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OER as a Moral Imperative in a Time of Constraint and Censorship by Caterina Belle Azzarello, PhD Candidate, Educational Psychology

09/29/2025

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.

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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
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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
Faculty Spotlight: Diana Becker, Lecturer, School of Nursing, College of Natural and Health Sciences
12/04/2024
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Diana BeckerDiana Becker was awarded an OER grant in the 2023-24 academic year. In this profile, she discusses why and how she is using OER in her NURS 374 Clinical: Adult Health course. 

What course did you convert to OER?

I converted NURS 374, which is a course where nursing students learn at the beginning of the semester how to care for adult patients in the hospital setting. They then put these principles into practice during a 10-week rotation working alongside nurses in the hospital.

What open resource(s) did you use?

I used two sources primarily: Nursing Advanced Skills by Open RN and Nursing Skills, 2e by Chippewa Valley Technical College.

What motivated you to convert your course to OER?

When I attended college a number of years ago, I remember the cost associated with textbooks.  I also remember that some of those books were not used for more than a chapter or two.  I began to look at alternatives to traditional textbooks after a colleague discussed it at a faculty meeting.

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

Prior to conversion, I had a pretty good idea of what I was looking for.  Additionally, I had already done some research into what resources I may want to use.  Since the resources I was looking for primarily pertained to skill attainment, it was easy to find the style of book that I wanted.  I also knew that I didn’t just want to change to an online book.  I wanted to create a resource that presented material that students needed to know, rather than having to find the pages or sections I wanted the students to read.  Once I found the resources I wanted, I read through each section and created separate documents: must read, good review, and checklists.  During the fall semester, I created a resource using the desired material for what the students must read.  Moving forward, I hope to also create a resource with the review materials and checklists.

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

The main challenge I have faced is working with colleagues about the advantages to OER materials.  We are still working through this!  Otherwise, I was fortunate to easily find materials I wanted to use.

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

I sent out a 7-question survey to students.  I didn’t receive a lot of feedback, but those who did respond found the materials accessible and easy to read.  However, many of them didn’t read all of the materials.  But, those who didn’t read all materials did self-report that they often don’t read materials for courses.

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

If you are considering using OER, do it. If you just keep thinking about it, you will never do it.  I think it is well worth the faculty time because it truly enables you to create a resource that is specific to your course, without all of the extra information or materials that may be in a traditional textbook.

Health Sciences, Nursing, Open Initiatives & Resources
Open Educational Resources and Accessibility by Becky Smith, Interim Director of Disability Support Services
06/06/2019
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Becky Smith Open Educational Resources (OER) expand educational opportunities and are a great tool for all students. These resources aim to remove legal, financial, and technical barriers that can prevent access. But how do they measure up for disabled students? The truth is that many OER are not designed with inclusivity in mind for disabled students. From a disability support program perspective, there is a long way to go before digital materials are accessible to everyone. In the meantime, there is some good news. OER are still a better choice than traditional resources for college students with disabilities and here are some reasons why:

  • Permissions granted by an open license remove legal barriers to adapting and customizing OER, making it possible to create learning environments that are more flexible and robust for all students.
  • OER offer the opportunity for instructors to curate materials authored by a diverse set of individuals, including those who identify as disabled, normalizing and reducing stigma while sharing viewpoints that have historically been marginalized.
  • Unlike commercially published materials, OER that are adapted to meet accessibility requirements can be retained and freely shared with communities, reducing duplicative work at and across institutions.
  • OER adoption can reduce costs, which benefits all students, but can be especially beneficial for students with disabilities who may face additional financial pressures.
  • It is more common for OER to be shared in formats that can be adapted for accessibility, unlike proprietary publisher content where editable files are notably difficult to obtain.

There has also been a significant push by university disability service offices and educators to encourage campuses to adopt universal design principles when developing courses and materials. Universal design is a concept for designing and delivering products or services that are useable by people with the widest range of capabilities. There are seven principles of universal design. One organization that aims to incorporate universal design principles and expand inclusive and equitable practices, specifically for OER, is the Flexible Learning for Open Education or FLOE Project which offers an Inclusive Learning Design Handbook. The handbook is, itself, an OER designed to help others create resources that are accessible to a diverse range of individual needs and learning preferences. Resources like the FLOE Project and others are great tools for creating inclusive learning resources without having to reinvent the wheel. The key is to be aware of the diverse needs of learners. Whether it is your plan to adopt or design OER please keep in mind inclusivity for all. While all OER are not created equally, there are still benefits for all students over traditional resources.

 

Thomas, C. (2018, October 8). OER and Accessibility: Working Toward Inclusive Learning. Retrieved from https://sparcopen.org/news/2018/oer-accessibility-working-toward-inclusive-learning/


 

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