Contributed by Ellie Svoboda

Open Educational Resources (OER) are often pitched as affordable alternatives to pricey textbooks. Fully-fledged open textbooks, such as those found in OpenStax, are touted as high quality OER texts that can be wholesale substituted for existing commercial textbooks. As an OER graduate assistant on the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, this vision was enticing and exciting. This like-for-like swap seemed so simple and effective, an elegant way to make a positive impact on the students on our campus.

In 2019, the CU Anschutz OER Committee received grant funds from the Colorado Department of Higher Education for the purpose of promoting the use and creation of OER on our campus. Our committee had great enthusiasm and we created a series of workshops to provide awareness, which was followed by a mini-grant to incentivize the adoption of OER. A small, but passionate group of twelve faculty members responded to the call, several of whom were from the College of Nursing. They were eager to find low-cost materials for their students and promote the use of OER.

Unfortunately, we quickly realized that there were not many OERs in the realm of health sciences, and even fewer specifically in nursing. In September 2021, if you conducted a quick search in MERLOT— one of the most comprehensive databases for OER — you would experience this disparity firsthand. A search for “business”- one of the most popular undergraduate majors – yields around 4,700 OER materials. A search for “medicine” yields around 1,200. A search for “nursing” yields just over 200 results. In early 2019, there were even fewer results. This led to a great deal of frustration amongst College of Nursing faculty and a genuine struggle to find appropriate materials.

This also forced me to reexamine my preconceptions about OER – both around what OER looks like (format, length, etc..) and the purpose of OER. I had been so completely hooked by the idea of saving students money by swapping a commercial textbook for an OER textbook that I failed to grapple with the many other freedoms and benefits that are afforded by OER such as customization to students and the freedom of adaption for faculty. As I worked with the College of Nursing faculty, I learned to listen more closely to their ideas and needs. I discovered that they were thinking outside of the “textbook box” and imagining alternatives to pricey textbooks that weren’t just more textbooks that happened to be openly licensed.

They were thinking about the classroom and enriching class time with meaningful in-class activities that can be shared between faculty with encouragement to adapt to the needs of their students.

They were thinking about videos that demonstrated fundamental skills and techniques in a visual way.

They were thinking about pocket guides that consolidated guidelines and interpreted them through the perspective of a nurse practitioner.

They were thinking about hands-on assignments that allow students to design clinical decision support artifacts.

While each of these OER materials in isolation might not replace an entire textbook and immediately reduce the material cost of a class for students, together (and separately) they are creating a richer learning experience without adding additional cost and they can be shared beyond our campus. They add to a growing open arsenal that equips nursing faculty with tools to teach more effectively and in a way that is customizable to their students. I resist the idea of viewing these materials as stopgaps–measures to make things a bit more open while we wait for initiatives like OpenRN to author all the necessary open nursing textbooks that can then complete the like-for-like swap. These “small,” learner-focused OER materials are ends in and of themselves that improve the education of many nursing students and robustly further the cause of Open Educational Resources.

Ellie Svoboda is the Education Informationist at the Strauss Health Sciences Library at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Her work includes overseeing regular library instruction, liaising with the School of Pharmacy, and coordinating the OER efforts on campus. She received her MLIS from the University of Denver and previously taught as a high school Montessori educator for 8 years.

This post is by Ellie Svoboda and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.