By Tonja Conerly, Sociology Faculty and Diversity/Inclusivity Facilitator, San Jacinto College
In October 2018, I wrote an article on how the use of Open Education Resources (OER) enhanced equity in our educational system after Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston the previous August. School openings were delayed for several weeks, because of the 40 inches of rain in 4 days, which affected our students and faculty emotionally, physically, and financially. Upon return to class, faculty members using OER experienced no lag time. We were able to start classes immediately because our students were equipped with textbooks on the first day of class.
Unfortunately, Houston, Texas and the world came to a standstill in March 2020 with the Coronavirus pandemic. But with this crisis, we were given the opportunity to promote OER and our educational system has embraced the use of OER and its ability to lead the way in providing an equitable education for our students. Three other components that are necessary to achieve our equitable goals are professional development training for faculty (teaching online to all students, especially those with disabilities), computers for teachers and students, and internet access. You can view a webinar presentation on this model and other aspects of how open education creates resilience in times of crisis and beyond.
Since COVID-19, the increase in OER adoption at colleges and universities in our society is staggering. For example, OpenStax reports, “between March 9 and May 5, there were 55,899 new openstax.org accounts have been created. 3,269 faculty new to OpenStax now have access to free faculty-only resources through the website, and 52,630 students can now highlight, take notes and create study guides from free OpenStax books. Faculty and students at 146 institutions have reported they’re now using OpenStax since that March date, adding to the 7,600 institutions that were already using one or more OpenStax textbooks in their courses.” (Palmiotto, 2020)
George Ritzer, a sociologist, created a key term to describe our society, McDonaldization. This is when a society adopts the characteristics of a fast-food restaurant by providing a customer with instant gratification (i.e. waiting in line for a burger for less than 5 minutes), and that is what OER has done for our educational system. With OER adoption, students have their textbook and faculty are able to teach instantaneously. This removes barriers to access thus contributing to equitable outcomes but in order to achieve equity in our education system, we will also need help from technological agencies, with hardware (computers, tablets, phones) and software (wi-fi). OER plus technology and professional development advance us toward an equitable educational system.
McDonaldization, Wikipedia, License: CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonaldization%23Examples_of_Mcdonaldization.
Palmiotto, Anthony. (May 6, 2020). OpenStax. www.openstax.org