the condensed list. The resulting tip sheet includes the final list and is shared with instructors of the seminars for first-time students.

When I first introduced this activity, student engagement increased dramatically. It seems that students are more involved in a task when others see their final creation and/or are impacted by it. Other common forms of OER-enabled pedagogy involve student-created textbooks or study materials.

In addition to searching for YouTube videos, Ted Talks, and other materials, instructors can use national repositories that house OER from all disciplines. While it does take time to identify and vet relevant OER, the investment is worth it if it promotes student learning and success.