AOER Blog

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.