One thing we can all agree on is that college is expensive. We pay thousands every year in tuition, and hundreds for textbooks that we may hardly use.

This is not something that professors are not worried about. “Once I started realized that textbooks were a social justice issue that was really precluding people from having an open access education, I started to care more than I used to,” said Robin De Rosa, Chair of the Interdisciplinary Studies Department and a leader in the Open Education Movement in the United States.

Over the past ten years, educators across the country have actually been working together to find a solution to this issue. They have done this with Open Education Resources (OER). Essentially, OER is a movement of individuals who are trying to change the way we learn and how we pay for access to the information that we need. It all started about ten years ago when copyright laws made it difficult to legally share work.

This was an issue, because many teachers actually wanted their work to be open to the public. Christin Wixson, a faculty member in Lamson Library who is involved with the Open Education Movement, explained that the solution was found in Creative Commons Licenses (CCL). These licenses allow people to post their work online and let others use it, to a certain degree. In OER lingo, there are five R’s to sharing: retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. It allows other people, typically educators, to take something that someone has posted through CCL and repurpose it to suit their classes needs. They can also redistribute their altered version online. Creative Commons Licenses are what allow Open Education Resources to work, the two go hand in hand.

The fact that it makes textbooks free, or at least much cheaper than they usually are, is not the main benefit of OER. Since people across the country can work together on the same subject, there is a constant update to knowledge that makes the information students read each year relevant to the age we live in. “We want to produce students who are more flexible, who understand how to use the technologies that are available and who can change with a changing culture,” Dr. DeRosa said. It is not just about saving money, it is about changing the way students learn and prepare them for a world that is in a constant state of change.

This movement is still young, so many professors are only just beginning to incorporate OER fully into their classrooms. One professor here on campus, Dr. Catherine LeBlanc (Communication and Media Studies), actually spent the summer working with other faculty to create an OER textbook for the First Year Seminar course that new students have to go through. It is not her first experience with the movement, as she also tried to incorporate some of its values into her Game Design Class by having students choose what they want to do when creating their games. She sees the potential in the movement to co-create knowledge with her students.