Joe Nowakowski, Professor of Economics and Education Division Chair at Muskingum University, gave a presentation on open educational resources called Open Textbooks – Access, Affordability, and Academic Success.
Costs for education are on the rise. While instructors can’t control the price of tuition or housing, they do have control over the cost of student textbooks. An excellent way of lowering costs on textbooks is through Open Educational Resources.
Students at the U of A are told to estimate that they will spend $1046 on books and supplies, but they’re only spending about $415 a year. They’re doing this by not buying all of their needed books or splitting the price of a textbook with other students and then sharing the book. When a student doesn’t have easy access to the supplies they need for their course they suffer in ways like those described by the student in the following video.
Open educational resources make use of Creative Commons licensing, which gives different levels of use and reuse depending on the license that is chosen. Open textbooks utilize this licensing to create books that, depending on the level of licensing chosen, can be used for free or adapted to be perfect for your specific course. Beyond just the savings to the student, open textbooks make it possible to convert the course texts to an accessible format for the students, something that you wouldn’t be able to do under traditional copyright.
Adopt
OpenStax is a highly respected open textbook repository. They have options for ebooks, printed books (at a low cost that simply covers the cost of the printing), web, and Bookshare (and accessible online library). They are even beginning to develop and share ancillary resources to go along with the books like PowerPoint slides, study guides, test banks, and multimedia tutorials.
Another resource is the Open Textbook Library, a comprehensive library of open textbooks that includes ratings judged by experts in the field.
Adapt
Open educational resources enable instructors to take already created textbooks and adapt them to meet the needs of their audience. For instance, Astronomy faculty in Africa adapted a textbook specifically for students in the southern hemisphere since the stars you can see there aren’t the same as those visible from the northern hemisphere where the book was created.
Create
If you can’t find the appropriate open textbook for your course you can always create one! Robin DeRosa, upon considering the fact that the literature from her anthology for Early American Literature was public domain, decided to create an OER textbook. Her students then created introductions, discussion questions, assignments, and even short films on the content. Another instructor had his students create the test questions as part of their assignments much like the instructor in our TIPS article.
Where do we go from here?
- Explore! See if there’s already the perfect book for your class!
- If you read a few books during your exploration, give them a review to help other instructors!
- If you find the right one, adopt it!
- Tell all your friends about how amazing Open Textbooks are!
Is anyone really using these?
Yes! Here at the U of A in 2017-2018 there were only 2 instructors using OER but in 2018-2019 there were 11! That represented a savings to students of $162,000 in 2018-2019.
If you would like more information on how to incorporate technology into your courses, reach out to us at tips@uark.edu.
For more information on Joe Nowakowski’s teaching methods, the presentation can be downloaded and viewed as a PDF or you can email him/her at joen@muskingum.edu.
This content was developed from a presentation by Joe Nowakowski which was sponsored by the University of Arkansas Libraries.