As Kent State University prioritizes Students First, it is helping to remove financial obstacles to learning, clearing the path for more student success through increased access. In partnership with University Libraries and the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Provost’s Office developed a grant program to support faculty in using alternatives to costly textbooks.
Four instructors from Kent State University at Geauga were recently awarded grants to redesign courses using free instructional materials known as Open Educational Resources (OERs) which lower the cost of higher education and may improve learner outcomes by making instructional materials available and free to all from the first day of class, reducing the incidence of students falling behind if they cannot afford to purchase required textbooks.
Molly M. Sergi, Ph.D., professor of history at Kent State Geauga, was awarded a $1,000 grant to cover expenses related to training in the use of OERs and redesigning the curriculum for her survey course in early American history (HIST 12070: Early America: From Pre Colonization to Civil War and Reconstruction).
While OERs remove a significant financial barrier ($100 --$125 per textbook), they also offer students a more interactive experience with primary and secondary sources, such as handwritten letters, vintage photographs, old news clippings and other online resources that illustrate little known historical events from early American history.
“OERs open up a whole new world to this generation of skeptical students who don't necessarily believe that what's written in their textbook is true, Dr. Sergi adds. "OERs provide first-person accounts from a diverse set of perspectives from a particular time period, whether they witnessed the Boston Tea Party or a slave auction, or the women's suffragist movement. They also allow us to analyze contemporary issues through the lens of history and gain a deeper understanding of unresolved questions that remain. A grant like this breathes new life into the curriculum and makes history come alive for students."
A group of three Geauga Campus English faculty was also awarded a $5,000 grant to produce free teaching and learning materials for a developmental first-year writing course. Assistant Professor Sorina Ailiesei, Associate Professor Bonnie Shaker, and Associate Lecturer Molly Mokros collaborated to develop one shared new curriculum for Stretch writing (ENG 11001-11002), a college-level developmental writing course that stretches a traditional 15-week first-year composition course over 30 weeks to allow for supplemental instruction.
Dr. Shaker explains, "Unlike a static textbook, distinct OER licenses allow educators to reuse and revise our work specific to their students’ needs. OERs are sort of like crowdsourced teaching pedagogy in that sense. The knowledge of the collective can be used to benefit the knowledge of the individual."
For best student outcomes, these faculty members were already standardizing and collaborating as much as possible while still allowing instructors flexibility in course design and pedagogy. Now, they want to make their expertise freely available for distribution. Their original OER teaching materials will support student success at Kent State and beyond at no additional cost to students beginning fall semester 2024.
A typical Stretch student will save about $50 using OERs designed and provided by their instructors. Dr. Ailiesei says that there are typically 200 Stretch students at Geauga campus alone, which translates to a $10,000 collective savings for Geauga students and five times as much for all Kent State regional campus Stretch students combined.
Professor Mokros explains, "Dr. Shaker, Dr. Ailiesei, and I have many collective years of experience teaching in Geauga's Stretch writing program. We are able to produce more comprehensive and effective OERs by combining our individual expertise to not only benefit the students themselves but to serve as a kind of modular playbook that instructors can customize according to their own approaches and needs each semester. We also genuinely enjoy working and collaborating with one another!"
During the training aspect of the grant project, Professor Mokros says, "We were required to complete the Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Affordable Learning Materials (ALM) Incentive Training Program. The online course opened my eyes, not only to the vast number of OERs and ALMs already available, but also to the specifics of how authors go about licensing their work."
Dr. Shaker adds, "Creative Commons licenses permit the materials we create to be legally reused by others with authorial attribution; we can also choose a license that restricts commercial use of our materials to avoid anyone profiting from them. The goal is to provide these materials free to students and educators in perpetuity."
These English instructors may be new to OERs, but they have long been innovating and creating fresh instructional materials for their students. As Dr. Shaker says, I have certainly created student materials such as screencasts, video lectures, and simple PDF instructional sheets. But I have not licensed them for others' use and reuse, which is what makes them OERs. It's a shame for faculty to keep their intellectual property to themselves if our goal is to serve students. That's why we're collaborating. Professor Mokros may have a great lesson on sentence structure, Dr. Ailiesei on citation, and I on paragraphing. All of our students receive richer instruction if we share our strengths."
While traditional textbooks were once considered the backbone of a college course, OERs will likely play an increasing role in the ever-evolving classroom of the future.
Professor Mokros started teaching online courses over a decade ago at Kent State Geauga, and, at the time, was one of only a handful of instructors doing so. "As our students' needs (and desires) changed, online delivery of courses increased. We are tasked with constantly evolving to best serve our students, and I believe that the use of OERs will become more and more popular."
"It's the direction higher education is moving toward," Dr. Sergi agrees.
Dr. Ailiesei adds, "Kent State has been a leader in reducing students' overall financial burden, in part through its Flash Books program, which negotiates lower textbook prices for students. However, Flash Books alone do not address all of the conditions necessary for success in Stretch writing."
Dr. Shaker sums up, "To make higher education accessible to the greatest number of individuals, I do think faculty-authored OERs are the inevitable wave of the future."