Open educational resources: expanding equity or reflecting and furthering inequities?
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Open educational resources: expanding equity or reflecting and furthering inequities? George Veletsianos1 Accepted: 1 October 2020 © Association for Educational Communications and Technology 2020
Abstract In this paper I argue that open educational resources (OER), such as open textbooks, are an appropriate and worthwhile response to consider as colleges and universities shift to digital modes of teaching and learning. However, without scrutiny, such efforts may reflect or reinforce structural inequities. Thus, OER can be a mixed blessing, expanding inclusion and equity in some areas, but furthering inequities in others. Keywords Open educational resources · Equity · Inclusion · Open textbooks As part of the “shifting to digital” special issue, this paper is in response to Hilton (2016). I argue that open educational resources (OER), such as open textbooks, can expand equity and inclusion, but without scrutiny, they may reflect or reinforce, and thus expand, structural inequities. OER are defined as “teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing” (Hewlett 2017). Hilton (2016) synthesized the existing literature to examine outcomes associated with instances in which OER replaced commercial textbooks. He reported two major findings. First, students generally performed better when using OER compared to commercial textbooks. The use of OER was not associated with decreases in learning. Second, OER were generally perceived by faculty and students to be as good as, if not better than, traditional textbooks. While this research faces some limitations acknowledged by the author much research since then continues to affirm the author’s original findings (e.g., Clinton and Khan 2019; Hilton 2020).
* George Veletsianos [email protected] 1
Royal Roads University, 2005 Sooke Road, Victoria, BC V95B 5Y2, Canada
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G. Veletsianos
What is the value of OER for inclusion and equity? The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has forced educational institutions to shift to digital modes of teaching and learning. This new environment includes a mode of education that is unfamiliar to many; it also encompasses threats and uncertainties surrounding public health, intensifying socioeconomic and racial strife, and an escalating economic crisis. While the high cost of commercial textbooks was burdensome for higher education students prior to the pandemic (Jenkins et al. 2020), the impacts of such costs in the challenging environment that students face today are magnified. A survey that gathered data in April–May 2020 in the United States for instance, found that nearly 60% of around 38,000 student respondents faced food insecurity, housing insecurity, and homelessness (Goldrick-Rab et al. 2020). The high costs of commercial textbooks encompass significant educational burdens as well. When students do not have access to texts from the first day of the course—due to delayi
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