OER Fellowship 2024

Outrage! Outrage was my initial motivation to become involved with OER. I was a young adjuunct at SFSU. Men with fat rolls of cash were regularly entering my office to buy textbooks from me. In cash. No receipt. This smelled fishy and made me uncomfortable. Doing a little research and asking around, I discovered this was commonplace. Further, I discovered it was effectively trapping our students with corporate texts, new and used. 

The buyers were a feedback loop to the corporate masters. Ensuring that faculty were ordering exam and review copies to sell for cash, thus increasing their motivation to change texts often and require new editions. I found that this was playing out on a national scale. I found it to be crooked as a dog's back leg and predatory...with our students as the prey items and the faculty doing the spotting for the predators. 

Those observations occurred in the 90's. I have been an advocate for OER ever since.

I would like to address the shift of chemistry labs through the years  - - - - - - back in the day, we used to do labs with aniquated glassware and ancient materials, collecting data BY HAND . . . . then, along came technology and we could collect data real-time with computers . . . . then we collected data remotely with handheld devices . . . . then we started being able to complete lab activiites entirely virtual, digitally, without even touching the glassware or chemicals. 

What I would like to do with this story is show the benefits of using technology to explore chemical phenomena and what we can offer through OER to allow students the same access to these experiences without cost.

Just my ideas of what I want to do for a story . . . .

I may need to come up with a new story of impact, but I have done this exercise for our conference last year.  

I grew up on a farm in Iowa where we ate mostly government subsidized foods, whatever we could grow or raise and were by anyone's definition, poor.  My dad made about $4000 some of the years when I was young and we had a family of seven.  Most of our clothes were made or second hand from a relative, and there wasn't much extra money for stuff.

When I got to college, my parents could not help financially at all as they still had my two little sisters at home; going to college on a full tuition scholarship for basketball was not only a gift but a neccessity.  I did not want to leave college with debt, so I lived off my workstudy checks; unfortunately those also had to cover books.  As so many college students decide, I went with food and gas over books most semester; I used the resources at the library and would borrow the books from other students.  I will admit to photocopying sections of math homework when required.

Now that I get to have some agency over what my students need for classes, it is so important that I don't put them in a situation like I was placed in.  I built my first OER course for our highest enrolled course, MAT 141/142 in 2018 and since then have built many more.  My students save on average $18,700 per semester on books in my sections (in the spring less as the sections aren't full) from when I started at Yavapai and the standard was Pearson products.

The build of my first OER course also gave me the gift of collaboration and how beneficial that could be to the final product students.  Working with other people in the college reminded me of my time at the high school and all the sharing we did with the resources we created.  

Rent: $450/month

Tuition: $1300/semester

Food card: $2,000/semester

Textbooks: ???/semester

I can't, I just can't. I'm trying to get ahead in life, but textbooks are just one more cost on top of everything else I have to pay for. Why am I going to college when I can literally just Google all of this and learn the same information? 

Wait... you mean there's a class I can take where the textbook is free? THANK YOU!!!! That is one less stress I have on me. Wait this professor EVERY CLASS IS FREE TEXTBOOKS?!?! Ok, looks like I'm changing my major! Why can't the other professors get on board with this?! - Every college student in the U.S. (probably)

Love this - but I think the rent is a little low:)  Some of our students are looking at $1000 in rent:(

As a prior elementary school teacher accustomed to sharing resources with my colleagues, whether it be classroom materials, lesson plans, curriculum, resources or thematic units, I was really drawn to the idea that this can also be done in higher education. I'm one of only a few early childhood instructors on my campus, so it's easy to feel isolated in my field. I knew that my community college peers were doing wonderful work, not just in Arizona, but nation wide. Prior to learning about and adopting OER materials, I didn't have access to the texts, lesson plans, or other materials they used. Now I can see what others are doing and learn from them as I adopt, adapt, and create my own OER materials. I feel not only more informed and have access to updated material, but also part of an OER community working together to provide the best possible educational experience possible for preservice early educators. The use of OER materials has helped me not only become a better teacher, but also mor connected to other early childhood educators nationwide.

My story is from the perspective of a doubtful faculty member, who is allured by the benefits of OER to both themself and their students, but has hesitations due to a lack of time, knowledge of resources, and bad information. As a result, they resort to using the textbooks that they are familiar with, even if not in love with them.

...Until one day, they see one of their peers starting to do something amazing, converting one at a time every course that they teach to OER. Their students are learning and performing not just fine, but better than before! The instructor shares how they also have been free to organize their material much more easily. The students in their courses are less financially burdened, and seem to be more involved outside of the classroom. When the doubting faculty sees this, they decide to give it a closer look, and maybe see if OER could be a part of their story too.

That is the goal in story form.

When I see our biology faculties' works about OER, I thought it might be a good way for chemistry courses as well. In my first year as chemistry instructor in NPC, I was looking for appropriate material to adopt and adapt (because I was not comfortable to do this from scratch). The first semester I use OER fully was not that easy. Students complained about the missing part of the online textbook. I kept making my OER materials better. Now I received way less complaint and students appreciate the free textbook. I will definitely keep working on my other two courses. And convince more faculties in my instittue to use OER.