Open Educational Resources (OER)

Why should I use OER?

There are many benefits to using OER, including affordability, improving student success, promoting accessibility and inclusion, and easy access.

Affordability

The price of textbooks has increased significantly over time, even accounting for inflation. According to the CBC, “over the past 15 years, the cost of university textbooks has increased more than four times the rate of inflation. In the past three decades, the costs have risen some 834%; this is more than double the rate of increase in house prices and triple the cost increases in the Consumer Price Index” (CBC, 2014). For students already struggling financially, the cost of textbooks can be insurmountable.

Student Success

Due to the high price, 65% of students report not purchasing a textbook because it was too expensive; of these students, 94% were concerned that not purchasing the textbook would hurt their overall grade (Student Public Interest Research Groups, 2014). What starts as an economic challenge becomes an academic issue, as students can’t learn from textbooks they can’t afford. Matt Reed argues that “a great book that goes unbought and unread isn’t as good as a pretty good book that a student actually reads” (Reed, 2021).

Accessibility & Inclusion

Unlike proprietary publisher content, OER can be adapted to meet accessibility requirements.

OER offers the opportunity for instructors to adapt and curate a wide range of materials. This material may be “authored by a diverse set of individuals, including those who identify as disabled, normalizing and reducing stigma while sharing viewpoints that have historically been marginalized” (SPARC, 2018).

Access

With the permissions granted by open licenses, OER have enhanced access options. Although OER can be in any format, they are primarily available digitally. Since OER are free, students do not need to log in or use a special platform to access these digital texts. Students can read OER on any device, including mobile devices, and in any country. OER can also be downloaded to be read offline, as well as printed without restriction.

Will using OER impact course transferability?

Course resources, open or otherwise, do not impact a course’s transferability to another institution. 

Course resources are not reported each term to make a transfer decision or maintain a transfer agreement, including interprovincial agreements (Canadian Information Centre for International Credentials, 2019). 

For more information, please see: 

• Does an open textbook affect a course’s transferability? (BCcampus)
• Articulation (Alberta Council on Admissions & Transfer)

When faculty create OER, are they compensated for their labour?

The labour associated with creating OER is widely recognized. At Red Deer Polytechnic, we are currently exploring ways to compensate faculty who are creating OER.

At other institutions across Canada, faculty are compensated for this labour in a variety of ways:

1. OER creation may be counted towards tenure and promotion applications. For example, the University of British Columbia explicitly mentions open education in its tenure and promotion policies. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) recommends that  academic staff associations strive to ensure that collective agreements “recognize [OER] works as contributions for the purposes of contract renewal, tenure, and promotion” (CAUT, 2019, p. 3). To this end, the Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success (DOERS3) collaborative, a group of 25 higher education systems and state/provincewide organizations, have developed an advisory model to help tenure-track faculty include OER work in their portfolios.
   For more information, please see:

• Recognizing “Open” in Tenure and Promotion at UBC
• CAUT OER Discussion Paper
• DOERS3 OER in Tenure and Promotion
• The Tenure Review Process Must Evolve

2. There are many provincial or institutional grants or stipends that may be provided to OER developers.
   For more information, please see:

• University of Alberta Open Educational Resources (OER) Grants
• Mount Royal University OER Grant Program
• University of Calgary 2017-18 Open Educational Resources Grants Recipients Announced
• Kwantlen Polytechnic University Open Education Resources Grants
• AtlanticOER Grants

3. In recognition of the time required to create OER, many institutions also provide course release for this purpose.
   For more information, please see:

• OER Development Grant (OERDG) program, Thompson Rivers University
• OER Program Funded Grants, University of Regina

In some cases, OER creation is included in the workload for a course. Faculty often create course resources as part of the expected labour associated with that course, and choose afterwards to license and publish these resources as OER.

Many OER creators choose to donate their labour freely because they believe in the value of sharing knowledge openly. For more information about why RDP instructors have created or adopted OER, please see RDP OER Guide: Student & Faculty Showcase.

How do textbook costs impact our students?

The price of textbooks has increased significantly over time, even accounting for inflation. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, consumer prices for college textbooks increased 88% from 2006 to 2016 (U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, 2016). According to the CBC, “over the past 15 years, the cost of university textbooks has increased more than four times the rate of inflation. In the past three decades, the costs have risen some 834%; this is more than double the rate of increase in house prices and triple the cost increases in the Consumer Price Index” (CBC, 2014).

As a result, 65% of students report not purchasing a textbook because it was too expensive; of these students, 94% were concerned that not purchasing the textbook would hurt their overall grade (Student Public Interest Research Groups, 2014). Without access to learning resources, student success is negatively impacted.

For students already struggling financially, the cost of textbooks can be insurmountable. A recent study at the University of Manitoba indicated that 35.3% of students experienced some degree of food insecurity throughout their degree (Entz, Slater, & Desmarais, 2017). Additionally, a pandemic-time study conducted by Statistics Canada found that 48% of students with a job reported either losing their job or being temporarily laid off (Statistics Canada, 2020).

RDP students, in an informal poll (2019), indicated that if they did not have to pay the high cost of textbooks, they could instead have paid for: