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A Success Coach/Advisor and Student Share their Stories About Open and Affordable Course Materials by Melinda Gurule, Success Coach and Academic Advisor, and Jessica Guerra, Undergraduate Psychology major

04/08/2024
profile-icon Nancy A. Henke
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headshot of Melinda GuruleAt the very start of my undergraduate program, I learned very quickly about the high cost of textbooks. As a first-generation college student, I was thankful to be a part of a TRIO program, Educational Talent Search (ETS) that had spoken about preparing for some of these financial challenges we could face when we entered college. To save money, I had learned from this program and those before me that it was a good idea to go to the textbook store early before classes began to be able to buy the best used books to save money and I did just that. I found that this method worked most of the time, but sometimes I had to purchase brand-new books wrapped up in plastic. Purchase of books and ways to save money was often on my mind as each semester approached throughout my entire undergraduate program. Thankfully, I was able to make things work financially with the help of scholarships, tips from peers, and even a lucky game of Bingo with my grandmother one semester to get the items I needed for my courses.  

Experiences growing up as a first-generation college student and summer job experience during my undergraduate program led me to a career in student support. For almost 20 years, I have worked for student support programs beginning as an Academic Advisor and later Assistant Director for a local TRIO program serving over 600 first-generation and/or low-income students prepare to make their way to be the first in their families to go to college and earn a degree. For the last seven years, I have had the privilege of working in the Division of Student Academic Success as a Success Coach and Advisor for the Soar Office here at the University of Northern Colorado.  Although there were some differences in serving students in a pre-collegiate program versus the college level, the financial challenges and concerns on both ends have been consistent.   

Throughout my time at UNC, I have had several conversations with students at the start of each semester where a student informs me that they had to delay the purchase of books until they could afford it. We then look for books on reserve, the possibility of sharing a book with a peer, and communication with their instructors.  Depending on the course, these methods are not always successful to help them get by. My observation with this delay in purchase often leads to falling behind in class, poor grades, and at times the inability to complete the course. For those that decide to make sacrifices to purchase books on time sometimes take from other budget areas to make it work. One of my previous students once shared that she had to take money from her gas and food budget to purchase books because she said, “for me buying books determines if I pass a class successfully with a good grade or not.” 

In fall of 2022 I was asked if I wanted to join UNC’s Affordable and Open Educational Resources (AOER) committee. At the time, I did not know what this was about, so I spoke with some members of the committee, and I learned that AOER is about affordable/low-cost or free learning and research materials that carry legal permissions for the opportunities of revision and redistribution.  Wow! Affordable and free access to books for students? What a great opportunity for me to continue to advocate and support not only Soar students with textbook cost challenges, but all UNC students, so I quickly joined.  My time as a committee member made me aware of not only what AOER were about but made me aware of courses on campus already utilizing OER. With this knowledge, I have been able to better support students by looking into OER course opportunities for them and it allowed me to share information with other advisors in my network.  

Once I learned about instructors that had made OER an opportunity for their students, I was eager to learn more about the student perspective. As further conversations occurred with students that mentioned they had taken an OER class or two, I wanted to know how OER influenced their learning experience and what impact it had on financial cost savings. One of my students, Jessica Guerra, offered to share some insight into her own experiences below: 

Headshot of Jessica GuerraHi! My name is Jessica, and I am one of Melinda’s students in Soar; currently, I am a Junior studying Psychology with a minor in Human Services. AOER in my courses have helped me immensely when it came to the cost of materials for courses. I have taken many classes where the professor has used AOER including PSY 166 Skills and Careers, PSY 323 Health Psych, HON 101 Critical Thinking, HUSR 205 Intro to Human Services, PHIL 100 Intro to Philosophy, and PSY 230 Lifespan Development. Within these classes having these free and accessible resources, I have probably saved $1000 dollars or more! 

Not only does it save me money on the cost of books, but it also saves me trouble in trying to figure out what site to use if the link isn’t provided to find a cheaper book, or if I have to order a hard copy, waiting till the last minute for the book to arrive before the first few assignments are due to read the required text. Instead, the professor provides the materials on Canvas and I am able to access them whenever and wherever I need and want. I am a part of the AOER committee with the hope of encouraging more professors to change their courses to open educational or affordable resources. 

 

OER provide open books and access to support students. I am thankful for the opportunity to learn about OER and be part of a community bringing about awareness. I encourage students to reach out to faculty and inquire about OER for their classes and look for opportunities to engage in an OER course when you register for classes. See how to find OER classes at UNC on the student page on the UNC OER website. I encourage faculty to look into this possibility and see if OER could be right for you.  

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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
Open Books, Open Doors: A First-Gen Student's Experience with AOER Empowerment by Ethan Roth, UNC Psychology Undergraduate
11/28/2023
Unknown Author
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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. 

Educational Technology, Higher Education, Library & Information Science, Open Initiatives & Resources
Open Annotation and the Marginal Syllabus by Dr. Matthew Farber, UNC Assistant Professor of Technology, Innovation & Pedagogy
03/31/2020
profile-icon Jen Mayer
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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.

 

 

Educational Technology