Michael: This is
Sherita: Write.
Chris: Think.
Genevieve: Teach.
Michael: A podcast brought to you by the Writing Across the Curriculum, a program in the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing at The Ohio State University.
Michael: Welcome to Write. Think. Teach. I’m Michael Blancato. As university costs have gone up, teachers, administrators, and librarians have increasingly looked to open educational resources, also known as OERs, to help students save money. For example, instructors may ask students to access webtexts instead of purchasing pricey textbooks. But affordability isn’t the only advantage of open educational resources. In this episode of Write. Think. Teach., Ohio State librarians Amanda Folk and Hilary Bussell return to discuss programming and projects related to open educational resources, that is, freely accessible information, media, or other assets that can be used for teaching, learning, or research purposes. We will hear about the pedagogical and research benefits associated with open educational resources in a bit. But first, Amanda explains how the seemingly open information available through university libraries is, in fact, quite expensive.
Amanda: We, not the two of us, but University Library pays the bill for access to so much of this information. And so a lot of folks access this seamlessly and may not have any idea that they are accessing this information through the libraries and they may think its openly available, when in fact it’s costing millions and millions of dollars. And we know that our faculty are the ones who are doing the research, they are the ones who are preparing these manuscripts for publication – whether that’s in a journal or in a monograph – and then they are often serving as peer reviewers for these journals or perhaps an edited monograph series for free and then we are being charged to access the information that they’ve either created or have reviewed.
Michael: As Amanda points out, information has value - for university scholars doing research as well as students completing course assignments. And because information has value, it oftentimes comes with costs. Hilary explains why it is important to let students know about the costs associated with library resources.
Hilary: I try to bring that up to students as often as I can, the fact that this information that they are getting through databases is something that is usually created by faculty like the ones that they are taking classes from, but the fact that most of it does cost thousands and thousands of dollars – a lot of times they are not aware of that. Why would they be? I probably wasn’t either until I was a librarian. But understanding that information has a price tag on it, information has value in a monetary sense, I think is a really important component to understanding the information landscape in general.
Michael: To cut down on the cost of information and make education more affordable for students, librarians at Ohio State have developed and supported open educational resources. Amanda has worked with the University Library’s Teaching and Learning Committee and in collaboration with the Affordable Learning Exchange also known as ALX, to call attention to open educational resources and affordable learning materials.
Amanda: Through the University Library’s Teaching and Learning Committee, we decided to take a theme of “The Year of Open and Affordable” for our programming. Historically, this programming would’ve been more focused towards our colleagues inside the libraries, but we decided to go a little bit more broad since it is such a priority on this campus. And so we’ve done a couple of things. Part of this is getting people to think more about OERs and about other kinds of affordable learning materials in their courses. So just promoting that you can replace your traditional textbook with more affordable materials and you do have support for that. We’re trying to promote that a little bit more. So we’ve done some programming with ALX around that. What we found through the ALX study is that people are interested in affordability, but this really does necessitate a course redesign when you’re doing this kind of work.
Michael: You may be wondering how a turn towards openness in our classrooms and the use of open educational resources can change the way instructors teach. Amanda offers some insight into this topic.
Amanda: If we’re talking about specifically the pedagogy of using OERs or bringing the theory of open into your classroom, one of the popular ways of thinking about that right now is “killing the disposable assignment.” A lot of times, not always, but a lot of times when we’re designing research projects for our classes, they may just be artifacts of academic culture. Like faculty write journal articles and that’s what we contribute to scholarship. And so we have students doing mini research articles in our courses. And folks label that often as being “disposable” because it doesn’t necessarily have a lot of meaning or value to the student and it doesn’t necessarily have a lot of meaning or value to the professor or to the larger community. They turn it in, they get their grade, everybody throws it away. It doesn’t have a lasting impact. But with OER-enabled pedagogy, we think about what’s meaningful to the students, but then also what’s meaningful to the broader community. So how do we help students to apply what they’re learning in the classroom, including information literacy, and make that more openly accessible or usable outside of the classroom. So you think about projects that may…so digital literacy narratives, which I’ve heard you speak about, Mike. Have your students go out into the community and do these narratives with folks to learn more about their experiences and build a research project around that because that has lasting impact, not only for the student and their learning, but for this broader community.
Michael: In my own courses, I often ask students to analyze information found on the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, a public archive of personal narratives about literacy from people all over the world. In a sense, the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives functions as an open educational resource, as students can freely browse and use the information found on the archive. The openness of the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives presents new teaching and learning opportunities in my courses. Instead of relying primarily on academic sources as the primary drivers of intellectual thought, the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives foregrounds communal knowledge making, as the stories posted to the site come from folks with different backgrounds, interests, and expertise. Because of the exciting teaching and learning possibilities that open educational resources present, it is worth discussing with our students how and why they might want to make their data open and available. Moreover, as Hilary highlights, making data open has implications for the replication of studies.
Hilary: We really want to emphasize to students as they become researchers that it’s important to think about making your data open. I did a workshop actually at the library with the data management services librarian on reproducibility. It was an internal workshop, it was more for librarians, but it’s something that a lot of disciplines are thinking about now in the social and natural sciences – is research reproducible? A lot of the issues with that is scholars don’t necessarily make their data available, so it’s harder to replicate studies in that case. That’s something else librarians are starting to talk more about.
Michael: By asking students to think about the value of information and open educational resources, instructors can encourage students to consider and perhaps even participate in the collection, production, and dissemination of information. And by emphasizing the value of information and the exploring the variety of forms information takes, instructors can help students see how their work fits into the information landscape.
That wraps up this Write. Think. Teach. series on programs, projects, and services offered by Ohio State librarians. To learn more about how a librarian can help you in your class, be sure to reach out to the subject librarian in your discipline. We’ll include a link in the transcript of this episode with information about all the subject librarians at Ohio State. I want to thank Amanda Folk and Hilary Bussell for taking time to share their ideas and experiences. And thank you for listening.