AOER Blog - Research Guides at University of Northern Colorado

As an instructor, I have adopted a variety of textbooks and supplemental materials to teach courses in Psychology, Neuroscience, Anatomy, and Physiology for undergraduate students, graduate students and medical students. For a long time, my perspective was solely on adopting materials that were most aligned with my course objectives and that best assisted me with instruction. However, being at UNC over that past few years has brought the cost of course materials into the forefront of my mind, as I have more freedom when choosing my course materials and I’ve learned that many UNC students have difficulty finding the funds for course materials. I’ve met very friendly, helpful, and genuinely concerned publishing company representatives that care about cost, but the student-centered approach is lost in the understandable motivation of profit within the corporate structure of publishing companies.

Publishing companies are doing a great job at staying relevant by creating textbooks in a variety of formats, providing supplemental instructor materials and test banks, and by integrating web-based active learning activities such as adaptive learning modules. This is very enticing for instructors, as this can significantly improve the quality of course materials with less effort. In addition, some publishing companies further entice by providing ‘bulk’ discounts and by packaging OER with significantly reduced price. Although this sounds like a great option for students, they’re essentially charging for OER and the ‘bulk’ discounts only apply if you use their products, which may exacerbate the monopoly certain publishing companies already have on the industry.

The solution, perhaps OER, but there are many obstacles for OER to be able to compete with publishing companies. First, OER need to be well organized, properly vetted, and easily accessed, perhaps through a centralized system. One of the benefits of adopting materials from publishing companies is that they are most likely written by experts and have been scrutinized through peer review, meaning instructors can be more confident that the materials are accurate and easily incorporated into their courses. Second, since textbooks are often written, edited, and reviewed by academics, there needs to be a concerted effort to recognize this contribution to their field and to higher education, not just for the creation of OER, but also for adopting and modifying OER. Tenure and Promotion is the obvious place to consider, but from my experience, there is not enough weight placed on the amount of work it takes to adopt OER, let alone create OER.

So, if you’re a Dean, Chair, Director, or Faculty, I encourage you to keep looking for ways to incentivize the creation and adoption of OER, and if you’re an Instructor, I encourage you to give it a try. You can start small by incorporating OER into a portion of your course, then you can add more and make modifications during subsequent semesters. Also, consider applying for UNC’s OER development grants awarded to UNC by the Colorado Department of Higher Education.

In some of my courses, I have begun to integrate the free web annotation tool Hypothesis. Free to use, students all mark up and highlight the same document. In doing so, students engage more with the text, and each other. This is a paradigm shift from approaches that are typically used in learning management systems such as Canvas; rather than read an article and then reply to a prompt in a discussion board, students can converse and reply right on the document itself.

I first learned about social annotation by following the work of friend and colleague Dr. Jeremiah (Remi) Kalir, assistant professor of Learning Design and Technology at the University of Colorado Denver. Kalir coauthored the new book Annotation with Antero Garcia on the history and current practice of social annotation. In fact, the practice is ancient, dating back to a long history of people scribbling in the margins of books. We see this from family cookbooks to medieval European texts. Fast-forward to today where there are several tools that enable anyone to socially and collaboratively annotate the web.

Hypothesis is Kalir’s tool of choice. It is free, and truly open (open source, open code). What’s more, it is multimodal: aside from highlighting text and leaving digital sticky notes, students and educators can respond with YouTube videos, GIFs, or emojis. There are also ways to fully integrate Hypothesis into Canvas, as well as other tools.

Getting Started

To get started, I recommend having students first annotate your course syllabus. Using the free Hypothesis tool DocDrop, any PDF -- your syllabus, an article you are using for your course -- can be dragged in, thus creating a unique link for your students. You can make the document public or private, sharing a simple password with students.

In addition to annotating documents, any website can be marked up as well. Hypothesis can be added as a Chrome browser extension, enabling anyone, anywhere to annotate a website.

Having students annotate a syllabus is a low-stakes way to scaffold its use later in courses. Once students grow accustomed, consider inviting the author of articles to engage in discussions. This past fall I invited Annotation coauthor Garcia to respond to questions as well as to annotate “Dear Future President of the United States”: Analyzing Youth Civic Writing Within the 2016 Letters to the Next President Project, an article he cowrote that was published in SAGE, and with AERA.

Having authors as guest annotators piqued student interest, and created an engaging and unique conversation, much more than had this been linked on a discussion board. After having students collaboratively annotate, Crowdlaaers, a free analytic tool, or “crowd layers” dashboard where educators and researchers can track activity.

To learn more on having students annotate syllabi, check out Kalir’s blog post, Annotate Your Syllabus 2.0.

It is easy to go with one of the "standard" textbooks for your class, especially when the publisher's rep takes you out to lunch and describes all the fancy new features that their online homework systems and ebook now offer (you probably won't use these, but its nice to know they are available). It is easy to convince yourself that, even though students might have to by over $200 for the book, the price of the book will eventually be worth it to students, given the wealth of information it contains (maybe they can find a used copy). And it is easy to use the textbook as a pedagogical backstop: to teach your class like you would anyway, leaning on your own expertise, and then being surprised when students struggle (did they even read the textbook?).

The above certainly doesn't describe everyone, but it did describe me about five years ago. The possibility of using Open Textbooks allowed me to reflect on the way I used, and didn't use, textbooks in my teaching. Partly because few students would read the textbook ahead of time, and partly because I wanted to give my students value beyond what they could buy in a book, I had drifted away from using textbooks as anything more than a course outline and repository for homework problems. These functions do not require students have a textbook, so why have a textbook at all? The solution: if the textbook is free for students, there is no harm in adopting it. There is no harm in adopting multiple books or to writing modules to cover material books don't get quite right. After a few semesters, these materials can be compiled into one coherent textbook tailored perfectly for our students.

What I describe here might not be easy, but we should take up the challenge to improve the educational experience of our students.

image of Willy Maxwell, UNC Bookstore manager Open educational resources (OER) learning materials are openly licensed digital educational materials that can be used instead of traditional textbooks and other courseware. The concept has been available for some time but is emerging now as a viable option to reduce the cost of learning materials while still providing rich, up-to-date content.

A recent study finds that one in nine students currently uses OER materials, and of that group, more than half use it to supplement print or digital textbooks. Instructors that consider price when selecting course materials may achieve the goal of reducing costs by assigning more OER. Professors can design courses on their own by building on available content from OER aggregators that host large collections of open resources. The process requires careful vetting to ensure the materials are high quality, peer reviewed and formatted properly.

Another option is to adopt OER content curated by a third party. For example, Lumen Learning reviews content from a variety of sources, selects the best available OER and adds timely updates, learning design and technical support to produce effective courseware for introductory courses, general education and developmental education available through an LMS. Working with Follett, students are charged only $10 to $25, which represents a significant savings compared to the cost of traditional learning materials. OER have already proven to increase student success measured by course completions and grades earned of a C or better. Students using OER enjoy an average of 83 percent savings with the same or better learning outcomes.

My Evolving Perspective on Open Educational Resources (OER) by Dr. Ryan Darling, UNC Assistant Professor

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