Michael Erkan
While most in higher education fear colossal tuition prices, the steadily increasing prices of textbooks are slowly becoming a major financial burden to millions of college students every year. In the last few decades, college tuition and textbook prices have both risen astronomically while the income in the average household has risen at a much slower rate. With so many students scraping together their life savings just to pay their college tuition, textbook prices become an evil cherry on top of their financial burdens. Textbook prices often sum up to five or six hundred dollars per semester, sometimes acting as the straw that breaks the financial back of students. The textbook market has a small number of large publishers that control the market, so they can control general prices as they please. As a solution to this problem, many have been looking towards Open Educational Resources as an alternative to conventional textbooks.
According to UNESCO, Open Educational Resources are defined as, “learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.” Colleges and universities should invest more time and resources into utilizing Open Educational Resources whenever possible, to combat high textbook prices. Open Educational Resources have the potential to massively change how college courses are taught across the globe. Open Educational Resources, or OER for short, are usually online
and accessible to the students. The attention and backing behind OER is due to the massive potential they have to replace traditional textbooks. Studies have shown that, “textbook costs have risen more than 1,000 percent since the 1970s” (Valle). Textbook prices are increasing in an artificial manner. Due to there being a small number of large textbook publishers, these publishers are able to control the market price, regardless of what the book should actually be worth. This has created an issue for students struggling financially. OER are meant to be a solution to this pressing problem. Studies have also shown that OER could potentially be even better than textbooks. In fact, it was found that, “In a survey of community college faculty and students, both groups believed that using open course materials had a positive impact on teaching and learning activities, with particular focus on the potential for interactivity and collaboration” (Todorinova and Wilkinson). In another study in Virginia Community College, it was found that, “More students’ perception on quality of OER out of 425 students was that the OER were excellent as opposed to 6% (12) who did not appreciate them” (Constance & Tshabalala). OER are a fairly new concept, but are the most promising route educators have for replacing overpriced textbooks, without compromising quality.
While Open Educational Resources sound almost perfect in theory, multiple issues arise when considering their application. One of the largest issues is the lack of motivation for professors to make the switch. Professors often share the opinion that finding and utilizing OER is too much effort for too little payoff. According to a survey given to professors after using an Open Educational Resource for a class at Rutgers University, many professors agree that using OER is not a preferred method of teaching. In the study, 41.18% of professors stated that OER were too difficult to find, and 64.71% stated that a difficulty of theirs was a lack of a comprehensive Open Educational Resource database (Todorinova and Wilkinson). These direct
opinions from professors demonstrate the lack of a singular database, or simple method of location, fregarding OER. While it is frustrating knowing how little effort is being put into making OER more accessible, these statistics simultaneously carry a silver lining. If there were to be a free, easy to access, expansive Open Educational Resource database, a large percentage of professors would likely begin utilizing them because issues with accessibility and location are one of the biggest drawbacks in the current climate. Studies like this show that professors would likely be happy to switch over to using Open Educational Resources, provided they are simple to locate.
Naturally, the next question to be asked by many is probably the following: How difficult would it be to form an expansive Open Educational Resource database for easy professor usage? Obviously there are many free resources online that could be used in higher education, but how do you find them? The internet is a vast cavern of resources, covering every topic imaginable.
Websites like Merlot, a fairly large OER database, are the closest thing we have to a singular database, but they lack multitudes of common topics and could be improved greatly. One issue with the internet, and specifically Merlot, is the difficulty of confirming whether or not a source is credible. Misinformation is commonplace online, and without heavily researching potential OER, that misinformation could accidentally be instilled in the student’s minds through a class. Just like Wikipedia, anybody can add information to the websites, so the information could easily be not credible. Ali Erkan, a professor of Computer Science for 20 years at Ithaca College and Cornell University stated that, “the existing stuff takes a lot to find, because there’s a lot of free stuff out there and doing web searches comes up with thousands of results.” Based on this, and knowledge of Merlot, we can infer that finding Open Educational Resources in the wild is possible, but is not efficient.
If locating Open Educational Resources for databases is difficult, how difficult is it to just make them yourself? Perhaps if creating OER was simple we could just make databases from scratch. Talking again to Professor Erkan about creating your own OER, he stated that, “I think that the development of one quality resource would take multiple years.” Later, Professor Erkan built on that point by adding that, “No one sits down and says I’m going to do an Open Educational Resource. They always use what they have already created, shape it up, polish it, and those are the ones that typically end up being free resources.” This sheds light on an aspect of OER that may not have previously been considered. Why would somebody want to make a free resource if they’re not getting paid? One major hurdle for OER is the fact that not many people want to create them. Infact, many are made without proper planning and preparation in place. Without a drastic change in funding by educational bodies, Open Educational Resources face a massive uphill battle for their production.
Ideally, colleges and universities should start investing in the creation and usage of Open Educational Resources as soon as possible. The reality is that some colleges are putting in effort, and some are not. There are multiple reasons colleges may not invest any money towards a future with OER. Some may simply not have the funding needed. Some may not be optimistic about the prospects of OER, and feel they are unnecessary. One university that has been proactive about Open Educational Resource implementation is Northwestern University. In 2022, they had an OER Faculty Grant Program where faculty received, “$5,000 to develop, use, and publish a singular resource for a Northwestern undergraduate course” (OER Faculty Grant). In addition to this program, many colleges and universities have created similar programs that give grants to faculty who are willing to create and/or utilize OER for their classes. When talking about the topic of Open Educational Resources it’s important to remember how new they are.
OER are a relatively fresh concept, and challenge an old tradition in education. Due to textbooks being so instilled in the nature of higher education, it will take some time before everybody becomes comfortable with them as a whole. The fact that numerous colleges and universities are incorporating OER grants into their budget is amazing for the overall future of Open Educational Resources.
Now would be a good time to talk about the largest roadblocks for Open Educational Resources. One of the most pressing issues is the lack of awareness and application amongst faculty. According to Doug Lederman, of Inside Higher Ed, “In 2015-16, 5 percent of all instructors and 8 percent of those teaching introductory courses reported using OER as required material in their courses…in Seaman and Bay View’s 2018-19 survey last year, those figures had risen to 14 percent and 26 percent, respectively.” This data shows a steady growth of awareness and application towards the usage of OER, but still a massive percentage of faculty that are turning a blind eye. As previously mentioned, many colleges and universities are hesitant to fund OER which does not aid the goal of spreading awareness and application. Another adversary towards OER are the big publishing companies. These companies depend on their textbooks selling, and selling for a high price. Depending on the severity of the push for OER in the future, the publishing companies will likely put a lot of effort into slowing and/or reversing the positive trajectory of OER as a replacement to their products. One last issue is the complexities of higher level courses. Implementing free information into lower level classes is fairly simple, because the information is public knowledge and available for anybody to look into for free. Once you get into more complicated courses, the materials covered become much more difficult to find for free. Sometimes, all the knowledge used for a class was research from a single group, or singular person. Taking information from a single research book and putting it directly into a free resource directly is simply not allowed. This would mean in order to create a free resource, one would have to conduct their own original research on the topic, and convert their results into an OER. This isn’t realistic, and shows the overall limitations of OER in higher level courses. There are many tasks to overcome for Open Educational Resources to reach their maximum potential, but most can likely be solved in the years to come.
By giving more funding to faculty in colleges and universities who are willing to create Open Educational Resources, the greater educational system could make long-lasting steps towards the overall goal of replacing traditional textbooks with OER. OER are the best current option that higher education has for replacing textbooks, due to their simplicity, and affordability. A lot has been done to progress the relevance of OER in the last decade, but there is still so much more to do. While a massive percentage of current classes using traditional textbooks could be using OER, it’s important to remember that many upper level courses in higher education have very complex content and likely won’t be using OER anytime soon. OER are an untapped power that could disrupt the current textbook marketplace, and change the way we look at teaching as a whole. As long as those in higher education approach this topic with good intentions, Open Educational Resources are set to have a bright future.
Works Cited
Erkan, Ali. Interview. Conducted by Michael Erkan, 3/21/22.
Kadada, Constance, and Thembinkosi Tshabalala. “Students’ Attitudes to Open Educational Resources (OERs).” (2020). Students’ Attitudes to Open Educational Resources (OERs). International Journal of Social Sciences & Educational Studies, 7(3), 9–18. https://doi.org/10.23918/ijsses.v7i3p9
Lederman, Doug. “Inside Higher Ed.” Pandemic Didn’t Speed Adoption of Open Educational Resources, but Outlook Is Promising,
https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2021/03/18/pandemic-didnt-spee d-adoption-open-educational-resources-outlook
“Open Educational Resources.” UNESCO.org, 1 Jan. 1970, https://www.unesco.org/en/communication-information/open-solutions/open-educational- resources
“OER Faculty Grant.” Northwestern,
https://air.northwestern.edu/get-started/open-educational-resources/oer-faculty-grant.html
Todorinova, Lily, and Zara T. Wilkinson. “Incentivizing Faculty for Open Educational Resources (OER) Adoption and Open Textbook Authoring.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, vol. 46, no. 6, Elsevier Inc, 2020, pp. 102220–102220, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102220
Valle, Gaby Del. “The High Cost of College Textbooks, Explained.” Vox, Vox, 6 Mar. 2019, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/6/18252322/college-textbooks-cost-expensive-pe arson-cengage-mcgraw-hill
