Why Open Education?

When it comes to the “why” for open education, the answer always comes back to students. The commonly-cited reason for open education is around the cost barriers to accessing quality education. This is important, but there are also myriad reasons beyond financial savings that make open education worth advocating for.

The Case for Open Education

Textbook costs should not be a barrier to education.

The price of textbooks has skyrocketed more than three times the rate of inflation for decades. College students face steep price tags that can top $200 per book, and K-12 schools use books many years out of date because they are too expensive to replace. Using OER solves this problem because the material is free online, affordable in print, and saved forever. Resources that would otherwise go to purchasing textbooks can be redirected toward technology, improving instruction, or reducing debt.

Students learn more when they have access to quality materials.

The rapidly rising cost of textbooks in higher education has left many students without access to the materials they need to succeed. Numerous studies have documented that students who use OER do as well or better than those using traditional materials. OER also creates important opportunities to meet diverse learners' needs, including improving cultural relevance and making modifications to meet the needs of students of all abilities.

In total, 7,779 students have utilized OER materials across the ten studies that attempted to measure results pertaining to student efficacy … the use of OER was sometimes correlated with higher test scores, lower failure, or withdrawal rates. None of the nine studies that measured efficacy had results in which students who utilized OER performed worse than their peers who used traditional textbooks. (Robinson, Fischer, Wiley, & Hilton, 2014).

Technology holds the boundless potential to improve teaching and learning.

Open Education ensures that teachers, learners, and institutions can fully explore this potential. Imagine an American History textbook with the latest news from the run-up to the 2020 election or a math tutorial that incorporates local landmarks into word problems. Imagine a lecture attended by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide or a peer-to-peer exchange between American students learning Mandarin with Chinese students learning English. All of this and more is possible when the pathways for technology in education are fully open.

Better education means a better future.

Education is the key to advancing society’s greatest goals, from building a strong economy to leading healthy lives. By increasing access to education and creating a platform for more effective teaching and learning, Open Education benefits us all.

Open education allows for continuous quality improvement.

When using traditional educational materials, educators can identify problems and alert the author or publisher to them, but they must then wait for the next edition before seeing a correction. With OER, any shortcomings in the materials can be corrected immediately because open resources permit educators to make changes. The adaptability of OER offers the ability to provide targeted, localized education experiences to students from different locations, cultures, and backgrounds. (Wiley, 2014).

Open education gives educators and learners control over the content.

Using OER can enable educators to become more involved and invested in teaching and learning practice.

"Most open licenses permit instructors to create customized versions of the textbook for use in their own classroom. For example, an instructor could remove unwanted chapters, change notations, or insert their own sections and examples. Instructors can distribute their customized versions online or have them printed for students by the bookstore or a local copy shop.” (Fasimpaur, 2015)

Many open textbooks also come with ancillary resources like test banks and quizzes. Open licensing flexibility allows educators to create supplementary materials for open textbooks that can link back to the texts themselves, something which would be considerably more difficult with the proprietary nature of traditional textbooks. An example of this process in action is the OpenStax Hub available through OER Commons. Educators can create and share educational resources designed to supplement specific textbooks available from OpenStax.

Open education supports true academic freedom.

The ability to adapt, update, and remix OER enables a new way of practicing academic freedom for all disciplines' faculty and instructional staff. Under a traditional model, teachers are encouraged to “follow the textbook” and therefore don’t have a lot of room to set their own pace or collate their courses' content from various sources (Fasimpaur, 2015). Open licenses put the control of education back in the hands of faculty, researchers, instructional designers, students. Open licensing allows for a community to grow: faculty can engage a broader spectrum of their peers in the creation, review, and revision process.

Open pedagogy enables better pedagogy.

While it is unnecessary to use OER any differently from traditional textbooks, OER provides a significant opportunity for educators to transform their practice. Because learners and educators have more control over the materials they’re using. Because the materials are freely available using open licenses, they offer students an opportunity to produce content that can be openly shared, used, and remixed by a wider audience.

"Open pedagogy means providing real-life, relevant, and transparent learning opportunities that let students become much more engaged with the material, thereby improving learning outcomes. Because students know their work will be used both by their peers and potentially by future generations of students, they invest in this work at a different level” (Wiley 2013)

Libraries can be leaders in opening up education.

Librarians are a valuable link between OER and students and faculty. They are leading the way on many campuses. They are the problem-solvers who can provide an entry point for open educational practices that include textbooks and ancillary resources. In fact, a recent report on the outreach activities of SPARC member institutions has found that libraries are the most actively engaged OER outreach groups on college campuses (Yano, 2017).

Library resources are available to students largely for free, but those resources are also published under a traditional proprietary model that restricts what faculty and students can do with them. Open educational resources are available for free or at low cost to students for free, but their open licenses give irrevocable permissions to retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute them.

Why Open Education Matters

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, SPARC Open Education Leadership Program.

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