OER and the Content Trap

OER stands for Open Educational Resources. A couple of weeks ago I read the following blog post titled The OER Content Trap by Jim Luke. Other related posts to that he links to are also worth reading, and I found them informative, although I haven’t read the recommended book, The Content Trap. Luke’s main point is that we should focus not on the content, but rather on the connections and community of open education. Focusing on content is a trap, and drawing up the battle lines between advocates of adopting “open” textbooks and the for-profit “publishing” industry is a losing strategy.

He writes: “We’re not alone in this trap. Nearly all higher ed institutions are there too. They almost all think their special sauce is in the courses they teach or the research publications they produce. They’re wrong. Similarly, the special sauce in open education isn’t the OER, the resources, books, video and content. The real special value is in the connections people make, the community that forms, and the identities they forge.”

A look at my college’s chemistry curriculum bears this out. Our courses aren’t special in terms of content; they’re special in terms of the relationships we forge between teacher and student thanks to our small class sizes. Our introductory science major courses, General Chemistry and Organic Chemistry, use standard publisher textbooks – less for the content, and more for the online homework system. Less instructor grading, more immediate feedback for the students, and more importantly it gets them to practice working on problems multiple times a week – which is essential for learning chemistry. There are caveats to the online homework system that I’ve written about in previous posts.

Even in the junior and senior level classes, Biochemistry, Physical Chemistry and Inorganic Chemistry, standard texts are typically used. I teach one semester of P-Chem (Quantum Chemistry) with a textbook, but the other semester (Statistical Thermodynamics and Kinetics) without one. And this semester I’ve chosen to teach my non-majors chemistry course without a textbook as part of an OER initiative by our library. There are various reasons for these choices, but much of it has focused on the content and to some extent the pedagogy. Trying to keep costs lower for students does factor into the decision, given how expensive tertiary education can be in the United States particularly at a private institution.

How did I choose my OER? Not surprisingly, and perhaps naively on my part, I chose my resources based on content. I do recognize that’s not the special sauce of my class, and I’d like to think the special sauce has to do with what happens in my classroom. The OER provides pre-class reading and practice problems. Essentially, I’m just using the OER for content – and because of the choices I made to keep the “textbook cost” at zero, the particular set of OER I have chosen do not come with an online homework system for practice. I do have homework that students turn in (although not too much). I’m trying to include more formative assessment strategies in my classroom activities. And I’m exhorting the students to practice, practice, practice, but to some extent allowing them to decide how much time and energy they wish to put into it. The students who put in the work do well, and those who don’t – well, they don’t do well. A voice in my head justifies my choice as “treating students as adults”, but does this approach really serve the students well? That’s debatable.

For-profit publishers have also been moving away from content. Witness the rise of data analytics and A.I.-based adaptive learning coupled to an online homework system. While no big publisher will make the bold claim right now that the relationship between student and machine is what counts (because right now they rely on professors assigning their online systems so that students “buy” them), that’s where we’re headed. Professors are still being wooed, judging by the strategy of sales representatives, but increasingly the pitch is made to university administration, both to the academic side and student affairs.

I suspect that Luke is correct in exhorting OER advocates to steer away from the content trap. For the Open community to out-innovate the for-profit juggernaut, it needs to focus on the community. The percentage of harried instructors who would want to spend much of their time mixing and re-mixing OER content is likely to always remain small. So just putting out content is not going to be enough, particularly as the for-profit products with their powerful data analytics increasingly present “evidence” that their systems result in better educational outcomes for the student. One could debate what these educational outcomes should be, but a high-minded idealistic outcome (most often trotted out by liberal arts colleges) is likely to prove unconvincing over time as strategic decision-making becomes increasingly tactical and short-term. A sad situation, but we’re already seeing this happening in higher education.

I’m not exactly what to do next. Maybe that’s a summer project. In the meantime, I need to do a better job in my non-majors class this semester. The Spring Forward time change sapped my energy in class this Monday (waking up an hour early), and I did not do a good job. But tomorrow is a new day!