Jessie Key - Chemistry
1) What drove you to make the decision to switch to OERs?
My push towards creating and using open educational resources (OER) has really been driven by social justice and accessibility reasons. VIU has a mandate as a special purpose, teaching university to provide open-access and laddered educational pathways to service the needs of the Vancouver Island Region. OER can help to remove or lessen the financial barriers present in post secondary education - better levelling the playing field for all learners. The use of OER can greatly impact the lives of many students, particularly the most vulnerable socio-economically.
2) What was the biggest hurdle you overcame?
There are a several hurdles when making the switch to open educational resources, but all essentially require time and effort. These include things like finding and checking the quality of existing OERs, adapting and integrating that material into your courses, creating content from scratch and even convincing colleagues in your department to switch to using OER in shared or co-taught courses. Finding the time and energy can be quite challenging when traditional course materials are already sitting there ready to use and you are already teaching a full course load and serving on other university committees.
3) Where did you find the most support?
The wonderful folks at BCcampus have been incredibly helpful, knowledgeable, and supportive, as well as my colleagues in the Department of Chemistry.
4) What would you say to other faculty about adopting open educational resources for their classes?
OER resources are becoming more and more available and are improving in quality. Although it may require some time investment, I believe faculty should try to investigate if these resources could be used in their courses. There are many reasons which have been put forward to support the use of OER, but I will briefly mention two:
OER helps to remove or lessen financial barriers to education, making your course and its content more accessible
Unlike traditional textbooks, most OER can be edited/modified/customized by instructors to suit the needs of your course learning outcomes
Both of these points may lead to better student performance, which is really what all instructors want!
In the Department of Chemistry all of our first year course offerings (CHEM 140, 141, 142, 150) are now using an adapted version of the OpenStax Chemistry textbook which is available to students free as a .pdf document or can be optionally purchased from the bookstore for the cost of printing plus stocking fee.
My recently developed CHEM 432 course does not use a textbook, course materials are zero cost to students as it uses course notes, practice problem sets, and selected readings from scientific journal articles (articles available from our library at no cost to students).