Pressbooks Reflects on a Growing Movement and How Librarians Can Move OER Forward By Leigh Kinch-Pedrosa (Pressbooks) <leigh@pressbooks.com> and Travis Wall (Pressbooks) <travis@pressbooks.com>
T
he open education movement has been around for over two decades, with much of its early efforts emerging out of the work of the Hewlett Foundation, David Wiley, and other innovators. In 2014, creators of open educational resources (OER) — like Lumen Learning, run by David Wiley, and BCcampus, an organization that supports post-secondary learners and institutions in British Columbia, Canada — started using Pressbooks to create and optionally host their content. These people and organizations saw the absurd rate at which the price of textbooks was growing, the impacts those prices had on the quality of students’ lives, and the challenges these costs present faculty in their choice of material. They found an alternative: free and open textbooks hosted natively on the web. Not only did these early adopters concern themselves with the cost of textbooks, but they also made transparency of the publishing process a key element of their best practices, thus ensuring the quality of OER could be assessed by librarians and faculty who might adopt and adapt those materials. Eight years after those early adopters began their OER creation projects, Pressbooks now hosts OER for over 100 institutions across North America.
when creating collections that not only take the content into account but that are attentive to the institution’s budget. The open movement has emerged as a way of addressing this ongoing challenge by tackling costs through pragmatic grassroots efforts, such as workshops, university pilot projects, collectively developed textbooks, and other collaborative endeavors to share open resources in and out of educational institutions. In recent years, these grassroots efforts have become increasingly common and accepted approaches in higher education, and OER has consequently found a place as an integral part of institutional strategies.
This article — positioned from the standpoint of an outside organization supporting the work behind OER — will briefly describe OER as a solution to problems of cost and accessibility faced by students, faculty, and librarians; highlight areas for improvement in OER creation with the goal of improving its viability; and encourage librarians to integrate OER into their workflows. The goal of this overview is not to encourage educators and librarians to renounce traditional publishing models or abandon existing methods for creating collections. Instead, we propose that, by including OER in the development of syllabi and collections — whether that is by adapting established content or creating new OER — faculty and librarians can improve access to affordable, approachable, and relevant educational materials.
With this history in mind, advocates for open education like Pressbooks ask “why not adopt, adapt, or create your own content?” As the price of learning resources and the cost of growing and maintaining collections remains high, educators and librarians can achieve a lot by taking an open approach. The right open tool can equip libraries to address crucial accessibility issues from the high cost of textbooks to the paywalls impeding students and researchers from accessing the materials they need to succeed academically. As an established partner for library publishers working to advance open “Why not principles, Pressbooks offers free adopt, adapt, or and low-cost eBook creation and create your own content hosting solutions that can help librarians develop and circulate content?” valuable resources to the students and faculty they serve. When Hugh McGuire first launched Pressbooks’ core open-source product, the Authoring & Editing Platform, the use case he envisioned was not in the education space. He imagined small presses using the platform to produce books in multiple formats. But, when the need became clear, he pivoted to the education space, hiring Steel Wagstaff to help shape the product for the needs of open education practitioners. Wagstaff, who holds a Masters of Library Information Studies, was an early adopter of Pressbooks in the higher education space, using the software for his open education work as the instructional technology consultant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Informed by the work of Wagstaff and his peers at other institutions of higher education as well as McGuire’s knowledge of open source software and community building, Pressbooks integrated open practices — like the use of open licenses, the ability to easily clone and adapt material, and the high importance of accessible design — into the design of the software, providing a low-cost solution to the high cost of educational material.
Those who work in academic libraries — as well as the faculty and students they serve — are keenly aware of the problem of cost in higher education. Textbooks, online exercises, and Learning Management Systems (LMS) can be prohibitively expensive, especially when many students already struggle to pay tuition. When building syllabi, faculty have to strike a balance between providing a robust selection of learning materials and the cost of said materials. Equally, librarians must make careful decisions
There are a few definitions of OER that circulate in open education and open access circles. Foremost among them is that of David Wiley, Chief Academic Officer at Lumen Learning, which uses the “5Rs” to define the ways practitioners engage with open content: the right to retain, revise, remix, reuse, and redistribute content that is released under an open license or is public domain.1 Another commonly cited definition comes from UNESCO and contextualizes OER within the different kinds
From our vantage point as an outside vendor that has grown up alongside a nascent OER movement, we’ve watched the work of multiple OER hubs — higher education institutions and their libraries like University of California-Berkeley, Michigan State University, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Ryerson University, and many more — as they grow, iterate, and collaborate. Librarians have been the driving force behind the open education movement since the very beginning, having managed to start, fund, and manage OER publishing programs all over the world. They have worked tirelessly to create, distribute, and advocate for OER. But there’s still so much to do.
18 Against the Grain / April 2022
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