Open Educational Resources and Open Textbooks OSCP Munch/Lunch & Learn #13, July 2014 Lauren B. Collister and John Barnett With additional content from Lauren Calloway Open Educational Resources What are they and why do they matter? What is OER?
"Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials that are freely available online for everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world." OER Commons
Why OER?
“The idea of free and open sharing in education is not new. In fact, sharing is probably the most basic characteristic of education: Education is sharing knowledge, insights, and information with others, upon which new knowledge, skills, ideas, and understanding can be built.” Open Education Consortium Educational resources (e.g. textbooks) cost a lot & are constantly changing Instructors like to modify, adapt, reuse, transform their resources Digital creation & dissemination of these items is easy and fast OER make learning opportunities available to underserved populations A brief history
ERIC (pre-WWW) William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Libraries & digital content 2002: MIT – OpenCourseWare 2007: Cape Town Open Education Declaration (http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/) Calls on educators to use open resources and in turn make their resources open, and declares that Universities should make open education a priority 2014: SPARC makes OER a primary topic of its annual meeting Types of OER
MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) Syllabus-sharing websites or archives Repositories of course materials (e.g. exercises, exams, lesson plans) Open Textbooks OER at Pitt
Localized in departments Blackboard iTunesU No University-wide initiative to collect, standardize, and share OER broadly
Open Textbooks Helping instructors, students, and libraries Open textbooks as a form of OER
Online Free of charge Free of access restrictions Adaptable, reusable, remixable: Open textbooks often allow others to reuse, adapt, remix, and otherwise alter the work for their own pedagogical purposes The benefits from open textbooks
For scholars and disciplines, they represent a way to take ownership of textbook content (e.g., through peer review), to match textbook content with lectures and classroom discussion, to keep content current, to provide easy access to needed content, and to do so at very low cost For administrators and students, they offer a way to reduce educational costs For students accustomed to an increasingly online delivery mechanism, they offer a quick way to get content for their classes For libraries, they offer the opportunity to meet a strong need among their clientele. For some libraries, they also represent a publishing opportunity. What constitutes a textbook?
“A book used in the study of a subject as a) one containing a presentation of the principles of a subject; b) a literary work relevant to the study of a subject” (Merriam-Webster) So essentially any book needed to learn a subject is a textbook Traditionally we think of textbooks as the former definition, “one containing a presentation of the subject,” i.e.,
A required text for a course
One that provides an introduction to a subject
A systematic and sequential approach to the subject
And examples, exercises, and other ways to measure knowledge The cost of textbooks
Between 1987 and 2004, the average price of a college textbook increased twice as fast as the consumer price index, an average of 6% per year 1 This increase (6%) was a higher percentage of increase than the cost of tuition and fees at both public and private institutions experienced over three decades 2 College textbook prices rose 82% between 2003 and 2013 3 The total textbook cost for a typical year of classes was close to $1,000 [2009 data] 4 Some 65% of students report not purchasing a textbook because of its high price 5 Thus . . .
“The price of textbooks strongly affects the availability of a college education because the ability to attend college is often dependent upon cost.” 6 Textbooks & the ULS: Student and Staff Experiences 7
Students seeking textbooks: A growing segment of service desk traffic (desk, E- ZBorrow, ILL) Pitt Pathfinders: Availability of textbooks via the ULS is used as a way to sell the library to student and parents Reality check: It is difficult for the library to fulfill these requests Reserves: Some leeway to purchase textbooks for reserves Reality check: These new purchases have hundreds of checkouts per term E-ZBorrow: High volume of requests at start of each term; small pool to choose from; e-textbooks don’t circulate ILL: Increased undergraduate use, primarily for textbooks; subject areas and titles are predictable Reality check: Requests are often unfillable Thus . . .
Students often experience 1, 2, and 3 strikes in requesting textbooks This experience may leave students with a negative impression of library services What’s next?
Operational: Create a LibGuide or other information page on OER and open textbook resources at Pitt and beyond Operational: Develop a communications plan for discussing with faculty, students, and administrators the use of library reserves, E-ZBorrow, and ILL to textbook needs Strategic: Better understand the use of and need for OER and open textbooks at Pitt Strategic: Through the Knowledge Commons, provide consultative and technological services to foster the creation and sharing of OER and open textbooks by Pitt teaching faculty Sources
1 U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2005). College textbooks: Enhanced offerings appear to drive recent price increases. Gao-05-806. Washington, DC: Author. Quoted in Baker-Eveleth, L. J., Miller, J. R., & Tucker, L. (2011). Lowering Business Education Cost with a Custom Professor-Written Online Text. Journal of Education for Business 86, 248-252. doi:10.1080/08832323.2010.502911 2 College Board. (2009). Trends in college pricing 2009. Retrieved from http://www.trends-collegeboard.com/college pricing/. Quoted in Baker-Eveleth et al 3 Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2014). Consumer Price Index Databases. http://www.bls.gov/cpi/data.htm. Quoted in Open Education. (n.d.). SPARC. http://www.sparc.arl.org/issues/oer 4 Christopher, L. C. (2009). Academic publishing: Digital alternatives to expensive textbooks. Retrieved from http://www.seyboldreport.com/bookpublishing/academic-publishing-digital- alternatives-expensive–textbooks; Rampell, C. (2008, May 2). Free textbooks: An online company tries a controversial publishing model. Chronicle of Higher Education, 54(34), A14-15. Quoted in Baker-Eveleth et al. Sources, continued
5 U.S. PIRG Education Fund and the Student PIRGs. (2014). Fixing the Broken Textbook Market. http://www.studentpirgs.org/reports/sp/fixing-broken- textbook-market – cited in Open Education. (n.d.). SPARC. http://www.sparc.arl.org/issues/oer 6 Joint Congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance. (Sept. 2006). An Economic Analysis of Textbook Pricing and Textbook Markets 5 (testimony of James V. Koch, President, Old Dominion University); quoted in Cotton, R. (2010). Students Call for Influence in the Textbook Market. Journal of Law & Education 39(1), 129-137. 7 Calloway, Lauren. (2014). Open textbooks: Environmental scan for ULS FY16 Planning & Budget Committee. Retrieved from http://bts.library.pitt.edu/ULSPlanning/FY16PBC/Environmental%20Scan/For ms/AllItems.aspx
Demonstration
Merlot OER Repository: http://www.merlot.org Open.Michigan: http://open.umich.edu/ University of Maryland University College LibGuide: http://libguides.umuc.edu/oer OpenStax College (Rice University): http://openstaxcollege.org/ Orange Grove Texts Plus (Florida Virtual Campus + University Press of Florida): http://orangegrovetexts.org/ Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota): http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/