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A First-Generation International Student's Journey in the World of OER by Franklina Addae, UNC Applied Statistics and Research Methods Graduate Student

10/30/2024
profile-icon Nancy Henke

Stepping into my new role as a Graduate Assistant focused on Open Educational Resources (OER) has been a profound and eye-opening experience. As a first-generation undergraduate and graduate student from Ghana, a developing country, where access to educational resources is often limited, working with the OER team at UNC has shown me the transformative power of open education. Not only does it challenge the traditional models of learning, but it also offers the potential to change lives by making education more equitable and accessible.

Being a first-generation student from a developing country comes with its own set of challenges. Education has always been seen as a luxury in my community, rather than a right. Textbooks, research materials, and even basic access to information are often out of reach for many students like myself. As I pursued my undergraduate and now graduate degrees, I have always been aware of the financial burden that textbooks and learning resources can place on students. It is not uncommon for students back home to rely on outdated textbooks, shared among classmates, or to go without the materials they need to truly succeed in their studies. This has fueled my passion for exploring alternative approaches to education—ones that do not exclude students based on financial capabilities.

I was fortunate to join the OER team as a Graduate Assistant, a role that perfectly aligns with my passion for education and advocacy. Before joining this team, I had no idea how far-reaching the concept of OER could be. In my home country, the idea of freely accessible, high-quality educational resources is still in its infancy. The cost of textbooks and academic materials is a significant hurdle for many students. For this reason, being part of an OER initiative in a more developed context has truly opened my eyes to the potential impact OER can have, not only in the U.S. but globally.

The primary focus of OER is to provide students with the resources they need to succeed without financial strain. In countries like mine, where families struggle to cover basic living expenses, the cost of textbooks can often be overwhelming. OER help bridge this gap by ensuring that no student is denied access to quality educational resources due to cost. These resources are designed not only to reduce costs but to improve educational outcomes by making up-to-date materials more readily available. The ability to access educational resources without the need for expensive textbooks means that students can focus more on learning and less on how they will afford the next book.

While OER is making great strides in developed countries, there are still significant challenges in introducing these resources to less developed nations. Many countries, including my home country Ghana, face infrastructure issues, such as limited internet access and outdated technology. These problems can prevent students from fully benefiting from the wealth of free resources that OER offer. However, the potential for change is tremendous. With increased awareness and support, we can begin to introduce OER in my home country and others like it. As I continue to grow in my role, I am committed to advocating for the integration of OER in developing countries. This will require collaboration between governments, educational institutions, and organizations dedicated to promoting open access to education. By building awareness around OER and creating the infrastructure to support it, we can take meaningful steps towards a more equitable and accessible educational future.

My journey as an OER Graduate Assistant has only just begun, but I already feel a deep sense of purpose in this role. Education has the power to uplift individuals and transform communities, and OER are critical tools in making that happen. As I continue to work with the OER team, I look forward to being part of this global movement for change, one that prioritizes the needs of students and breaks down the barriers that have traditionally stood in the way of educational success. OER have shown me that education does not need to be restricted by financial constraints—it can and should be available to everyone, regardless of where they are in the world. I am excited to bring this knowledge back to my home country, where I hope to be part of the movement to promote OER and ensure that every student has the opportunity to succeed.

Open Educational Resources represent more than just a cost-saving initiative—they represent a fundamental shift in how we view education. OER remove barriers, level the playing field, and ensure that all students have the opportunity to reach their full potential. I look forward to continuing my work with the OER team and contributing to this global vision for a better, more equitable educational landscape.

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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 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, Open & Affordable Educational Materials, Monfort College of Business, Finance
Choosing OER as an Equitable Pedagogical Practice by Dr. Cassie Bergstrom, Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences and Dr. Molly Jameson, Interim Director of CETL
03/05/2024
profile-icon Nancy Henke
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Dr. Cassie Bergstrom (CB), Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences, and Dr. Molly Jameson (MJ), Interim Director of CETL, recently sat down to talk about OER.

MJ: Thanks so much for talking with me today, Dr. Bergstrom. So, can you tell us a little bit about what OER means?

CB: Sure! OER are open educational resources or materials that can be used in classes free of cost. These resources can also be modified by faculty to best fit their goals for classes. The result is materials that are adaptable and closely fit the course's goals and have the additional benefit of free access for both students and faculty.

MJ: That sounds helpful for both instructors and students. What are some of the benefits of using OER for instructors?

CB: For instructors, benefits include adopting or adapting materials that most closely fit the learning objectives they have for their students. If students don’t need to buy a textbook, it also means that all students (regardless of their financial situation) will have access to the course materials that are essential for learning. An additional benefit for instructors is the possibility of working with and sharing materials with other instructors, creating a sense of community and shared purpose.

MJ: I can totally see that. I also really like your point about how OER results in materials that fit the course goals, which is an important part of strong course design. I know when I used regular textbooks, there were often chapters I would skip or sections within chapters that I did not use. But with OER, I can use only specific chapters or even specific sections from open access texts. How about the benefits of using OER for students?

CB: For students, the primary benefit is avoiding the costs of traditional textbooks! Textbooks are often not covered by financial aid and that means that students who might not be financially secure may choose to share or go without required textbooks, impacting students’ learning and grades. It is quite challenging to learn the content when you cannot afford the book, so OER allows all students access to the material.

MJ: Traditional textbooks ARE expensive! I remember several years ago a student told me that they had to choose between buying textbooks and paying their rent that month. That’s ridiculous! Because OER are open and affordable, it sounds more accessible to students from diverse backgrounds, like first-generation students or financially insecure students. Is that right?

CB: That’s right. Using OER in classes reduces the barrier of high-cost instructional materials for all students, but they have the highest impact on students who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Often OER are integrated right into the course’s Canvas shell, making them easy to find and accessible. Additionally, students can access the OER right at the beginning of a course, not needing to wait for a textbook to ship or for financial aid to come in to access the course materials.

MJ: That is so important for student success. It sounds like OER are beneficial to everyone involved. Are there any downsides to using OER?

CB: There are some things to be aware of. First, it’s important to make sure that students know how to access the materials for the course. If students have patchy internet access at their homes, it might be beneficial for them to be able to download the resources. Second, it does take a bit of time on the instructor’s end to find and integrate OERs into a preexisting course. However, we do have some wonderful resources at UNC to help with this process!

MJ: Why do you think some instructors are hesitant to make the jump into OER? Or why are there not more instructors using OER?

CB: Those are great questions. I think some instructors get very connected to the textbooks they use for courses, particularly if they have used the same text for years. There’s also a lack of knowledge about where to find OER materials that would be a good fit and how to collect and utilize these materials in courses. Finally, trying out new things can be a bit scary! Instructors have often used textbooks both as students and faculty, so adapting to a new way to consider course materials can be a bit intimidating.

MJ: As an instructor who uses OER, what is your biggest piece of advice for people who want to adopt OER in their classrooms?

CB: Try it out!  You can take small steps towards using OER, like trying them out for one unit or one topic in a class. Also, I highly encourage folks who are interested in learning more about OER to attend some of the activities during Open Ed week or to reach out to people in their departments who have used OER or Nancy Henke, our textbook affordability librarian at UNC.

MJ: What can centers that focus on teaching and learning, like CETL, do to enhance and improve OER use to supplement teaching and learning?

CB: I think integrating information about OER into multiple areas of content would help improve the visibility and understanding of what OER entail and why they are beneficial. Not only do they help support students and student learning, but they can enhance the fit between instructional materials and instructors’ learning objectives for students.

MJ: Dr. Bergstrom, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today about OER. I have shifted several of my classes to OER, and after our conversation today, I see a few places where I can start to make some more small changes. I am also very thankful for your advice for CETL, and I look forward to continued collaborations to enhance OER, teaching, and learning here at UNC!

Education, Open Initiatives & Resources, Open & Affordable Educational Materials
Open educational resources: A student perspective by Malaika Michel-Fuller, UNC student trustee
03/07/2019
profile-icon Jen Mayer
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Malaika Michel-FullerWhen I first began learning about open education and open educational resources, I was immediately intrigued by the prospect of providing affordable and high-quality services that support authors, curriculum designers, and educators while also considering financial obligations of students. I am a strong advocate for increasing the affordability of education for students, and I speak personal experience; my undergraduate course materials range across disciplines such as Economics, English, and Anthropology, and access to the wealth of texts and resources my professors prescribe reflects a heavy price tag. Serving on UNC’s OER committee has allowed me to further engage in dialogue and critical inquiry about the topic alongside higher education professionals, and through this process I have developed a greater understanding of the vital role students play the implementation and sustenance of OER on an institutional campus.

Promoting open resources is a natural fit for student advocacy, given concerns about the rising cost of higher education. Students are interested in saving money and excited by the opportunity for student work, ranging from class projects to undergraduate manuscripts being made publicly available, reusable and revisable by others. UNC houses a multitude of engaged student governance groups and leadership organizations that can serve as a valuable asset at the table when in conversations with administrators, state legislators, and other prominent stakeholders. As a 3-term member of UNC’s Student Senate, I draw parallels between the legislative advocacy my organization engages in and endeavors by campus professionals to institute OER on campus and cultivate an open education culture. As our institution continues to shift and grow, I look forward to collaboration between students and the educators, administrators, and campus members who deliver us the quality education and services that define our student experience at UNC.

Education