Open Education at Roger Williams University
Removing barriers to information access
In her 2019 keynote at the Open Education Global Conference, Cheryl-Ann Hodgkinson-Williams of the University of Cape Town in South Africa defined “open education” as an umbrella term that encompasses the products, practices and communities associated with this work. The common term that represents the products of Open Education is OER (Open Educational Resources). OER are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, adaptation, and redistribution by others. OER can be print or digital. Access the OER Starter Kit to learn more about the fundamentals of OER.
An open license permits users of a resource to participate in the 5R activities of OER:
- Retain: Make, own, and control your own copy of content
- Reuse: Use the content as-is
- Revise: Adapt, adjust, modify, improve, or alter the content
- Remix: Combine the original or revised content with other OER to create something new
- Redistribute: Share your copies of the original content, revisions or remixes with others
The vast majority of open textbooks have a Creative Commons license that allows for editing, adapting and making derivatives. Learn more about Creative Commons licenses here.
An open textbook is just like a traditional textbook in terms of content, but it has a license that makes it free for anyone to access, redistribute and retain in perpetuity, and in many cases revise and remix the content to make a customized copy. The author, or the copyright holder, gives you explicit permission to use an open textbook just by giving it an open license.
Like OER, inclusive access models aim to ensure that all students have access to their learning materials on day one of class, but the cost is rolled into their tuition (OER is free). Students lose access to these materials after the semester ends because of copyright restrictions and license agreements between the publisher and the institution. True OER, in contrast, allows students to retain their learning content in perpetuity, serving students and learners of all ages and stages. This is important for students who may have to retake a course or who are enrolled in a sequence (ex. Biology I and Biology II), where having access to the previous semester's book is essential.
While the OpenEd community emerged to address the rising cost of textbooks, practitioners quickly realized that openly licensed materials allow for innovative, learner-centric pedagogies. Educators are engaging their students in content creation and seeing the impact of their learning through this "open pedagogy." Even in the OpenEd community, the term Open pedagogy takes on several different definitions depending on who you ask. To learn more about what several practitioners are doing and how they define it, check out the Open Pedagogy Notebook.
Research
Affordability
Florida Virtual Campus Office of Distance Learning and Student Services conducted a large-scale study in 2018 to examine textbook affordability and the associated implications. Among the many key findings, notably, the cost of textbooks negatively impacts student access to required materials and learning. The top 5 highest percentage answers as a result of the high cost of textbooks are: not purchasing the required textbook (64%); taking fewer courses (43%); not registering for a specific course (41%); earning a poor grade (36%), and dropping a course (23%).
Read Florida Virtual Campus Office of Distance Learning and Student Services (2018)
Awareness
The 2020 Bayview Analytics and WCET report on OER suggests that while faculty and institutions have shown increasing awareness and acceptance of OER, “many remain unfamiliar with what they are, or how to utilize them.”
- Faculty who are aware of one or more OER initiatives are much more likely to be adopters of OER. This holds true for both faculty teaching introductory-level courses and the general population of faculty.
- When implemented at the institutional level, OER initiatives result in a measurable rise in the number of faculty who are aware of OER.
- Faculty who are aware of OER are much more likely to adopt OER as required course materials; those who have yet to adopt OER are much more likely to do so in the future.
- The impact of awareness of OER initiatives on adoption remains consistent across types of institutions (two- and four-year), the level of course being taught, and across regional compacts in the U.S.
Read Bayview Analytics and WCET (2020)
Equity
A 2018 paper by Sarah Lambert offers a new social justice-aligned definition for Open Education, providing us with new shared language and a strong theoretical framework to distinguish the field of Open Education from constructivist eLearning. Lambert offers us three new “R’s” to define the principles of social justice in Open Education: redistributive, recognitive, and representational.
A 2018 study by Colvard, Watson & Park found that “… OER adoption does much more than simply save students money and address student debt concerns. OER improve end-of-course grades and decrease DFW (D, F, and Withdrawal letter grades) rates for all students. They also improve course grades at greater rates and decrease DFW rates at greater rates for Pell recipient students, part-time students, and populations historically underserved by higher education.”
Read Colvard, Watson & Park (2018)
Pedagogy
John Hilton III, et. al (2019) published a study on the perceptions of 173 students enrolled in courses using various approaches to open pedagogy by nineteen instructors in post-secondary institutions in New Hampshire. Students found value in open pedagogy and believed that open pedagogy had greater overall educational value than traditional educational activities. One student shared that open pedagogy “allowed me to look through important course information, such as cases and related legal information, and synthesize it for the audience (my blog). This forced me to think of the information in terms of its importance relative to my topic and use it in a way that was meaningful to an audience that may not have the context to digest a lot of raw information. A traditional tool, like a test or quiz, would not achieve this same level of cognitive rigor in terms of how I used the course material.”