Plaintext
CSUP OER Minigrant Awardees Basic Info Session
Jonathan A. Poritz
jonathan.poritz@gmail.com
www.poritz.net/jonathan
July 2020, Online
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
These slides are available at poritz.net/jonathan/share/CSUPMGinfoJul2020/ .
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 1 / 31
What Are Open Educational Resources [OER]?
HB18-1331, Higher Education Open Educational Resources, passed by
the Colorado General Assembly and signed by Governor Hickenlooper on
30 April 2018, defined OER here:
(6) ”OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES” MEANS HIGH-QUALITY TEACHING, LEARNING,
AND RESEARCH RESOURCES THAT RESIDE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR HAVE BEEN RE-
LEASED UNDER AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LICENSE THAT PERMITS FREE USE OR
REPURPOSING BY OTHERS AND MAY INCLUDE OTHER RESOURCES THAT ARE LEGALLY
AVAILABLE AND AVAILABLE TO STUDENTS FOR FREE OR VERY LOW COST. OPEN
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES MAY INCLUDE FULL COURSES, COURSE MATERIALS, MOD-
ULES, TEXTBOOKS, FACULTY-CREATED CONTENT, STREAMING VIDEOS, EXAMS, SOFT-
WARE, AND OTHER TOOLS, MATERIALS, OR TECHNIQUES USED TO SUPPORT ACCESS TO
KNOWLEDGE.
1
1
Closed based on the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s definition: “OER are 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 re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming
videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.”
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 2 / 31
First Answer: Free Textbooks
A basic place to start with this is
(6) ”OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES” MEANS HIGH-QUALITY TEACHING, LEARNING,
AND RESEARCH RESOURCES THAT RESIDE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR HAVE BEEN RE-
LEASED UNDER AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LICENSE THAT PERMITS FREE USE OR
REPURPOSING BY OTHERS AND MAY INCLUDE OTHER RESOURCES THAT ARE LEGALLY
AVAILABLE AND AVAILABLE TO STUDENTS FOR FREE OR VERY LOW COST. OPEN
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES MAY INCLUDE FULL COURSES, COURSE MATERIALS, MOD-
ULES, TEXTBOOKS, FACULTY-CREATED CONTENT, STREAMING VIDEOS, EXAMS, SOFT-
WARE, AND OTHER TOOLS, MATERIALS, OR TECHNIQUES USED TO SUPPORT ACCESS TO
KNOWLEDGE.
So the term “OER” includes free textbooks.
Students tend to like this a lot, and it changes their behavior in many ways.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 3 / 31
Second Answer: “Repurposing by Others”
But notice this also includes
(6) ”OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES” MEANS HIGH-QUALITY TEACHING, LEARNING,
AND RESEARCH RESOURCES THAT RESIDE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OR HAVE BEEN RE-
LEASED UNDER AN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LICENSE THAT PERMITS FREE USE OR RE-
PURPOSING BY OTHERS AND MAY INCLUDE OTHER RESOURCES THAT ARE LEGALLY
AVAILABLE AND AVAILABLE TO STUDENTS FOR FREE OR VERY LOW COST. OPEN
EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES MAY INCLUDE FULL COURSES, COURSE MATERIALS, MOD-
ULES, TEXTBOOKS, FACULTY-CREATED CONTENT, STREAMING VIDEOS, EXAMS, SOFT-
WARE, AND OTHER TOOLS, MATERIALS, OR TECHNIQUES USED TO SUPPORT ACCESS TO
KNOWLEDGE.
So “OER” also includes resources which can be adapted, mixed with other
OER, and then shared back to the global scholarly community.
Faculty tend to like this a lot, and it can change their behaviors in many
ways.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 4 / 31
“Open” vs “Free”
A better word than “open” in OER might therefore have been “free,” in
both of the two common senses of that word in English:
“free as in free beer” and also “free as in free speech”
This linguistic issue has been around for a while. You might be familiar
with “open-source software,” like Android, Linux, Firefox, MediaWiki
[the engine that runs Wikipedia], Apache [the most widely used web
server software in the world], etc. Such software was originally called “free
software,” and even though it is free [as in free beer] it has enormous
economic consequences and has made a lot of money for many businesses.
E.g., when I worked for IBM Research in the early 00s, my youthful radical
background in FLOSS2 was a business benefit, not problem.
2
FLOSS = “Free/Libre/Open-Source Software” is the best term.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 5 / 31
[Micro]Economic Issues for Students
The #RealCollege Survey found3 in 2019 that for students in higher
education in the United States
• 39% were food insecure in the 30 days before taking the survey,
• 46% were housing insecure in the last year, and
• 17% were homeless at some point in that year.
Now ask yourself: if you were a student in debt, [sometimes or often]
hungry, and concerned about keeping a roof over your head ... where
would your economic priorities be?
And for a faculty member who teaches a large class with 100 students,
around 17 of them have recently been homeless; if the class 25 students,
around four were homeless.
3
#RealCollege 2020: Five Years of Evidence on campus Basic Needs Insecurity, Baker-Smith, Coca, Goldrick-Rab, Looker,
Richardson, Wilson, 2020, on the web here.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 6 / 31
[Macro]Economic Issues for Students 1
The easiest single indicator of exploding prices for students is:
total student debt in the U.S. is around $1.64 trillion.4
Some examples in Colorado:
Institution Median Debt, 2015 Grads
CSU Pueblo $29,914
Front Range Community College $13,500
Colorado College $19,756
University of Denver $29,050
All private[non-profit]
$25,064
and public 4-years in CO
Aggregate Colorado Community
$11,730
College System
Sources: https://ticas.org/posd/state-state-data-2015# and https://www.communitycollegereview.com/
4
Source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g19/current/default.htm; a preliminary report out 12 July 2020 puts the
number at $1.74 trillion.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 7 / 31
[Macro]Economic Issues for Students 2
In the US, the root cause of part of student economic difficulties is the end
of “public” higher education: [data from State Higher Education Executive Officers Association]
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 8 / 31
“...like marshmallows.”
As I said in a piece, I wrote in Inside Higher Ed on 27 February 2019:
“Total student debt in the United States stands at approximately $1.5
trillion - yes, trillion, with a T. It increased by approximately $37 billion
in the third quarter of 2018: that’s a quarterly increase by about the
endowment of Harvard University or, annualized, by more than the GDP
of three-quarters of the nations on Earth.
Public institutions of higher education in a majority of U.S. states are
funded more often much more by tuition than by state support, calling
into question the adjective public in that traditional terminology.
... It’s not so much that as a society we are eating our seed corn with
this treatment of the next generation, it is more that we have set the
global climate on fire, skewered our children on pointy sticks and are
roasting them like marshmallows.”
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 9 / 31
Students Pay Many Different Costs...
Consumer price indices for tuition and school-related items,
not seasonally adjusted, January 2006-July 2016
January 2006 = 100
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/college-tuition-and-fees-increase-63-percent-since-january-2006.htm
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 10 / 31
...But the Winner5 Is: Textbook Cost
Increase in textbook costs since 1980
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Poritz
5 https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 11 / 31
Your Intuition for Textbook Costs is Wrong
One attempt to correct our intuition for these different rates of inflation:
Source: https://mathematikoi.net/
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 12 / 31
Consequences for Students
Studies6 have shown that, as a result of these economic realities, students
• make decisions about which courses to take based on the costs of the
textbooks;
• take fewer courses because of expensive textbooks;
• do not buy even required textbooks, because of cost, and therefore
learn less, do more poorly, and drop out more frequently; and
• take longer to complete degrees because of the obstacle of textbook
cost.
A particularly exciting recent study7 found that DFW rates went down
by one-third among minority and Pell-eligible students in gateway
courses which switched from commercial textbooks to OER.
6
See references in Report to the Joint Budget Committee and The Education Committees of the General Assembly – Open
Educational Resources in Colorado, Brown-Sica et al., 2017, on the web here.
7
The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Various Student Success Metrics, Colvard, Watson, and Park,
International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (2018), on the web here.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 13 / 31
Scholarly Production Wants to Be Free
Faculty are not used to thinking of the economic consequences of their
choices, nor of their work as being in a marketplace8 .
We are used to signing over our copyrights on research papers to the
journal publishers, who in turn make large profits on subscriptions which
they in no way pass on to the article authors.
Scholars do tend to keep the copyrights on their monographs and
textbooks, although usually tied up in restrictive contracts.
It is as rare as winning the lottery (or getting struck by lightning) that a
book will sell enough to make some serious money for the author.
Scholars mostly seek impact, which comes when others use a work in new
ways – clearly without first asking permission. We hope someone else will
take our ideas, with attribution!, and do something amazing.
In this sense, scholarly production wants to be free, as in speech.
8
other than “the marketplace of ideas”
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 14 / 31
Freedom Includes the Right to Seek a Profit, or Not
If a professor wants to assign an expensive textbook in a class (and has a
good reason to do so) or wants to publish a textbook commercially with
the hope of writing the runaway bestseller on economic history, then by
academic freedom and scholarly tradition, we should not stand in the way.
But usually, many faculty will be happy to contribute their textbooks,
problem banks, software, and other writings to a global intellectual
commons, a Creative Commons.
If there were a way to dedicate a creative work to this commons, rather
than having it automatically fall into the domain of all rights reserved
copyrights – as any work of original expression does as soon as it is fixed in
a tangible medium9 – many scholars would likely do so.
9
this is the trigger which causes a copyright to spring into existence: no registration or formalities is actually required.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 15 / 31
Creative Commons Licenses
The way to bend copyright law to the purposes of the scholarly life is to
release works with a Creative Commons Licenses:10
Educational resources release with a CC license – well, not those two
licenses with “ND” – are open to repurposing by others, in the words
of HB18-1331, and therefore are Open Educational Resources [OER].
OER can be customized, localized, adapted to a faculty member’s own
way of teaching, unlike [commercial] textbooks under traditional copyright.
Only OER truly respect an instructor’s academic freedom!
10
see https://creativecommons.org
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 16 / 31
The e-banking model of education
Paulo Freire criticized what he called the banking model of education,
where teachers are thought to deposit knowledge into students’ minds.
Jean Marc Cote publicdomainreview.org/2012/06/30/france-in-the-year-2000-1899-1910/ [Public domain], via Wikimedia
Commons, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:France in XXI Century. School.jpg
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 17 / 31
“Drill-and-kill classes”
Education which does not center on the autonomy and agency of student
and instructor, like drill-and-kill classes is only a tool to turn us all into
better – more docile – factory robots and consumers.
11 12
11
Publicity photo of Charlie Chaplin for the film Modern Times (1936); [Public domain in the United State (maybe not in
other jurisdictions!) since it was published between 1924 and 1977 without a copyright notice], via Wikimedia Commons,
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chaplin - Modern Times.jpg
12
Planking in the supermarket by TheeErin from www.flickr.com/photos/27073477@N00/4112368718, released under a
CC-BY-SA 2.0 license. Please hear Lost in the Supermarket by The Clash in your head while considering this image.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 18 / 31
bell hooks and Paulo Freire
“The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of pos-
sibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to
labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an
openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even
as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to
transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom13 .”
emphasis added, Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks, 1994, p.207
faculty autonomy pedagogical
But notice that =
and agency academic freedom
13
hooks likely was nodding here at Freire’s first book, Education as the Practice of Freedom.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 19 / 31
The 5Rs as pedagogical academic freedom codified
If you stop to write down in detail the specifics of pedagogical academic
freedom, it’s not hard to end up at David Wiley’s 5Rs14 , the rights
• Retain - to make, own, and control copies of the content
• Reuse - to use the content in a wide range of ways
• Revise - to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
• Remix - to combine the original or revised content with other open
content to create something new
• Redistribute - to share copies of the original content, your revisions,
or your remixes with others
14
For which, see his 5Rs of Open and The Access Compromise and the 5th R, both released under CC BY 4.0
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 20 / 31
Briefly, after covid-19
Students are now under far, far higher financial pressures. To the extent
that they are able to continue in school, they will have far less money
available to purchase expensive textbooks.
Additionally, many of the coping mechanisms we know they use – sharing
a book is very common, getting a book from the library when they are on
campus, etc. – are now impossible.
I hypothesize that a large but hard to measure part of the fall in academic
success which probably happened this spring semester is due to the fact
that all of those students could no longer come to campus to get access to
course textbooks in the above ways... so they were put under all of the
current stresses while trying to continue their courses (those who did try)
but without their course textbook(s)!
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 21 / 31
OER vs ZTC
I hope you’ve been persuaded by the economic arguments. You might then
ask if the only important thing about OER is their cost – typically, $0.
If cost were the primary driver in this movement, then we should probably
be talking about “Zero Textbook Cost [ZTC] courses,” rather than
“courses which use OER.” ZTC courses can use expensive (to the library)
materials which are free (to the students).
This can be a particularly attractive perspective for funding entities such
as legislatures, because they are often concentrated on the return on
investment for their dollars spent, which is measured by total amount
students save – i.e., it only cares about cost.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 22 / 31
Open Pedagogy, or OER-Enabled Pedagogy, or...
On the other hand, the pedagogical academic freedom which OER
provides has lead to various approaches to pedagogy which are called open
pedagogy, OER-enable pedagogy, critical digital pedagogy, etc. Some of
the brilliant folks working in this area include Maha Bali, Robin DeRosa,
Rajiv Jhangiani, Sean Michael Morris, and Jesse Stommel; see also The
Open Pedagogy Notebook. E.g., some of these authors talk about
disposable assignments that support an individual student’s learn-
assignments: ing but add no other value to the world and
renewable assignments that both support individual student learn-
assignments: ing and add value to the broader world. With renewable
assignments, learners are asked to create and openly li-
cense valuable artifacts that, in addition to supporting
their own learning, will be useful to other learners both
inside and outside the classroom.
[Although I confess I’m not sure I dislike “disposable assignments” as much as the name implies I should....]
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 23 / 31
Open Pedagogy’s 5Rs
Rajiv Jhangiani’s blog post 5Rs for Open Pedagogy15 gives a new set of
Rs expressing the ideals that underpin his view of open pedagogy:
• Respect for the agency of students and creators including whether
they wish to perform public scholarship or not
• Reciprocate by not just drawing on but also contributing back to the
commons, by sharing resources, practices, and ideas
• Risk is ever present with open pedagogy
• Reach involves having an impact that extends well beyond the
classroom, a course, or a semester’s objectives.
• Resist against forces that conspire to pit increasingly precarious
faculty against increasingly precarious students. Resist against the
commodification of learning. Resist against the neoliberal university.
15
which he released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 24 / 31
Takeaways
• Grim, soulless neoliberalism has turned higher education from a public
to a private good, resulting in a sky-rocketing cost to students.
• Students are in debt, and many are hungry and housing-insecure.
• Textbooks costs are rising much faster than essentially all other
consumer goods, because of a broken feedback loop in this market.
• As a result, students are learning less, doing less well, dropping out
more, and taking longer to finish degrees.
• Switching to OER has large, immediate gains for student success,
particular among underrepresented groups.
• Only OER give instructors real academic freedom.
• Only OER give teachers and learners a chance at autonomy and
agency.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 25 / 31
CSUP Specifics: Choose a License!
Conditions of our grant from the state of Colorado:
• The work you do must be licensed with one of the CC licenses that
does not include the “ND” clause – an “OER license.” [We can help
you choose.]
• Additionally, your work will need (eventually) to be posted in some
public-facing place on the web. [We can help with this; maybe you
want to consider Pressbooks?]
• You will be requested to do some data collection on the efficacy in
the classroom of your resource. [We can help with this.]
• You will have to do a accessibility check for the resource you adapt or
create. [We can help with this.]
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 26 / 31
CSUP Specifics: How We Can Help You
You will have me [Jonathan Poritz] nearly full-time and members of the
PueblOER Committee [Rhonda Gonzales, Lona Oerther, Margie Massey,
Adam Pocius, Denise Henry] and other members of the Library [incl.
Alexis Wolstein] part time, to support you.
We can help you by:
• Finding resources you can adapt/incorporate – CC-licensed, so this is
easy and fun!
• Finding or making smaller artifacts like images or diagrams.
• Help you with platforms such as PressBooks.
• Give you a sample student survey.
• Give you an ADA checklist (and help you fix issues it finds).
• Typesetting, format-shifting, copy editing, finding peer reviewers....
• Publicizing your excellent work.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 27 / 31
CSUP Specifics: Supplemental Contracts
We will pay you half of the amount we promised immediately and the
other half at the end of your timeline.
[This is not meant to be punitive or judgemental, it’s just apparently the
way things like this are done here.]
For this, I will need to talk through the following things in a 1:1 meeting:
• a timeline of your project
• some sort of description of a “work product” that can go into the
supplemental contract; a few sentences are all I will need.
For this, it wouldn’t be bad thing if you thought ahead of time what that
timeline and description could say. You could also think about, and we can
discuss in our 1:1 meeting,
• which of the types of assistence mentioned above would be useful to
you.
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 28 / 31
CSUP Specifics: Searching for Existing Resources
The downside to OER is that they are spread out across the Internet in
many places ... which can make it hard to find. Here are the first places I
tend to look, though:
• the OpenStax repository of excellent, complete, traditional-looking
OER: openstax.org/
• the Open Textbook Library, another excellent repository of OER:
open.umn.edu/opentextbooks
• OASIS, a search site for OER: oasis.geneseo.edu/
• OER Commons, anoter search site for OER (not quite as easy to
use): oercommons.org/
• many other... ask us for help!
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 29 / 31
CSUP Specifics: Pressbooks
Presentation to continue away from this slide deck.
But also see resources such as:
• The (Growing) Guide to Using Pressbooks: guide.pressbooks.com/
• Many, many videos on YouTube, just search for “introduction to
pressbooks”. Here’s a good one (as are all of the presentations by
Steel Wagstaff): Getting Started with PressbooksEDU Webinar
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 30 / 31
Questions, Comments, and Contact Info
Questions? Comments?
Email: jonathan.poritz@gmail.com ; Tweety-bird: @poritzj .
Get these slides at poritz.net/j/share/CSUPMGinfoJul2020.pdf and all
files for remixing16 at poritz.net/j/share/CSUPMGinfoJul2020/ .
If you don’t want to write down that full URL, just remember
poritz.net/jonathan/share
or poritz.net/j/share
or poritz.net/jonathan [then click Always SHARE]
or poritz.net/j [then click Always SHARE]
or scan −−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−−→
[then click Always SHARE]
16
subject to CC-BY-SA
Poritz https://poritz.net/jonathan Minigrant Basic Info Session online, July 2020 31 / 31