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Open Books, Open Doors: A First-Gen Student's Experience with AOER Empowerment by Ethan Roth, UNC Psychology Undergraduate

11/28/2023
Unknown Author

Not to oversell it, but I grew up poor. The kind of poor where all your dishes are old Cool Whip containers and where you decide that some nights it’s better for everyone if you just go to sleep hungry. When I decided to go to college as a first-generation student, I knew it would be a risk. Given my background, there wasn’t going to be a safety net for me to fall back on if things went wrong. But even if I had to do it on my own, I knew that college was the only opportunity I had if I wanted to change my situation -- and so for me, it was a risk I had to take. 

 

Knowing it was something that I had to do didn’t make the first few semesters any easier though. College, as it turns out, is expensive. Being a low-income student meant that while I had my tuition covered by financial aid, all the other expenses that came with college looked like mountains. From asking professors to see if I could complete an assignment on paper because I couldn’t afford a laptop, to having to walk to class because I couldn’t afford a parking pass – each fee risked the possibility of pushing me into the negative and out of school. A few days before my first classes I went to hunt down the required textbooks and quickly realized that even rentals, the lowest cost option, were well outside of my budget. So I didn’t buy them.  

 

Taking classes without the required materials is a lot like starting a course half-way through the semester; it feels like every assignment and lecture is in the middle of a topic that you’ve never even heard about before. Tests are based on topics only covered in the readings, assignments are on certain chapters, exams are open book (but only if you have a book to open). To sum up the overall experience: it stinks. For a long time, it felt like I was getting half the education that I’d paid for simply because I wasn’t able to afford the materials for those classes. To be honest, it was crushing. 

 

It's this experience, however, that made me so excited about affordable and open educational resources (AOER). I first heard about AOER during my first semester at UNC. Searching for a job, my advisor recommended I apply for the ‘UNC Libraries AOER student position’ – to which I promptly asked, “What in the world is an AOER?” As it turns out, AOER are the solution to the very problem that had nearly driven me out of college: course materials that were things other than traditional textbooks, like library resources or online content, or openly licensed materials made available to students for free. Once I knew what AOER were, I knew that I had to get in, and less than a month later I would be starting my first day on the job. 

 

As UNC’s AOER student employee I work with UNC’s AOER committee to advertise, facilitate, and advocate for AOER on campus. This means that I get to bring a student voice to the conversation. While the decision to use AOER lies entirely in the hands of faculty, I get to be an advocate for those who would benefit the most from these materials and help spread the word so that students can take courses that best fit their budget. It would be an understatement to say that doing this work has returned my agency in what has felt like a hopeless situation.  

 

I would love to say that AOER have suddenly fixed the entire affordability crisis that higher education is going through, but that's not true. What I can say, however, is that the AOER movement offers an opportunity to make college better. It is an opportunity to better facilitate and share knowledge, an opportunity to get students more involved in the learning process, an opportunity to better facilitate diversity into college classrooms, and an opportunity to allow students like me to get an education – and maybe even change their lives. 

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Real-Time Teaching for Real-World Markets: The Case for OER in Finance by Dr. Constantin Gurdgiev, Associate Professor of Finance
04/14/2025
profile-icon Nancy A. Henke
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Constantin Gurdgiev headshot

The traditional proposition for using OER in modern classrooms focuses on the reduction of costs associated with purchasing educational materials. Another common advantage of OER is the promise of “democratization of knowledge” – a proposition that OER allow audiences outside the confines of formal degree programs access to learning materials.

Undoubtedly, both of these aspects of OER are powerful factors driving growing rates of OER adoption in higher education, including at UNC.

However, when it comes to the fields that are data- and time-sensitive such as finance, OER offer another benefit that works well with the core objectives of modern education. That benefit is being able to deliver accurate, up-to-date, sector-specific, and jobs-market focused applied content that traditional commercial textbooks and course materials simply cannot match. 

News and data flows are at the heart of business education

In business, news flow – a flow of time-sensitive and materially important information – forms a core part of decision making. In finance, that decision making covers higher levels of management. Fund managers define investment strategies tailored to opportunities and threats presented in the news flow. Institutional investors, corporate CFOs and financial analysts must track the evolution of news and react to it both tactically and strategically.

Data and news flows also reach back and front office mid-managers, traders, investors, portfolio and asset management support specialists, and corporate project finance professionals, and treasury managers. Take any financial institution, from a local credit union to a globally-trading specialist hedge funds, their daily operations are anchored to news and data. The news flow is woven into financial analysis, modeling and decision-making both ‘vertically’ (across the model inputs) and ‘horizontally’ (across time). It serves to confirm prior strategical and tactical knowledge and to test this knowledge against possible changes in the conditioning and causal relationships. 

Change defines finance

Crucially, in finance, axiomatic, theoretical and empirical foundations of our knowledge are subject to frequent and disruptive changes.

This means that news flow in finance and in business is not just the noise of the media. It is a flow of “hard” quantitative data that materially influences asset values, expected future returns on investments, R&D, Mergers and Acquisitions, market expansions, marketing, strategic changes in management, talent acquisitions, and so on. It is also a flow of “soft” qualitative information, such as statements, disclosures, warnings, company or policy communications, and more. 

Just as our information flows become broader, deeper and more complex, the tools we use in integrating news flow into our business decision-making also change. Rapidly. In academic finance, we are seeing adoption of new research tools and methodologies that displace prior norms of analysis every decade or less. Finance is always the frontal point of new technology adoption in business decision-making. 

This is not what is expected to happen in many other disciplines of inquiry, where the rates of change are more slow, more predictable. There are many epistemological reasons for this, but reality is that the core body of knowledge in natural sciences is changing more gradually and less dynamically than in social sciences. The same change is even faster in finance than in any other sub-discipline of business.

OER: challenging epistemological biases

In the lecture halls, this means that financial course materials and engagements must integrate news flow, and anchor key analytical concepts and frameworks to information and data flows. These data and events that generate them must then be tested across time and models, with a common expectation that it might fundamentally alter our understanding of and experience with the world around us. The use of these frameworks and analytical methods must then be integrated into applied sector-specific body of knowledge and aligned with modern workplace tools.

Put simply, a textbook written in 2019, and updated in 2023 is out of the news flow by the time it hits the reviewers’ desks in 2024. Worse, as it passes through the filters of epistemological biases of its authors, reviewers and publishers, it faces just two options for survival through to publication. Option one: it can evolve into a generic, high-level text covering only broadly consensual and largely outdated frameworks. Option two: it can focus on highly technical and specialist aspects of our body of knowledge that make them relatively immune to reviewers’ and publishers’ biases, at the expense of giving up on being timely and skills-focused. The best textbooks in finance fall into that second trap: they are technically flawless, yet practically outdated, highly theoretical and poorly targeted to applied skills sets.

Inevitably, these texts fail to meet the test of everyday reality/news flow.

Take one example. Almost all literature on the subject of investments and portfolio management focuses on the well-publicized regularity that gold and bonds act as “risk diversifiers” to stocks. In other words, during stock market turmoil, we come to expect – and this is the subject matter of traditional textbooks on the subject – that investors selling stocks will move their funds into government bonds and gold. 

This “flight to safety” movement prevails in almost all historical episodes of major stock market corrections, which is commonly noted in the textbooks – except for the never-discussed experience of the Global Financial Crisis, when the selloff in stocks led to waves of investors selling bonds and gold. This is not covered in the textbooks not because the authors are ignorant, but because the Global Financial Crisis was so violently challenging to the prevalent norms of established finance, it is deemed to be too anomalous to be worthy of coverage.

Zoom to the market turmoil in the second week of April 2025. Stocks crashing, and gold and bonds are selling off too, at least in the very first day of the announced tariffs. Thereafter, gold rose, bonds continued to fall and stocks at first tanked, then rebounded. Is anomalous becoming the new norm? You wouldn’t know it if you consulted the commercially published textbooks full of mathematical models, and short of critical analysis that traders and investors need in the real world. 

Yet, my OER-utilizing course, BAFN479 Portfolio Management, was fully enabled to deal with these types of events precisely because it is not anchored to a singular textbook. Instead of focusing on tracing out one source of materials, we use weekly-updated lecture notes, specialist data sources, and analytical files that cover high level frameworks that many traditional textbooks would do, but go beyond these. Where textbooks use stylized examples and long-dated historical data to work through conceptual definitions and analytical tools, we use real-time, real-world data and we overlay it with actual news flow. That allowed us, for example, on April 9 to discuss in class the events in the gold, bond and stock markets in the context of actual institutional portfolios. It also allowed us to extend key tools of theory and modern portfolio strategies to the concepts of financial hedges and safe havens that are current to the modern practice and research yet are never consistently covered in the textbooks.

This ability to transcend the orthodoxy of “established” business, financial, and economic body of knowledge, to challenge the prevailing narrative using key tools and timely news and data flows is the key benefit of OER to the lecture hall. The power to link today’s information to current decision making without having to graft both onto the old trees of  past knowledge is the promise of OER in the lecture hall. Keeping the subjects we teach current, immediately reactive to the reality of business and financial environments around us is more than an opportunity to teach better. It is an opportunity to enable our students to face real world challenges not as an auxiliary example to the textbook, but as the core part of our classroom engagements.

Open Initiatives & Resources, Monfort College of Business, Finance
From Student Activist to OER Advocate: The Journey of a Textbook Affordability Librarian by Nancy Henke, UNC Assistant Professor
10/19/2023
profile-icon Nancy A. Henke
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As an undergraduate, long before I knew about affordable and open educational resources (AOER), I gave a speech at a well-attended university event where I decried the high cost of textbooks. After my speech, a fellow student asked me, shocked, “Are you allowed to talk about that?”

Spoiler: I’m still talking about it.

I didn’t know then that my career path would lead me into the higher education classroom as an instructor of Composition and Literature, through my degree in Library and Information Science, and right back around to issues of educational access and knowledge equity.

As UNC’s Textbook Affordability Librarian, I develop, sustain, and advocate for initiatives that promote free-to-student educational resources. This may mean working with faculty to adopt, adapt, or create OER for their courses, or exploring options for integrating library-licensed materials into a course, such as e-books available through library subscription databases.

My 13 years teaching at another university prior to my role at UNC has certainly influenced my views on AOER. On the one hand, I have extensive experience developing courses – from choosing textbooks to developing lessons and assessments to crafting quizzes and building Canvas courses – and I recognize the immense workload that comes with that endeavor. Converting a course from using a traditional, all-rights-reserved textbook to affordable and open resources is no mean feat; I deeply sympathize with faculty members’ legitimate concerns about the labor involved in doing so. I similarly respect the principles of academic freedom and the right of faculty to choose learning resources they deem best for their students and courses.

On the other hand, though, from the vantage point of a classroom-instructor-turned-AOER-advocate, I now see aspects of my previous relationship with the textbook industry very differently than I did while I was teaching. Especially in light of my impassioned speech about textbook costs as an undergraduate, I’ll admit that the cost of my students’ course materials wasn’t top of mind when I was an instructor.

Consider the opacity of textbook costs for faculty. It is possible for a faculty member to choose a textbook for a course and not even know exactly what students will pay for it. Some publishers make a faculty member “dig” to determine how much students will pay for the title, and in retrospect I’m ashamed to think that I often required a textbook without knowing the out-of-pocket cost for my students. After all, as an instructor I received a free copy of any textbook I was considering adopting for my courses, since publishers want to make it easy for faculty to review (and ideally, adopt) a textbook they sell. Of course, I knew it wouldn’t be free for my students, but the fact that my copy of the book simply materialized when I requested it from a publisher led to me focus only on the content of the book, not its cost.

Case in point: I taught early American literature for many years, and each semester I assigned a high-quality yet high-cost anthology from a major publisher. Even though I purposefully chose an older edition of the book to cut student costs, I now know that students easily paid over $70 for a new copy of the previous edition and over $50 for a used copy. And, to make it even worse, this is for literature that is so old that it’s in the public domain, meaning it’s no longer protected by copyright. At least 90% of the works I taught in that course are available for free anywhere on the web simply because of their age. Yes, there was plenty of “value-added” in this text: essential historical context, helpful timelines, thoughtful introductions written by experts in the field, etc. Yet that kind of content is also available in OER texts for free.

In the end, I’m a realist and recognize that not every learning resource in every class in every discipline will ever be completely open, and that’s fine. Yet as former teaching faculty now immersed in the world of open education, I hope to reach those instructors who, like me in my previous career, aren’t aware of OER or have misconceptions about them. We all know that the costs of higher education have soared, but what students pay for tuition and fees is simply outside the control of faculty. The cost of course materials, however, is within their control, and when a student doesn’t pay $70 for their American literature anthology, they have $70 for groceries, or gas, or a new pair of winter boots, or a thousand other things they need for themselves and their family.

There’s nothing I can do now about my having required expensive textbooks in the past other than fail forward. My position at UNC Libraries gives me the opportunity to make amends by advancing programs that help current and future UNC students save on textbooks. My undergraduate self who gave that speech way back when might have been disappointed that Instructor Nancy didn’t do more to control textbook costs for her students, but she’d certainly be on board with Librarian Nancy who works on behalf of AOER.  

Educational Technology, Higher Education, Library & Information Science, Open Initiatives & Resources
Open Educational Resources – A Graduate Student Perspective by Teresa Henderson, UNC Professional Counseling Graduate Student
01/26/2021
Unknown Author
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As a master’s student in professional counseling, I would estimate I spent nearly $500 on textbooks  during my first year in the program, with the book content ranging from the basic introduction to the counseling profession, to diagnostic manuals and treatment planning resources. While I am excited to be pursuing my dreams, especially as a first-generation student, the cost of higher education has become an increasingly salient issue for me as I have progressed through my education. I often find myself wondering, when all is said and done and I walk across the stage as Dr. Henderson someday, how much will I have spent on my education, on tuition and books, from my bachelor’s degree to my doctorate? I know I am not alone in wondering this and feel that it has become a question that many students find themselves asking. The cost of education, and the materials that go along with our education, have become a substantial barrier for many to academic success. Some may argue that if students cannot afford the textbooks for classes, they can use their university library’s resources, but with limited resources that are often utilized by more than one student, many are left scrambling to access course materials that often determine their success in the course. While student success is a multi-faceted issue, I feel that we set many of our students up for failure by requiring expensive textbooks for courses, especially courses that are required to complete a degree. How can we address this textbook issue so that students have financially friendly options for class materials as they work toward their goals?

            I first learned of open educational resources (OER) during my first semester of graduate school. In search of a job, I had applied for a position with UNC’s University Libraries as an OER graduate student employee. I remember reading through the job description and thinking to myself, “This position sounds great, and I think I’m qualified, but I have no idea what OER is!” Luckily, I landed the position, and had the opportunity to steadily learn all about OER for the next few months. The benefits of using OER in classrooms quickly became clear, and I realized that increasing the use of OER materials could help to alleviate some of the financial burden for students in higher education. However, I found myself wondering why I had not heard of OER before, and why professors were not using these resources in place of expensive textbooks more often. If we have the tools to make higher education more accessible and affordable, why aren’t we using them? I wonder if part of the issue stems from common misconceptions of OER, with one of the biggest misconceptions about OER materials being that because they are free, they must be of lower quality. While I am sure that OER materials exist out there which certainly are of lower quality, the materials I have come across and worked with during my time with University Libraries have been of overwhelmingly high quality. Many sites which offer collections of OER also offer rating systems for individual materials and provide users an opportunity to leave honest reviews and even suggestions for changing the material. In fact, one of the coolest aspects of OER is how customizable the content often is; using OER offers professors the opportunity to edit materials to better fit the focus of the course and its unique learning outcomes. While integrating OER into a course can be a learning curve, plenty of resources exist to make the process easier. To the professors considering OER, I encourage you to learn more and give it a chance; in making the jump to using OER, we provide our students with customized, high-quality, and affordable materials that contribute to their learning and overall success in higher education.

Educational Technology