While open educational resources (OER) are part of a growing trend toward open education and open access, there are various reasons why instructors remain hesitant to embrace OER adoption for many courses. A typical reason is a concern about quality, but, perhaps not unrelated, instructors are concerned about the time it takes to both locate OER and to fill in the gaps left by missing ancillary materials. An Education Dive brief suggests that it is faculty frustration that leads to a rejection of OER, while an Inside Higher Ed article points out that this frustration may be supported by a general satisfaction faculty feel toward their existing textbook resources.
Satisfaction with publisher materials is not surprising when we consider that a textbook often comes with a package of ancillary materials, including test banks, slide decks, assignment prompts, and other learner activities. Chuck Staben of Inside Higher Ed blatantly points out that “many OER resources [sic] do not provide the extensive ancillary materials often provided by commercial texts.” As Staben suggests, financial incentives back to departments are attempts to compensate instructors for the time required to build supplemental materials for use in the classroom, but the incentives are often not enough to motivate the significant effort required to replace materials that instructors had already been content to use.
If educators are not willing to look critically at their reliance on publisher materials, however, they miss an opportunity to increase the relevance and alignment of the course experience for learners.
Robin Zahrndt concedes that publisher materials are beneficial when integrated carefully and deliberately, but also warns that it is easy to over rely on ancillary materials. Pitfalls include allowing the publisher perspective to overshadow the instructor’s presence, utilizing materials that do not fully align with course objectives, and a persisting lack of accessibility of many publisher materials.
Rather than an obstacle, then, perhaps OER presents an opportunity for educators who desire to think critically and serve their learners’ best interests.
By committing the time and effort to adopt an OER text into a course, we have the chance to reinvigorate our teaching strategies and infuse our own voices, our own expertise, into our learning spaces. Now that’s a trend worth supporting!
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