Contributed by Zoe Speidel

As an adjunct at Clark College, I was first introduced to OER through their OER Community of Practice—and I never looked back! I’ve been so impressed with the efforts of librarians and faculty across Clark’s campus to expand the reach of OER. I especially appreciate that OER at Clark is not only about providing students with no-cost course materials, but that it is also about promoting open pedagogy and the agency it gives to students as they help direct their own learning. Below is an interview with Maggie Lynch, Clark College’s OER Fellow.

Zoe Speidel: What is your central philosophy about why OER is important? How has this evolved through your work on OER initiatives?

Maggie Lynch: I’ve been working on OER initiatives since 2004 and in 2009 was the recipient of one of the first national OER grants for community colleges in the U.S. with a team of eight community colleges participating. The regular use of OER has come a long way for some institutions that gravitated to the concept and invested in the creation of OER not only for their own students but for students worldwide.

That said, the concept of sharing educational resources widely, without asking for payment, has been around since the 1970s when global educational initiatives began to be created to help primarily third world countries and/or educational needs within the U.S. where the population was struggling with poverty.

There have always been philanthropic faculty or groups of people who have provided their expertise, teaching materials, and philosophy for free. It was in 1971 that Project Gutenberg began making books available, online, that were in the public domain. Very few people were willing to read online texts back then, but Project Gutenberg now has more than 70,000 books in its catalog and continues to grow.

The main concerns around these early resources, and is still a concern today is vetting and validity. There was no process for determining if more than one faculty member agreed that the resources, text, and exercises reflected the field or incorporated accepted teaching practices. In addition, the idea of intellectual property, or “fair use,” was not yet tested and there was no conceptual framework like the Creative Commons licensing we have today (developed in 2001-2002).

In the U.S. allowing faculty time or creating interest in investing in free curriculum or teaching exercises was not widely promulgated until the early 2000s. Until then the commercial publisher-controlled environment of curriculum development and teaching resources was the primary means for educational content to be approved from K-12 throughout all levels of college preparation. It was, and still is, easier to say that a specific textbook and its accompanying resources, quizzes, and assignments had been vetted by a group of faculty across the nation and edited by knowledgeable publisher staff.

It wasn’t until UNESCO coined the term Open Educational Resources in 2002, at their Forum on Open Courseware, that OER was brought to worldwide attention. However, it was primarily implemented within the concept of Open Courseware and online learning environments.

UNESCO’s definition was that “Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permits no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.”

As government and private grants began to be released in the following years, the measurable focus was on cutting student costs to attend college because textbook costs had risen 400% over the past two decades. Though the desire to cut costs is still huge and easily measured, I believe that today the focus of OER is much more than that.

One would think that OER use and purpose will have moved forward beyond the cost-cutting uses. However, academia is always slow to change and cost-cutting has still been the primary focus. I believe that is because it is easily measured and easy to enforce, as with the State of Washington initiatives around OER for community colleges.

However, I am a proponent of making OER work harder and smarter for all of us. Today, with emphasis on creating not only free resources but resources that reflect the diversity of college student’s backgrounds, cultures, and learning styles. Traditionally, commercial publishing has relied on authors who all come from a similar group of people—highly educated, late in their academic careers, and tenured faculty. This has meant until recently that primarily white men have been the only voice in most textbooks and their view of the world is often limited to their own experience.

I believe that if we focus on OER that reflects a broader experience and encourages more voices, we have a great opportunity to provide more diversity and inclusion within the curriculum through textbooks, exercises, images, and case studies. Furthermore, if we embrace student co-created content as an important part of OER development—through using an Open Pedagogy approach to teaching and learning—we can increase that diversity and inclusion even faster.

Creating, reusing, and remixing OER also puts updates directly within the hands of faculty and/or curriculum departments. When new things are introduced in a field or new research becomes more prominent, faculty no longer have to wait for two to five years for a new edition of a textbook from a publisher that may or may not include those new findings. Instead, they can go in and change the OER textbook or exercises or references in the course at any time.

I would like to see OER as the primary choice, and the acceptance of the tenets of Open Pedagogy in teaching practices that take advantage of the OER we have available worldwide.

ZS: I know a TON of work has been done at Clark to advance the presence and quality of OER. What are the accomplishments you’re most proud of?

ML: For myself, having only been at Clark for a year, I’m most proud of being able to introduce to faculty a means of evaluating what is working and not working in their courses and different ways to look at how to fix that by using a combination of OER and Open Pedagogical practices. Unlike K-12 teachers, College and University faculty are never required to take a single class in how to teach. Though there are many related workshops offered by the TLC, they are not required of faculty.

Consequently, most faculty cannot articulate what their teaching practice entails. They know what topics they need to teach, what the learning objectives are as defined in their syllabus (usually a syllabus copied year after year from prior faculty). They tend to teach in a fashion that they were taught in (quizzes that require regurgitation of facts, occasional discussions, and writing essays). However, they cannot articulate what really helps students learn and what else they could do to help students who struggle.

I don’t know If my attention to combining pedagogy and OER will stick after I’ve gone, but I hope so.

ZS: I imagine this work might sometimes feel like a moving target. How have your goals or vision changed since the start of this work?

ML: For me, it has never felt like a moving target. Perhaps that is because I’ve been involved in it for so long and came to it from a teaching and learning perspective instead of a “let’s make it less expensive” lens. Those who have been steeped in the OER cause have been exposed to the need for teaching and learning priorities in terms of pedagogical practices from the beginning.

For me the most frustrating aspect of implementing the work is twofold: 1) The lack of institutional buy-in as demonstrated by funding personnel to support faculty in their endeavors; and 2) The concept, from most faculty, that doing this work is not a part of their curriculum prep or requirement to stay up-to-date with changes in their field. Instead, most faculty see this as a need for additional financial compensation. Consequently, we are straddled with the model of having to pay stipends and that the majority of faculty who participate are adjuncts who have no built-in payment or expectation for curriculum renewal or development.

This is a systemic structural problem that has been a part of academia since the beginning of my involvement in the early 2000s. It is always easier not to change from the status quo because it is hard to bring people onboard.  Change takes time and effort and personnel to keep pushing it forward. Academic institutions, including Clark, have many hard choices to make as to where to spend money. Budgets are always tight unless you are an elite school with millions of dollars in donations from a combination of corporations and alumni.

ZS: I often think about how my beliefs in the value of OER don’t always align with what others will find valuable (for example—the idea that OER is about a lot more than textbook cost, even though that is extremely important, too!) What challenges have you found in getting people to believe in the value of OER?

ML: I hear you and have articulated much of that already above. I think it is important to separate belief and ascribed value. It is ascribed value that leads to implementation and continued advocacy.

I have found that when faculty are educated in OER and Pedagogical Practices that the majority do see that it works and can be more effective. In other words, “belief” in its efficacy is there. However, when it comes to the work one needs to do make that belief an implemented reality, there is a disconnect.

The ascribed value of OER and Pedagogical Practices is not high. Many faculty have other values that are more prominent such as their prep time, their family time, their research time, the time needed to achieve tenure. Though they believe implementing OER and Open Pedagogy has value and can be measured to be better, the question is always how much better? Is it worth giving up those other values when what they are doing has been working okay?

IMO, until institutional leadership has a high ascribed value to OER and specific pedagogical practices, and that value is reflected in faculty support and specific rewards for those who undertake it (e.g., part of tenure packets, part of hiring new faculty, part of required faculty development, part of compensation, part of recognition in a meaningful way, etc.).

Without institutional buy-in at that level, then the implementation is left to those few who have a strong value for making their teaching better, for consistent improvement, for listening to the needs of their students and putting that above all else. Those people are out there, but they are outliers in all institutions. Not that all other faculty are bad, it is again what their bandwidth is for change and what other competing values they have.

ZS: What wisdom would you want to pass on to other people who are looking to promote and integrate OER more systemically on their campuses?

ML:

·  Look for institutional, or at least departmental, buy-in from the start. Make sure it includes financial resources. That may look like a portion of the budget or the willingness to give faculty time (e.g., teach one less class that term) to invest in change.

·  Identify support resources who are not only willing, but passionate about doing this as part of their job.

·  Identify faculty leaders and/or good communicators who have a good reputation among their peers and are willing to work with them to create that high value for implementation not only for themselves but for their department.

My biggest wisdom is patience. This doesn’t happen overnight. Anytime institutional change is required, it is a multiple year (perhaps decades) undertaking.  Last year I developed a five-year plan for Clark. It was designed to get from initial implementation with a few faculty to beginning to actually implement the institutional structure atyear five to create continued development in the future. That structure is through having enough faculty who have participated in adopting, remixing, creating OER and using good pedagogical practices. Those faculty then become departmental mentors to new faculty and create an engine for continuous improvement.

Though my strategic five-year plan was set forth and adopted by the OER committee, in reality it is probably going to be accomplished in ten-years because Clark has already entered a three-year budget austerity period.

ZS: What’s next for OER at Clark?

For Fiscal year 2023-2024, we have received grant money to hire a PT OER Fellow who I will mentor this year with the hope of that person taking over for me. That same grant will also help pay for 10 hours per week for a librarian to be the kind of marketing/PR person at the campus and the one who can direct faculty and students to the support resources available to them.

I would like to see a full-time position for an OER Fellow in the library, probably better place within the TLC arm of the library. That involves a commitment from the college and a budget line for that position. The Dean and VP are in agreement that this is needed. However, so far among the budgetary considerations they have to deal with (less income from students, because there is less enrollment), this position is not in the cards this year and likely not for at least two more years.

We are in a place of patience. I will not be at Clark after this year, but I’m hopeful that continued grant funding for the PT OER Fellow will be available while Clark weathers this budget situation. That person will continue to try to move the 5-year plan forward and to establish more and more individual and institutional buy-in with people who do value this change and are willing to do a little extra to make it come to fruition. 

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.