As we design our courses, we are participating in a larger project to design the future of higher education, and as we develop our skills in teaching, we must also develop our engagement with the larger questions of what our students will need to thrive in a world that is currently presenting so many challenges to their livelihood, health, and happiness.
—Robin DeRosa, A Foreword to Toward a Critical Instructional Design
As instructors in different contexts—an English program in a public two-year college, a language and linguistics department in a small liberal arts college, and digital scholarship services in a library at a major research university—we the co-editors of this special issue on Open Educational Resources (OER) have seen the attitudes toward and practices of OER shift over the last several years. Embraced by college and university administrators and funded by national and state initiatives as a means to lower barriers of entry for low-income college students, OER have also become a cornerstone of open pedagogy methods that work to make connections between the classroom, the university, and the world beyond the academy. Since the emergence of COVID-19, OER creation has expanded rapidly to accommodate the demands of remote and hybrid teaching and the ethical concerns of teaching in an increasingly inequitable world. The emphasis on equity and access has resulted in an increased quantity of OER material and platforms created and circulated online. The OER work that produced this glut of materials received a range of levels of institutional and financial support, ranging from dedicated individual scholars’ unpaid labor to corporations that produce and sell access to resources and platforms. At the same time, remote and hybrid teaching has also prompted for many instructors a series of questions about established pedagogical approaches. Some traditional teaching and learning practices developed in in-person learning environments have buckled upon adaptation to this new environment. Beyond that, online and hybrid teaching practices have impacted the way we teach in person now that we are returning to campuses. In this special issue, we explore questions and concerns that OER inspire about teaching practices, pedagogy, course planning, labor, and assessment.
While economic concerns are often the impetus for institutions and scholars to consider using or investing in OER, these free-to-use resources open the door for open education practices (OEP) as well. Unlike traditional proprietary textbooks and materials, OER can facilitate Open Pedagogy by promoting learner-driven approaches, fostering the development of digital literacies, and prioritizing accessibility, transparency, and collaboration. Open Pedagogy, stemming from Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, also restructures the traditional classroom because it abandons the paradigm of the static banking system of education and envisions the process instead as a dialogue, a conversation among students and educators working collaboratively as knowledge producers. At the same time, the alignment between OER and OEP that “focus on collaboration, connection, diversity, democracy, and critical assessments of educational tools and structures” is not cost-free; it consumes a great deal of time and labor, often unpaid, by many of the people involved.
Committing to the creation, adoption, and implementation of OER presents challenges, as it limits curricula to free or openly licensed materials and requires labor that may not be compensated or count towards tenure and promotion. Using OER in a curriculum demands labor intensive development and requires ongoing maintenance to update software, links, and interfaces on top of keeping content current. This work by instructors tends not to be recognized and/or remunerated by institutions. There have been several attempts to establish some guidelines for the assessment of digital projects, yet these efforts are not widely and formally accepted in most colleges and universities. And while funded initiatives for faculty and staff to familiarize themselves with and develop OER are increasing, these are not yet sufficient to support and sustain these types of projects and initiatives.
As the authors of this issue express in many ways, if our pedagogical approaches are not neutral, then neither are our teaching materials. For this special issue on OER, we are excited to share articles that explore the increased emphasis on and institutional demand for free teaching materials, tools, and platforms in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. As college instruction went online in the early days of the pandemic, many professors started using OERs for the first time, often only learning their politics and practicalities on the fly. The authors collected here investigate multiple OER practices, teaching and learning frameworks, and resources that they have built into meaningful and inclusive future pedagogies, but also share critiques of OER design, distribution, and institutional management approaches.The articles in this issue explore the challenges of and inspirations for not just creating OER, but also of selecting, implementing, and administering already existing OER, from the perspective of educators, students, online education developers, librarians, instructional technologists, and administrators.
We aim to highlight disciplinary as well as institutional diversity: we showcase teaching in languages, literature, classics, psychology, math, and astronomy in small regional community colleges through large public universities. Unsurprising given the collaborative nature of so much OER work, six of the ten pieces are the product of co-authorship. The authors include educators from diverse positions in the division of academic labor, including OER faculty and librarians and global non-profits (like the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education). The articles expand on the complexities of different stages of OER development: from assessing existing OER, to adoption for specific courses, to faculty and student perceptions of OER used in the classroom. Our authors provide critical context and challenge us all to participate in the broader shift to Open Educational Resources with attention and intention.
The first half of this issue examines classroom experiences. Philosophical perspectives on classroom needs often drive the instructors to adopt OER, but so do the practicalities of particular assignments. These articles move from planning class sessions, to broader syllabus concerns, to tools adoption, and finally to student evaluations of teachers who assign OER. Beginning with Emily Scida’s “How the Pandemic Transformed Us: The Process and Practices of a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility-Focused OER Project for Teaching and Learning Spanish” we jump into the application of transformative learning theory in a Spanish language-learning sequence. Scida details the steps from the first stage of engagement in an OER project at the University of Virginia through the lenses of transformative learning theory. Scida’s intervention centers on addressing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) in multiple levels of Spanish courses, highlighting the meaningful impact on faculty, the program, and the institution.
With careful attention to the goal of equity espoused by many who choose OER, Taylor Clement’s “Building a Community of Voices in Professional Writing” looks at what it takes to address intersectional audiences in an upper-level online professional writing class at University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The article provides “an example of how educators can employ Open Educational Resources (OER) to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in professional writing courses.” As she argues, “Instructors should carefully consider the voices that open access resources amplify.”
Danica Savonick’s “Teaching DH on a Shoestring: Minimalist Digital Humanities Pedagogy” describes course design through assignments to show “how free, low-cost, and open-source tools can be used to help students increase their digital literacy, including their awareness of the ways technologies reproduce and challenge conditions of inequality.” Its focus on equitable education and readily available tools parallels both the goals and philosophy underpinning much of the movement behind OER.
Randi Shedlosky-Shoemaker’s “Don’t Judge a Book—But What about the Professor Who Assigned the Book?” study builds on existing research to determine if OER yields more positive student evaluations. They attempted to determine “whether participants saw the professor as caring, supportive of students, enthusiastic about teaching, and committed to student learning” based on their choice to use OER.
As these articles show, attention to student diversity and financial barriers to access can motivate the choice of OER, but there are many other crucial reasons the movement is gaining momentum. Digital texts can be quickly distributed, can accommodate a diverse student body, and they also enable new pathways to old knowledge. Not all OER are centered on lowering cost for students; in some cases the ability to access texts online enables new connections that reimagine, for instance, ancient language learning. Farnoosh Shamsian and Gregory Crane, in “Open Resources for Data-Driven Learning of Ancient Greek in Persian,” explore the use of localizable grammar explanations and cross-lingual annotations on ancient Greek open resources to develop teaching and learning resources for Persian speakers often excluded by the predominance of the presumption of familiarity with English in ancient-language learning materials.
The following three articles are case studies of building or using OER in different disciplines and institutions. They look at the benefits of crafting renewable assignments, and explore in detail the additional burden that offering OER places on faculty, and the layered difficulties confronting instructors using OER to serve missions of equity and inclusion. In the first in this series, Judy Orton Grissett and Feng-Ru Sheu’s “Creating Active and Meaningful Learning through a Renewable Assignment: A Case Study in a Human Growth Development Psychology Course” outlines a model for using OER to facilitate the extension of assignments’ relevance to students beyond the single semester in which they are due, contributing to learning for other students and for the general community.
Ian McDermott, Joshua Tan, Emma Handte, Alioune Khoule, Marta Kowalczyk and Rena Grossman follow with “Implementing OER at LaGuardia Community College: Three Case Studies,” outlining their diverse experiences putting OER into practice in the STEM fields of math, astronomy, and chemistry in their public community college in New York City with the assistance of a state-level grant. Their detailed case studies come with helpful advice regarding taking the opportunity the shift to OER to not only think about eliminating costs, but to build serious consideration of accessibility and universal design into the born-digital resources provided.
While higher education institutions may encourage OER creation, adoption or adaptation, Jennifer Epley Sanders, Daniel Bartholomay, Amanda Marquez, and Anthony Zoccolillo’s “An Interdisciplinary Case Study of Cost Concerns and Practicalities for Open Educational Resources at a Hispanic-Serving Institution in Texas” illustrates the significant labor burdens for faculty undertaking such projects. Teaching with OER, though likely beneficial for students, and potentially supportive of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, often results in unrewarded and uncompensated labor for faculty at traditionally underfunded institutions, especially when maintenance and assessment are not counted toward tenure and promotion.
The last two articles round out the issue beautifully by addressing OER at an organizational level—how do these projects play out beyond the solo classroom, how do they get remixed, who chooses to adopt OER, and what keeps faculty invested? We see careful consideration of the distinct categories of users and their different expectations of OER searches in Michelle Brennan, Selena Burns, Cynthia Jimes, Jeff Hecker, Anastasia Karaglani, and Amee Evans Godwin’s “Five Faculty and Library Curation Personas to Aid OER Discovery Solutions.” The authors’ study sought to understand, through the use of User Experience (UX) research, the potential obstacles to OER adoption at the search phase by creating “user personas” of different kinds of instructors and librarians, noting their needs and potential pain points in their projects, allowing for better OER discovery solutions.
We conclude our issue with “Worth the Time: Exploring the Faculty Experience of OER Initiatives” by Stacy Katz and Shawna Brandle, who investigate faculty perceptions of adopting OER through an institution-level initiative. They found that across the City University of New York system and across different faculty levels (associate and full), instructors primarily chose to shift to OER because it benefited the students to have no-cost course readings. Their qualitative study addresses faculty motivations and the conditions of adoption, offering clear areas such initiatives could take in order to facilitate greater uptake among faculty.
We, the editors, would like to thank the JITP Editorial Collective and our incredible Managing Editor, Patrick DeDauw, for their monumental effort in migrating to Manifold, led by the inimitable Kelly Hammond and phenomenal committees headed by Brandon Walsh and Anne Donlon, as well as all who undertook interim workflows for the production of this themed issue. We also extend thanks to Matt Gold and Luke Waltzer, JITP alumni and CUNY GCDI and TLC superstars for their help and support in this transition.
We are proud to publish this special issue on CUNY’s Manifold instance. JITP grew in part out of the CUNY Graduate Center’s commitment to community platforms of exchange and has happily lived for its first twenty issues on the CUNY Academic Commons, a WordPress-based blogging and networking site developed to foster scholarly exchange across and between CUNY campuses. JITP has always been enriched by its relationship to the community-building work central to wonderful projects like the Commons and Manifold, both of which represent CUNY’s commitment to developing homegrown open infrastructure. As we look forward, we are grateful for all the Commons team has done for us, and are excited to shift our production process to Manifold, an open-source digital publishing platform developed by the CUNY Graduate Center in partnership with The University of Minnesota Press and the development firm Cast Iron Coding. Manifold represents a new approach to academic publishing generally, and to OER publishing specifically, allowing readers to collect, share, and collaboratively annotate articles. All issues of JITP going forward will be published directly on CUNY’s Manifold instance, and our entire archive will soon be available on CUNY’s Manifold instance. Using these features to connect JITP readers to authors and other readers directly in our openly published text supports our OER mission and the spirit motivating this special issue. To this end, we hope you’ll consider creating a reading account to publicly annotate and share, and learn more about reading on Manifold and creating Reading Groups. We hope you will join us!
