By Ursula Pike, Instructional Initiatives Coordinator at Austin Community College
When I was invited to speak at the Building Bridges Community Dialogue gathering in Austin, Texas, I assumed it would be a typical presentation with a slideshow followed by questions and answers. We called it “How Free Textbooks for College Promote Equity” and I found dramatic graphs (textbook prices have increased 204% in the last twenty years!) and Pixabay images of diverse students holding textbooks. Loretta Edelen, Austin Community College’s Community Engagement Director, extended the invitation to me but she made it clear that this was not a presentation. “It is a discussion,” she told me.
Building Bridges is a program led by the Travis County Sheriff’s Department to facilitate dialogue among neighborhoods, communities, and institutions. Nelson Linder, the President of Austin’s NAACP chapter and Building Bridges Chairman Flynn Lee moderated the meeting. The meeting was held in the annex of the Simpson United Methodist Church, one of Austin’s oldest African American churches.
Cost of Textbooks
I started the conversation by talking about the cost of textbooks and how the use of OERs can save students money. As a commenter on the CCCOER listserv pointed out, community members who aren’t attending or paying for someone’s college may be unaware of how expensive textbooks are in 2019. Everyone in that room already knew that Austin is an expensive place to live. The college can’t control other costs like housing and childcare expenses that students have but our Zero Textbook Cost or ZTC initiative (our term for OERs) has helped students save over $3 MILLION in the last two and a half years. Several attendees wanted to know how we were communicating to students that ZTCs are available. We have added sorting options in the online course schedule and in the student registration system to help students – and the advisors who help them register – find the OER class options. But the participants of Building Bridges challenged me to make sure that the lowest income students, the ones who could benefit the most from free textbooks, knew about OER options. It made me realize that I need to include the Financial Aid department in my outreach efforts.
A Question of Quality
The quality of Open Educational Resources was brought up in a way that I hadn’t considered before. At every OER workshop or conference that I have attended, someone questions the rigor and quality of the materials. Usually, the presenter will explain approaches to reviewing OER materials with a reminder that, as Wiley has said, “quality is not necessarily a function of copyright status.” However, sitting in that circle, I saw the concern about quality in a new context. Schools in high-poverty communities, like the East Austin neighborhood we were in, have been historically underfunded and had to use outdated textbooks. The suspicion that low-quality free textbooks are being recommended to high-poverty communities is understandable given this history. I explained the peer review process ACC followed for all of the courses developed as part of the Achieving the Dream OER Degree Pathway but, honestly, I’m not sure if my answer addressed all of their concerns.
Cultural Inclusion
As a baker passed around her freshly made gluten-free cupcakes, I told the Building Bridges participants that equity is about more than making education affordable. OERs are changing how students learn and how faculty teach. I related the way that Daphnie Sicre, PhD., Assistant Professor, Department of Speech, Communications and Theatre Arts Borough of Manhattan Community College City University of New York, helps her students evaluate representations of black and brown individuals in their textbooks and online. I revisited her presentation as part of the CCCOER webinar “How OER Can Support Student Equity and Diversity” recently and I recommend it to everyone.
I finished by letting the participants know that for me, working with OERs is personally important. In college, I never saw myself reflected in my textbooks. I’m Native (Karuk tribe of California) and I can only imagine how validating and motivating it would have been for me as a student majoring in Economics to learn anything at all about Native Americans’ ability to build wealth. In this way, equity in our OER work is not just ensuring that all of our students have quality course materials available to them on the first day of class, it is also about ensuring that our students see themselves in their course materials and know that they CAN be successful in college. I always appreciate the opportunity to talk to the community about the important work we’re doing at Austin Community College and I really loved walking away feeling like I had a new perspective on my work.
Ursula coordinates initiatives focused on increasing options for students at Austin Community College. These include supporting open educational resources and managing the weekend classes. With open educational resources, her role is to build and support the infrastructure of OER development at the college. She ensures that faculty interested in OER receive the support they need from librarians, instructional designers, and grant projects so their OER courses are easy for students to find and enroll in.
Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay