When Time Isn’t on Your Side: Revising a Course to Use OER
Contributed by Zoe Speidel
When I first learned about OER, I was in a training offered by my institution. By the end of the first session, I was jazzed. I wanted to start finding OER immediately. It was May, but I wanted to revise my entire summer course to rely on OER–no more costly textbooks for my students!
Reality soon set in: where was I going to find the time to rewrite my entire course in 5 weeks? But on the other hand, how could I teach an entire course with a traditional textbook knowing what I now knew about OER? I had to choose between having free time during the next five weekends or enduring 8 weeks of teaching a course that no longer aligned with my newfound passion for OER.
This is a “do as I say, not as I do” situation, because I ultimately chose my newfound passion and gave up a lot of free time. But I don’t recommend that. Not only is that a big ask of an already over-extended faculty member, but also you may not have the ability to forgo five weekends in a row to update a perfectly good course. If this is you, then you might consider tapping into the power of “plus-one thinking.”
Starting Small
In my work as an instructional designer, I use the concept of “plus-one thinking” to encourage faculty to make small improvements to their course that will help them reach larger goals, such as transitioning a course completely to using OER.
Tom Tobin’s “plus-one thinking” is mostly used in discussions of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). As Tobin stated in 2018 when interviewed by Inside Higher Ed, “The ‘plus-one’ approach helps to take what otherwise might look like an insurmountable amount of effort and break it down into manageable, approachable chunks. It also helps people to determine where to start applying the UDL framework so they can address current challenges and pain points in their interactions.” For example, updating every single course video to include captions might be impossible before the course is offered next time; but identifying and prioritizing one video that would be especially useful with captions is a great place to start.
So how can you use this framework to begin transitioning to the use of OER? As a first step, you might choose to start with the course you teach most often or a course that you are already in the process of updating. It will also be necessary to choose a course where you’re free to choose your materials. Any course will work, but you might as well choose one that already needs some updating.
When you have settled on a course, choose one unit, week, module, lesson, or assignment to start with. You might consider Tobin’s mention of “current challenges and pain points” to identify a portion of your course where students typically struggle with the content. As teachers, we usually want to prioritize revising the parts of a course where students just aren’t seeming to get it–updating or supplementing the course materials can potentially help with this.
Wherever you choose to begin, remember that we are focusing on plus-one thinking. You don’t have to tackle everything at once in order for your students to begin to reap the benefits of the many amazing OER out there. And don’t get overly ambitious: you can simply “reuse” (one of the “5Rs of Openness”) openly-sourced content. No need to try and create your own… yet!
Recycle, Reuse, Reduce Your Effort
It isn’t slacking or cheating to reuse OER–it’s actually the whole point! It’s OK to take the “easy” road in order to get closer to your ultimate goal of a complete OER course.
First of all, don’t worry about finding the “perfect” OER textbook–it probably doesn’t exist, plus the beauty of OER is that you can pick and choose which parts of sources you use since you won’t be requiring students to purchase them!
Find one or more chapters of an OER textbook you think will be most useful for your students and go from there. In my English 101 and 102 courses, I use multiple OER textbooks to deliver content–a few chapters from Writing Guide, a few from Choosing & Using Sources, Oregon Writes, and The Simple Math of Writing Well. This has allowed me to choose materials that address various topics in the ways that will be most useful for my students.
I also highly suggest looking for open-source textbooks that provide supplementary materials. OpenStax is an OER publisher with many textbooks available on a wide variety of topics; even better, they also provide many supplementary materials for their textbooks, including “Student Toolkits” (worksheets that I have found surprisingly effective), chapter PowerPoint slides, and information for students about developing effective study skills and time management.
Some other excellent repositories of OER textbooks include:
If you’re like me, you might find it both exciting and daunting to be faced with so much choice. During my first searches, I found myself bookmarking book after book (“They’re free!”), but ultimately this became overwhelming and I had to reign myself in.
Stay focused on the portion of the course you’re looking to update…and maybe start a list of bookmarked OER you want to return to in your future free time!
Finally, don’t forget about your colleagues. Maybe others in your department have started using OER? Maybe you belong to listservs where you can ask for suggestions? And don’t forget about librarians!
As educators, time is almost never on our side–there’s always a committee to join, student emails to respond to, grading to complete, and the start of the term always seems to come too soon. But by adopting the practice of plus-one thinking, we can keep our weekends free(ish) and start to revise our courses to align with our passion for OER.
Zoe Speidel is an Adjunct Instructor in the English Department at Clark College and a Faculty Development Specialist at Oregon Health and Science University. She is also the Contributing Editor for OER & Beyond for 2023.
This post is by Zoe Speidel 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.