CLAS Acts May 2021
Monthly newsletter of the tenure track faculty of the college
A Note from Dean Drake
To center and lift all voices, we have to make space. I’ll have an opportunity at our CLAS Spring Meeting on May 4 at 2 p.m. to talk with you, so instead of reading my usual note, I encourage you take a seven-minute listen to poet Kwame Alexander’s recent NPR interview and poem:
Best,
Jen
Open Educational Resources—Between the book and ramen
Matt Ruen, scholarly communications outreach coordinator for University Libraries, made a successful proposal to the President’s innovation fund (covered by GVNext) to facilitate uptake of Open Educational Resources (OER) to remove financial hurdles for our students.
In a nutshell, OER are texts and other materials freely available to use, share, and modify. Developed by academics specifically with this open sharing in mind, OER reduces costs for learners and allows educators to share and customize without violating copyright. As these materials clearly state, you have permission to customize and improve these materials to suit your needs. This sharing entirely skips commercial publishers.
Matt explains that while OER “won’t solve the cost of education, it does address one barrier. No waiting to see if the book is important. No decision between the book and ramen.”
From research conducted in Florida and nationally, Matt is all too aware that two-thirds of students sometimes skip the required course materials due to cost, despite knowing it will lead to a lower grade. The situation at GVSU is similar.
“With costs of course materials rising faster than inflation,” Matt observes, “it just isn’t sustainable.”
The cost to students of course materials is also a matter of access, which Matt points out is aligned with President Mantella’s priorities. But he notes that open access has been going on through university libraries since 2012. He is currently aware of 14 courses making use of OER.
Matt would like to hear about any other courses making use of shared materials and anyone interested in exploring what is out there already or how to get started in the production of materials.
“Faculty report required texts, but about 3,000 sections don’t have one—it’s hard to know what percentage of those are labs or have different sorts of materials, but I would love to know direct from faculty what they are doing. “
The pandemic highlights the challenges in the area of course materials as it does in so many issues of equity. “The pandemic and the sudden switch to online emphasized some of the challenges in the status quo of providing learning materials to students. We have the tech to share more widely with fewer barriers, but ‘digital only’ has its complications. You can’t borrow your friend’s used textbook or get to course reserve hard copy. Digital texts being rented are lost at the end of the semester. Publishers even make it hard for libraries to get copies of textbooks.”
Accelerating OER aims to help faculty wanting to make a start. Early adopters have paved the way, and the initiative will make it easier—incentives, support, workshops, stipends, digital capacity of the library. Workshops will run this summer on OER adoption and ancillary materials to support OER. Teams of faculty interested in adopting for multi-section courses can benefit from these “sprints”.
Some of the early adopters are in our college.
Matt Boelkins (MTH) explains that, “My professional society wrote an article about "The House that Calculus Built", the $21M mansion built by the author of a prominent calculus textbook that in the early 2000s was selling for nearly $200 a copy. I decided that calculus was the intellectual property of humankind and thought that a free version should be available.”
Matt has written or co-written three texts: Active Prelude to Calculus, Active Calculus (Single Variable), and Active Calculus (Multivariable) (https://activecalculus.org/). His 2012 and 2018 sabbaticals provided the space to work on some of these projects. Matt is now turning his attention to the materials surrounding that work. “A major long-term project involves developing an ‘ecosystem’ around these texts that supports users and makes adoption easier for faculty.”
David Austin (MTH) is another early adopter who describes his motivation as, “Two things: accessibility and compatibility. Students pay a lot of money for our courses, and the cost of a textbook can be a burden, if not prohibitive. For instance, when students can't afford the textbook, they're already behind their peers that can. Having a freely available text can make a huge difference for these students.”
He also likes the degree of customization, “published textbooks are written for a wide market, which means they have to meet a lot of demands. Writing my own textbook meant that I could tailor the text to what my students needed. For me, this meant redesigning and updating the linear algebra curriculum to be more meaningful, and this is already having some impact beyond Grand Valley, especially when combined with some of the other linear algebra changes we made in our department. I could also write the book in a way that supports best pedagogical practices, such as active learning, which most published texts don't do.”
David has made OER an important part of his work. “I have written a linear algebra textbook that is being used in our new linear algebra courses, MTH 204 and 205. I have also served for 10 years on the editorial board for the American Institute of Mathematics' Open Textbook Initiative. We review open access textbooks and ‘approve’ books that we think should be known to a wide audience. We hope to act as a clearinghouse for people curious about adopting an OER text.”
Steven Schlicker (MTH) agrees. “I began writing my own notes and activities for classes, then worked on filling in details, until I eventually had the guts of textbooks for several courses. Some of my colleagues had been doing the same, so I collaborated with several to build some texts. Since we were all fully promoted, we didn't feel that we needed to publish texts through the traditional route to help in future personnel actions. Also, I found that I liked writing this kind of material. Two main reasons for making our material free and open source are 1) to help ease the financial burden our students carry and 2) to allow colleagues to adapt our materials to better fit their own purposes.”
Steven supplies some caveats: “Before beginning to develop OER, the first thing I would suggest is to check with colleagues, department, and university to ensure that this type of work is valued in personnel decisions. If not, don't do it. On this point I think it is incredibly important that if we want to encourage creation of OER, this kind of work must be positively recognized by colleagues, departments, and the university in tenure and promotion decisions. I think it is in my department, but my years on the FPPC lead me to believe that this is not the case university wide.”
And he acknowledges the work involved, “developing OER is very time-consuming. The bulk of my professional work these days is devoted to OER. For example, writing a mathematics text is more than just explaining ideas. In order for others to be motivated to use your materials it is necessary to have good examples, excellent collections of exercises (this takes a LOT of time), solutions manuals, etc. I didn't think about that part of the work when I started.”
Matt’s advice to developers is, “make your work public as early as possible. Take advantage of the internet to have an online presence, and be responsive to people who inquire about your work. Use the feedback you get to make your work better. Don't wait for your work to be perfect: it never will be.” For those exploring the use of these materials for their own courses, he suggests, “there are lots of great resources that already exist. See, for instance, GVSU's ScholarWorks, the PreTeXt Gallery, and the Minnesota Open Textbook Library.”
David wants those considering the use of OER to know that, “There's a lot out there, and it should be possible to find an OER option for almost any of your course needs. There's also a wide range of quality though so seek out some people who are knowledgeable about the options. For instance, the AIM Textbook Initiative is a good resource. The #OER hashtag on Twitter is another way to connect with resources and people using and creating them.”
“I'd think about the quality of OER resources. Sometimes people think you have to give something up if it's free. There are several projects that are as good, if not better, than professionally published texts. Matt Boelkins' Active Calculus (activecalculus.org) is a good example. It's most likely the most successful OER math text and still getting better. There are other OER texts that are also incredible.”
“For those wanting to develop an OER option, I would say to jump in. But first, connect with some others who have already developed some OER resources for advice. Choose a format that will be easy to produce something that looks professional, is easy to distribute, and easy to maintain. Be professional, not cutesy. After looking at hundreds of OER texts, the place you see the most value in professionally published materials is in editing. Ask someone (or ones) to read carefully and be ruthless in giving you editorial advice.“
Whether you are all in or just want to take a small step, contacting Matt Ruen will be a great place to start. He explains that for “a faculty member looking for help, even on a lower volume course, the library might be able to help assemble a course pack that would be free to the students.”
OER Links
https://www.gvsu.edu/elearn/open-educational-resources-oer-62.htm
https://www.gvsu.edu/ftlc/open-education-resources-205.htm
https://www.gvsu.edu/library/sc/
https://www.gvsu.edu/library/sc/acceleratingoer
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