Lowering Barriers to Adopting, and Customizing, OER and Low-Cost Course Materials

Many institutional leaders are encouraging faculty to consider more affordable teaching materials. While some faculty lean into this idea and develop cohesive course materials, others find it challenging to implement in a quality way.

When faculty can’t dedicate the time needed to fully redesign their course to fit with affordable materials, they either continue to use more expensive materials or wind up with compromised and less effective materials.

How Expert TA is helping Institutions

• We are a formal partner with groups like OpenStax
• We have enhanced versions of many of their books
• Our Editable eBooks platform allows instructors to easily customize any of these books, as needed for their course
• Instructors can start with any OpenStax title, or any of our enhanced or modifed versions, and further customize as needed.
• We have a trusted and powerful online homework platform for anyone needing an assessment component
• We have a commitment to affordability
• We continue to improve and enhance the texts, and develop additional resources to support them.

Free materials are well-intended, but often present faculty with real challenges to adopt. In most cases there is no graceful way to edit these textbooks to fit a given instructional approach. As such, course materials can feel “cobbled” together and involve a lot of directions to students about which resources to look at during a given week.

We are helping by:

• Making it effortless to customize OER Textbooks.
  • Instructors can remove material they don’t intend to cover
  • Instructors can incorporate their own materials directly within the text.
  • Students have one resource to look at, that follows the scope and sequence of the course.
• Providing additional tools like online homework and secure exams that are designed to fit with these OER Textbooks
• Making a commitment to affordability
• Custom Digital Textbooks for $12 to $15
• A complete suite of tools for a course for $50 or under with a powerful online homework system as the foundation.
• Working with Faculty to make better and more broadly usable versions of these textbooks for the community

Over the past year more than 1000 instructors used our textbook-independent homework system for Astronomy and Physics courses alongside their book of choice. Instructors tell us that they would love to adopt a more affordable option, like OpenStax Astronomy, but many have shared their challenges associated with making such a switch. The following provides a sense of this.

The Situation

• There are more than a half-dozen distinct approaches within Introductory Astronomy texts. They differ in ways like,
• Scope and Topic Coverage: For example, Astronomy Essentials would cover less and make sense for a lighter course.
• Sequence: The order in which the material is covered can vary widely.
• Any instructor who has taught using one of these books would have established lecture notes, PowerPoint Slides, and other course materials that fit with the approach of that textbook.
• OpenStax has only one OER Introductory Astronomy book.

An Example of an Outcome we should all want to Avoid

• Imagine an instructor who adopts a free book, but doesn’t like the way topics are presented in a few chapters.
• that instructor supplements with his or her own materials and then provides instructions like, ,

“…for week number 3, we won’t look at the chapter from the book, but rather use the PDF posted on the class webpage..”.

• Some students miss that direction and look at the wrong material.

We are told by instructors that this happens more often than they would like.

The Challenge for Instructors
Instructional approaches do vary. For most courses, OpenStax only has one textbook to choose from. If an instructor’s current textbook and approach different from the approach of that book, a transition to that book can involve a significant amount of work. At a minimum the instructor would need to,

• Redesign all of their course materials (lecture notes, PowerPoints, etc.) to reference the new material and match its sequence.
• Heavily edit the OpenStax Astronomy book in order to match their existing materials

What we are Doing

• To reduce these barriers for faculty, we did the work for them.
• We evaluated the approach in the most broadly used Introductory Astronomy textbooks.
• We worked with the Astronomy instructors who were already using our online homework, and wanting to use one of these “modified” versions of the book.
• We made six new versions of the text, all of which were based off of the original OpenStax text.

A $15 textbook that is custom designed for a course is better than a free textbook that creates extra work and confusion for students.

Most students and parents don’t want $300 textbooks, but most also don’t think they have to be free. Consider that sales of Cliff’s Notes are still high (roughly $15). Students will readily pay a reasonable amount for resources that they think will help them do better in a course.

Realistically not all faculty tasked with teaching an introductory course, are able to dedicate their full time and attention and put in place free resources in a seamless and organized way. Many have research, graduate students, and other things that get in the way. If the expectation set is that materials MUST be free, often students will be presented with something cobbled together less clear and less quality than it could be.

Our goal is to bridge this gap.