I am surprised that the open educational resources (OER) movement has taken so long to take hold. Having the involvement of the students and other teachers in the course’s materials would give continual improvements. Students have the ability to directly respond to the materials at any moment, not just at the end of the semester in a course evaluation. This openness to critical feedback keeps the curriculum alive and responsive to the students, and gives more ideas to the teacher on what is working for students and what is not. Teachers benefit, students benefit, and the public benefits. How did OER not become the norm? Instead education and knowledge is often regarded like a state secret, only shared on a “need to know” basis. Disagree? Then why would a large-scale learning management systems (LMS) like Canvas show only 3 classes when searching for “CS”? There must be close to a thousand of those classes hosted by Canvas. Those classes can never be used by anyone else now, the class is considered ‘expired’, like a food. An instructor could restart the class for next semester, but they always retain all visibility, control, and restrictions on the course.
Perhaps educational resources should work towards the same progressive structure as academic publishing. Academic works can have a lineage of citations that can be clearly followed to find the origins, modifications, and improvements of the idea. Education materials could be similarly referenced on and expanded upon, and high quality content would become popularized in this same manner. There is one central issue this could cause though. Popularity leads to the homogenization of classes, tempting teachers to be less individualistic, creative, and adaptive in their classes. Students who do not fall in the majority target audience also would be disadvantaged in these classes unless the curriculum is carefully structured. If educational materials merely adopt the academic publishing system, they would inherit the same issues there as well: restrictive access and price gouging. This is why the current academic publishing model is not a good destination for educational resources to move towards. The open access model does not have these concerns and would promote reusing and remixing of the course content. This is how to bring education to the masses, not through having “gold subscription member” tiers.
Side note: I wonder how did universities shed the responsibility of textbook costs onto the students? College students must be able to take care of textbooks better than young kids. But every high school and middle school I’ve heard of pays for their students’ textbooks. Perhaps this is a consequence of the predatory professors who require the most expensive and newest version of their own textbook for their classes. Universities may have refused to fund this practice, but could not prevent it, so it offloaded the expense down to the students.
I love your idea about educational resources following the same strategy as publishing. It seems so simple, right? What if–hear me out–instead of just putting things out, we worked collaboratively to better resources in order to improve students’ learning attainment? Revolutionary, huh? The only answer I have for why this is not the norm is because it takes more time, and in the world of textbooks and such, money is central. If you don’t put out something fast enough, the publishers lose money. So frustrating.
Agreed. I’m gonna step on the ol’ soapbox now…
One of the unspoken issues–and the most insidious–is that the contemporary University runs just like a business, and in business, the bottom line is everything, so whatever cuts costs and raises profits (which is essentually what that wonderful endowment that always seems to keep rising really is), up to and including the absurd prices of textbooks, is acceptable because it benefits the University and its donors (or shareholders, execute board, whatever other business analogues I’m missing.)
I’ll let someone else get on the box now. 🙂
Hey Patrick,
There are important questions you are raising about open pedagogy. Now that you know about these issues, how do you think it will impact how you design your courses in the future? Open educational resources have the potential to make education accessible to more students–and for us educators, we have more pedagogical resources at our fingertips as well. Open educational resources really broaden the notion of what a “learning community” is, doesn’t it?
Patrick,
I think that fear is one factor that might be holding open education back. Opening up the curriculum to student involvement requires a level of trust that your students will interact with it responsibly and a level of trust in your own ability to bring the class back if it falls off the rails. Right now I am assisting with a class on the Arab-Israeli conflict. While I can definitely see some benefits of an approach with this sort of subject matter, I can also see the class running into issues due to the strong opinions that this topic evokes. This is not to say that open education is not valuable, even for controversial subjects, but I do think that educators will (for good reason) want to tread carefully with these courses. On the textbook issue, semi-privatization and self-funded auxiliaries have been big points of emphasis in state-funded (I use that term loosely) higher education for awhile, so it doesn’t surprise me that textbook costs have been separated from tuition. In addition, I would imagine that not paying for textbooks gives professors greater freedom in assigning texts, both in terms of cost and potentially controversial subject matter.
Hey Patrick,
You may have meant your question about the adoption of OER rhetorically, but I think that major holdup for the adoption of something like OER is a combination of effort (as with any change) and vulnerability. When a professor opens up the classroom to student comment and augmentation they also open themselves up for critique. Not sure about you, but nearly every academic I have met is incredibly insecure, whether they want to admit it or not, and allowing your students to change your course probably sounds to a lot of professors like admitting that they do not know what they are doing, and are less “expert” than those they are teaching. While on a logical level OER makes sense, I think on an emotional level it is quite frightening for a good number of educators.
Thanks Patrick — I’ll just make a couple of quick comments: 1) re: who pays for textbooks in K-12 – that would be the tax payers (taxes fund public schools in general). and 2) why students pay in higher ed – that’s more complicated. Sarah S went to undergrad at a school that provided textbook rental for all students as part of their tuition. Who paid for that? Again, tax payers – but not nearly at the level that we see in K-12 because of the widespread de-funding of higher ed by state legislatures in the last 15 years. Grants, the endowment, and most of all, tuition, are now essential to making the budgets of universities work. The COST of textbooks has much more to do with the (predatory) nature of publishing than with the greed of the faculty.
And on Canvas: Making a course “public” is not nearly as straightforward as you imagine. Canvas is not an “Open Ed” environment IMO. I think if you look at Stack Exchange and other OER repositories you’ll find lots of materials for CS courses.
One question I am left with after reading your post and considering a model where students and fellow teachers view material critically is whether students are developmentally ready to critically assess class materials. If all students know entering college know is a banking method of education, I’m wondering how they might respond to the ability to openly criticize the expert, whether that be the textbook or the professor if they’ve been relying on external authority for so long. I believe they eventually need to make the jump to critically evaluate information sources, but I think a carefully scaffolded approach would be necessary to make that happen.
Responding briefly to your last question with textbooks, I’d imagine part of it would have to do with the economics of having to purchase so many different textbooks rather than for a single curriculum, but I think it more so relates to the nature of higher education being treated as a private good. Even in state school like Tech, the government only covers a small portion of the school’s expenses, so honestly if textbooks were made free, they would just be added into tuition. It’s easy to say that a university has tons of resources, but with the way budgets are allocated, every dollar is accounted for, and educational expenses are covered primarily by tuitions dollars.
Patrick, I really like your point on openness as a prerequisite to receiving “critical feedback [and in keeping the] curriculum alive and responsive to the students.” I also share your perspective on that “continual improvements” is fundamental for both students and teachers in pedagogy. Well said.
Hi Patrick,
I enjoyed your post as you raised some very interesting points. Especially, how educational resources can follow more or less the same path of academic works (giving citations, etc), which could be useful but on the other hand might force instructors to follow the same procedures that used to be successful before. I’m thinking of a platform in which students can continuously provide feedback to the instructor and an intelligent system that analyzes the comments and gives suggestions or possible solutions based on a large database was trained on successful previous examples (in other courses). Just something on top of my head, maybe you could say how practical this could be with your CS background.