Open Educational Resources
and Open Textbooks
OSCP Munch/Lunch & Learn #13, July 2014
Lauren B. Collister and John Barnett
With additional content from Lauren Calloway
Open Educational Resources
What are they and why do they matter?
What is OER?
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"Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and
learning materials that are freely available online for
everyone to use, whether you are an instructor, student
or self-learner. Examples of OER include: full courses,
course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments,
quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical
materials, games, simulations, and many more resources
contained in digital media collections from around the
world." OER Commons
Why OER?

“The idea of free and open sharing in education is not new. In fact, sharing is
probably the most basic characteristic of education: Education is sharing
knowledge, insights, and information with others, upon which new
knowledge, skills, ideas, and understanding can be built.” Open Education
Consortium

Educational resources (e.g. textbooks) cost a lot & are constantly changing

Instructors like to modify, adapt, reuse, transform their resources

Digital creation & dissemination of these items is easy and fast

OER make learning opportunities available to underserved populations
A brief history

ERIC (pre-WWW)

William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
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Libraries & digital content
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2002: MIT – OpenCourseWare
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2007: Cape Town Open Education Declaration (http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/)

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Calls on educators to use open resources and in turn make their resources open,
and declares that Universities should make open education a priority
2014: SPARC makes OER a primary topic of its annual meeting
Types of OER

MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses)

Syllabus-sharing websites or archives

Repositories of course materials (e.g. exercises, exams, lesson plans)

Open Textbooks
OER at Pitt

Localized in departments

Blackboard

iTunesU

No University-wide initiative to collect, standardize, and share OER broadly
Open Textbooks
Helping instructors, students, and libraries
Open textbooks as a form of OER

Online

Free of charge

Free of access restrictions

Adaptable, reusable, remixable: Open textbooks often allow others to reuse,
adapt, remix, and otherwise alter the work for their own pedagogical
purposes
The benefits from open textbooks

For scholars and disciplines, they represent a way to take ownership of
textbook content (e.g., through peer review), to match textbook content
with lectures and classroom discussion, to keep content current, to provide
easy access to needed content, and to do so at very low cost

For administrators and students, they offer a way to reduce educational costs

For students accustomed to an increasingly online delivery mechanism, they
offer a quick way to get content for their classes

For libraries, they offer the opportunity to meet a strong need among their
clientele. For some libraries, they also represent a publishing opportunity.
What constitutes a textbook?



“A book used in the study of a subject as a) one containing a presentation of
the principles of a subject; b) a literary work relevant to the study of a
subject” (Merriam-Webster)
So essentially any book needed to learn a subject is a textbook
Traditionally we think of textbooks as the former definition, “one containing a
presentation of the subject,” i.e.,

A required text for a course

One that provides an introduction to a subject

A systematic and sequential approach to the subject

And examples, exercises, and other ways to measure knowledge
The cost of textbooks

Between 1987 and 2004, the average price of a college textbook increased
twice as fast as the consumer price index, an average of 6% per year 1

This increase (6%) was a higher percentage of increase than the cost of tuition
and fees at both public and private institutions experienced over three
decades 2

College textbook prices rose 82% between 2003 and 2013

The total textbook cost for a typical year of classes was close to $1,000 [2009
data] 4

Some 65% of students report not purchasing a textbook because of its high
price 5
3
Thus . . .

“The price of textbooks strongly affects the availability of a college education
because the ability to attend college is often dependent upon cost.” 6
Textbooks & the ULS:
Student and Staff Experiences 7

Students seeking textbooks: A growing segment of service desk traffic (desk, EZBorrow, ILL)

Pitt Pathfinders: Availability of textbooks via the ULS is used as a way to sell the
library to student and parents


Reality check: It is difficult for the library to fulfill these requests
Reserves: Some leeway to purchase textbooks for reserves

Reality check: These new purchases have hundreds of checkouts per term

E-ZBorrow: High volume of requests at start of each term; small pool to choose
from; e-textbooks don’t circulate

ILL: Increased undergraduate use, primarily for textbooks; subject areas and titles
are predictable

Reality check: Requests are often unfillable
Thus . . .

Students often experience 1, 2, and 3 strikes in requesting textbooks

This experience may leave students with a negative impression of library
services
What’s next?

Operational: Create a LibGuide or other information page on OER and open
textbook resources at Pitt and beyond

Operational: Develop a communications plan for discussing with faculty,
students, and administrators the use of library reserves, E-ZBorrow, and ILL to
textbook needs

Strategic: Better understand the use of and need for OER and open textbooks
at Pitt

Strategic: Through the Knowledge Commons, provide consultative and
technological services to foster the creation and sharing of OER and open
textbooks by Pitt teaching faculty
Sources
U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2005). College textbooks: Enhanced
offerings appear to drive recent price increases. Gao-05-806. Washington, DC:
Author. Quoted in Baker-Eveleth, L. J., Miller, J. R., & Tucker, L. (2011). Lowering
Business Education Cost with a Custom Professor-Written Online Text. Journal of
Education for Business 86, 248-252. doi:10.1080/08832323.2010.502911

1
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2

3
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4
College Board. (2009). Trends in college pricing 2009. Retrieved from
http://www.trends-collegeboard.com/college pricing/. Quoted in Baker-Eveleth
et al
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2014). Consumer Price Index Databases.
http://www.bls.gov/cpi/data.htm. Quoted in Open Education. (n.d.). SPARC.
http://www.sparc.arl.org/issues/oer
Christopher, L. C. (2009). Academic publishing: Digital alternatives to expensive
textbooks. Retrieved from
http://www.seyboldreport.com/bookpublishing/academic-publishing-digitalalternatives-expensive–textbooks; Rampell, C. (2008, May 2). Free textbooks: An
online company tries a controversial publishing model. Chronicle of Higher
Education, 54(34), A14-15. Quoted in Baker-Eveleth et al.
Sources, continued
U.S. PIRG Education Fund and the Student PIRGs. (2014). Fixing the Broken
Textbook Market. http://www.studentpirgs.org/reports/sp/fixing-brokentextbook-market – cited in Open Education. (n.d.). SPARC.
http://www.sparc.arl.org/issues/oer
 5
Joint Congressional Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance.
(Sept. 2006). An Economic Analysis of Textbook Pricing and Textbook Markets
5 (testimony of James V. Koch, President, Old Dominion University); quoted in
Cotton, R. (2010). Students Call for Influence in the Textbook Market. Journal
of Law & Education 39(1), 129-137.
 6
Calloway, Lauren. (2014). Open textbooks: Environmental scan for ULS FY16
Planning & Budget Committee. Retrieved from
http://bts.library.pitt.edu/ULSPlanning/FY16PBC/Environmental%20Scan/For
ms/AllItems.aspx
 7
Demonstration
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Merlot OER Repository: http://www.merlot.org

Open.Michigan: http://open.umich.edu/

University of Maryland University College LibGuide:
http://libguides.umuc.edu/oer

OpenStax College (Rice University): http://openstaxcollege.org/

Orange Grove Texts Plus (Florida Virtual Campus + University Press of Florida):
http://orangegrovetexts.org/

Open Textbook Library (University of Minnesota):
http://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/