With Open Educational Resources, higher education is not just more accessible—it has the potential to be more adaptable, inclusive, and engaging than ever before.
According to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, an Open Educational Resource (OER) is a teaching, learning, or research resource that is in the public domain or has been released under an intellectual property license that permits the free use, adaptation, and redistribution of the resource by any person.
OER’s could be the solution to the growing costs of higher education in the country. College tuition and fees have risen over 80% in the past 12 years, with the average student paying between $339 and $600 for books and supplies in one academic year.
“The cost of higher education in general is outpacing the cost of everything,” said Anthony Zoccolillo, Associate Professor of Psychology at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. “Textbooks is just one part of that, and it’s the one part that as faculty, we have some say over.”
In 2020, Zoccolillo was awarded the Open Educational Resources Grant which is a state-funded program to help Texas public institutions of higher education adopt, modify, redesign, or develop courses using only OER. He was awarded a grant of $5,000 that would allow him to implement OER into his classes. With the grant in hand Zoccolillo went on to develop a curriculum that would best serve his teaching pedagogy, while also saving his students some money, “even if it’s just in one class for just one semester.”
This is the first semester that none of his students are paying anything for textbooks in any of his classes.
“We had almost 2,500 students take general psychology, at what would normally cost $100 a piece; [with OER] we ended up saving over $200,000,” Zoccolillo said. “Everyone had access to the book, and nobody came to the class and tried to do well in it without buying the book, which is often times a recipe for failure.”
The road to implementation of OER was not an easy one. Despite the great benefits of lower costs for students, it presents a higher cost for instructors: time. “To go from being able to adopt a book and having it all packaged and ready to go, to adopting OER is a huge learning curve,” he explained.
Zoccolillo mentioned that the money received from the grant typically goes toward buying out the professor’s time. Most textbooks often come prepackaged with PowerPoint slides, quizzes, tests, and other teaching aids for the classroom and online courses. By choosing an OER, often a professor would have to create their own supplemental materials.
“Most of these OER textbooks aren’t done by one person anyway, they’re cobbled together sources from experts” he said. “The one we use, every chapter is written by a subject area expert. Which is sometimes great but can also be problematic. You don’t have the same voice coming through – some chapters are written at a higher level while some are more basic”
Despite the setbacks, Zocollio affirmed OERs benefits.
“I’m convinced OER is the way to go. While there are faculty that have shifted to different OER or to supplement it with paid materials; at the end of the day, nobody has gone back to fully paid textbooks.”