AOER Blog

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 It is not uncommon for students back home to rely on outdated textbooks, shared among classmates, or to go without the materials they need to truly succeed in their studies.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.

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. 

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.