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Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Meg Du Bray, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, GIS, and Sustainability, College of Humanities and Social Sciences

03/19/2024
profile-icon Nancy A. Henke

Dr. Meg du Bray was awarded an OER grant in the 2022-23 school year as part of Cohort 4 of OER grant recipients. Below, she discusses how she uses OER in her courses, her motivations for using OER, and the process she used (and continues to use) in converting and updating her course.

What course did you convert to OER?

I had previously used OER materials in my ENST 100: Introduction to Environmental Studies course, so I used this opportunity to search for alternatives to the OER textbook I had been using. There’s now an updated edition, and I found additional OER materials to use in other classes.

 

What open resource(s) did you use?

I used OASIS, LibreTexts, MERLOT, and OpenStax most regularly.

 

What motivated you to convert your course to OER?

I know that financial costs are a struggle for many of our students, and I want to make their education as valuable to them as possible, while also minimizing costs to them. I never want financial burden to be a reason someone can’t do well in my class, and OER makes it easier on them. Plus, environmental studies, like many fields, is a rapidly evolving and changing field. I want to be able to rely on up-to-date information!

 

Could you describe the process you went through to convert your course to OER?

When I first adopted OER at another institution, I had previously been using a textbook that I liked but didn’t feel covered all the material that I wanted it to. Once I went through and looked at the possible options, I still felt that no single text covered everything I wanted it to, but the book I use, Environmental Biology comes the closest. Over several years of trial and error, I have gotten comfortable with the text enough to try using different sections at different points in the course. This obviously required me to change lecture slides, incorporate additional readings and activities, and so on, but has allowed me more flexibility in my teaching, as well.

 

Did you encounter any challenges during the conversion process, and if so, how did you overcome them?

The biggest challenge was finding a textbook that I felt really addressed the interdisciplinary components of the field and the course. At the end of the day, I have used a number of different materials, in addition to the OER textbook (such as podcasts, YouTube clips, and pop-sci readings) to make sure I get complete coverage. Sometimes it’s about looking in different places!

 

Have you received any feedback from students about using OER in your course? If so, what has been their response?

My students have mentioned that they appreciate the lower cost of taking this course. Environmental studies textbooks can run around $100-150, and it’s nice that they don’t have to decide between that book and another. Especially since many students take this as an LAC, I believe they appreciate the low cost!

 

Can you share any advice or tips for other faculty members who are considering converting their courses to OER?

Check as many OER sites as you can. Even if you can’t convert your entire course to OER, you might find some really neat activities, or even complete syllabi that help you rethink your courses. I now check the OER sites first to get inspiration to develop new courses!

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Faculty Spotlight: Amy Bekins, Assistant Professor, Biological Sciences, College of Natural & Health Sciences
11/04/2025
profile-icon Nancy A. Henke
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Amy BekinsAmy Bekins was awarded an OER grant in the 2024-25 academic year as part of Cohort 6 of OER grant recipients. Below, she discusses her motivations for converting her course to OER, the resource she used, and offers advice for other instructors interested in using OER.

 

 

What course did you convert to OER? 

BIO 100- Exploring Biology 

What open resource did you use in your converted course?  

Concept of Biology from OpenStax  

 

What motivated you to convert your course to OER?  

I was new to the university, and I knew I had to create a lot of resources, and it made sense to just make the resources around an OER. The OER also provided many resources for both me and my students that were immediately accessible at the beginning of the semester. Also since my course is an LAC [Liberal Arts Curriculum course] and has a high enrollment, it allows many students to benefit from the reduced cost of the course.  

 

Could you describe the process you went through to convert your course to OER?  

I first found a resource that would work for my course. I then created lessons, assessments, and other resources that went along with the order of the text. I was planning on dividing my course a different way and incorporating more problem-based learning, but the text was set up so well that I ended up just using the pacing of the text. From there I was able to design lectures and activities around the scope and sequence of the book, and then write exams that matched my Learning Objectives, both from the book and what I felt my students needed.   

 

Did you encounter any challenges during the conversion process, and if so, how did you overcome them?  

The biggest challenge was just finding the time to do the work that was needed. I will admit the first part of my course was much better developed than the latter part, due to this challenge. However, I plan to continue to improve the course and work more on developing and refining, specifically the end of the course to better support student learning.  

 

Can you share any advice or tips for other faculty members who are considering converting their courses to OER?  

Creating an OER course takes more time than you think. However, it is time well spent. The OER is available to every student on the first day of class so you can launch right away without having to print unnecessary things or adjust your timeline.

Biological Sciences, Open Initiatives & Resources, College of Natural and Health Sciences
OER as a Moral Imperative in a Time of Constraint and Censorship by Caterina Belle Azzarello, PhD Candidate, Educational Psychology
09/29/2025
profile-icon Nancy A. Henke
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Caterina Belle Azzarello headshot

Let me start with a simple but powerful idea: Open Educational Resources (OER) aren’t just useful or innovative—they’re a moral imperative. A moral imperative is when something feels so right or important that you have to do it, even if no one is making you. We’re living in a time of undeniable challenge in higher education. Across the country, universities and colleges are cutting budgets, laying off personnel, increasing costs for students and increasing workloads for staff and faculty. Programs and clubs that once served as lifelines for first-generation and marginalized students are disappearing.

Higher Education in Crisis

It’s not just about budgets. Academic freedom is being dismantled piece by piece. In Florida and Texas, for instance, new laws restrict teaching African American studies, gender theory, and even basic discussions of race and identity. Entire histories and scientific realities, like climate change or reproductive health, are being stripped from classrooms. Not because they’re inaccurate, but because they’re politically disruptive. Some of this happens quietly, through defunding. Some of this is loud, deliberate, and aggressive. Either way, if we don’t name it, challenge it, and offer alternatives, the effects will last long after today’s students have graduated.

Meanwhile, textbook costs remain a crushing barrier. Students skip meals, work multiple jobs, or go without required materials altogether. For some, the choice is literally between groceries and learning. A few years ago, one UNC student shared this: “I know students who failed because they couldn’t afford the textbook...it has caused me to stress greatly, and I had to choose between getting food or getting the textbook.” We’ve often heard that with great challenges come great opportunities, and that’s where OER enter the conversation, not as a trend, but as a lifeline. Sure, OER help reduce costs. But they’re so much more than that.

OER as a Lifeline, Not a Trend

OER restore agency to educators. They remove barriers for learners. They give teachers the freedom to choose resources that are pedagogically sound, factually accurate, and ethically right—not just what a publisher sells or what an administration approves of.

As someone who works in education research, I’ve seen how much trust matters: trust between students and teachers, trust in the materials we use, trust in the systems that are supposed to uphold knowledge, not suppress it.

When a teacher can’t afford to assign a textbook or is told they can’t use a resource because it clashes with a political narrative, or even when a student doesn’t see themselves reflected in their curriculum, that’s not just unfortunate. That’s unjust.

OER give us a way forward. They let educators adapt content to their classrooms and their communities. They allow us to include marginalized voices and tell the full story. And they guarantee that students—no matter their zip code, background, skin color, or bank account—can access the tools they need to succeed. That’s why universities have a moral obligation to support OER. Not as an afterthought, but as core infrastructure. 

That means investing in faculty training, incentivizing OER creation and adoption, and weaving open practices into policy. That’s why I’m proud to be a member of the AOER Committee at the University of Northern Colorado and deeply grateful for the support of the state of Colorado and the Colorado Department of Higher Education, whose grant funding makes so much of this work possible at UNC and around the state.

It also means defending academic freedom, especially now. Because when facts are politicized and evidence is treated as optional, open education becomes one of our strongest defenses. By making knowledge accessible, transparent, and verifiable, we uphold the integrity of scholarship and empower both educators and students to think critically, challenge misinformation, and protect the pursuit of truth. 

A Commitment to Truth, Equity, and Access

At the end of the day, we’re not just educators. We’re stewards of truth, equity, and possibility. OER are more than resources — they’re a moral commitment. A commitment to: openness over obscurity. Inclusion over exclusion. Facts over fear.

And in times like these, the commitment to OER and affordability is not only important, but also a moral responsibility we carry as educators and learners. Choosing openness and access is our resistance to barriers that limit opportunity, and it is our path forward toward a more just and inclusive future.

Education, Psychological Sciences, Open Initiatives & Resources
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