BLOG: Current Happenings in OER

New Releases from ROTEL

We’re excited to showcase the latest textbooks from the Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens (ROTEL) Grant, an initiative of six Massachusetts Public Institutions of Higher Education along with the MA Department of Higher Education funded through the U.S. Department of Education. The mission of this project is to promote textbook affordability, student success, and inclusion, particularly for minoritized students. Rebus collaborated with ROTEL through the Textbook Success Program.

Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing

This resource was created by Kisha Tracy and teams from the TSP July 2022 M-2 Cohort, facilitated by Amy Minervini, Joerdis Weilandt, and Apurva Ashok.

Heritages of Change: Curatorial Activism and First-Year Writing is an OER for students to think about the social changes that were prevalent during the COVID years and remain important in their wake. Heritages of Change is a lens for thinking and writing about these ideas. Through curation and exhibition as an act of activism, students focus on a specific audience with whom they can communicate authentically about this dynamic world.

Why Do I Have to Take This Course? A Guide to General Education

This resource was created by Kisha Tracy and teams from the TSP July 2022 M-2 Cohort, facilitated by Amy Minervini.

Why Do I Have to Take This Course? A Guide to General Education helps students think about why they take General Education courses and what significance they have, individually and as a program as a whole. It allows students the time to contemplate connections, the potential reasons for developing certain learning outcomes and skills, and the applications to other courses as well as their professional and personal lives. 

Statistics Through an Equity Lens

This resource was created by Yvonne Anthony and teams from the TSP July 2022 M-1 Cohort, facilitated by Amy Minervini, Joerdis Weilandt, and Apurva Ashok.

Statistics Through an Equity Lens carries a significant responsibility by presenting statistics through an equity lens. The book encourages further inspection of the ways in which data is collected, interpreted, and analyzed on a variety of social justice issues, such as health disparities, hunger and food insecurity, homelessness, behavioral health (mental health and substance use), and incarceration of males of color. It also attempts to reveal how the misuse of data can reinforce inequities, for example, by stigmatizing people and labeling neighborhoods as high poverty, violent, and having poor educational opportunities.

Shared Voices: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

This resource was created by Demetrios Brellas and Vanessa Martinez and teams from the TSP July 2022 M-2 Cohort, facilitated by Amy Minervini.

Shared Voices: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology is a student-centered cultural anthropology mini textbook built with an equity lens. This text aims to be accessible, interesting, accurate, and centered on marginalized voices. This text is a starting point for any introductory anthropology course recognizing that cultural change is constant and the familiar is cousin to the weird and unusual.

The Math Education faculty at Brigham Young University have created a series of videos to help teach. They are available at Math The World on Youtube. From the description:

Welcome to Math The World, a math project dedicated to bringing real life context to math! 

At Math The World, we are on a mission to answer the age-old student question, "When will I ever use this?" We're here to bridge the gap between theoretical math and real-life applications. Our videos take everyday questions and harness the power of mathematical modeling to provide insightful and meaningful answers.

What makes us different is we are a team of not just Mathematicians but Math Educators. So we don't just know the material but also how to teach it, the common pitfalls students make, and the pedagogy to help empower other teachers to improve their practice!

Highlights

• Faculty became more cost conscious over the course of the pandemic.
• Usage of open educational resources increased by between 10 % and 15 %.
• The percentage of students spending less than $100 a semester doubled to 33 %.
• First-year students are spending the most and saw no savings since 2020.
• More first and second-year students are going without required materials.

Abstract

This article compares the results of a pair of course material surveys for faculty and students conducted before and after the COVID-19 pandemic by academic librarians at a private liberal arts college in the northeastern U.S. Findings indicate that overall students are spending significantly less per semester on required course materials, but some are going without significantly more required materials due to cost. Furthermore, first-year students were not found to be spending any less than prior to the pandemic and, as a result, spent significantly more in 2023 than most of their more experienced peers. The decrease in average student spending corresponds with our findings that faculty became more cost conscious and expanded efforts to make required materials affordable by assigning more OER and fewer materials which they consider to be overpriced or unaffordable. As a result of these and other strategies, by 2023 significantly more faculty had been able to develop courses for which the required materials cost nothing for students. The authors discuss the importance of these and additional findings, placing them in the context of similar surveys and suggesting ways that the data can be used to inform current library practices and future research.

Christopher A. Barnes, Scott Vine, Ryan Nadeau, Assessing textbook affordability before and after the COVID-19 pandemic: Results of student and faculty surveys, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 50, Issue 2, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102864