Barbara Gooch, student at Volunteer State Community College in Tennessee, joined us for a recent webinar “Culture Shift to Academic Freedom” to share her knowledge and passion for education reform and open educational resources (OER). A journalism major, she has a longtime passion for education reform first as a parent and now as a student herself.
The webinar panel led by Maricopa Million’s Matthew Bloom, CCCOER VP of Professional Development, centered around teaching practices and institutional pressures both to keep using traditional publisher materials and to encourage the use of open educational resources. Automated billing sometimes referred to as inclusive or first-day access, a new strategy by traditional publishers to automatically charge students for instructional materials upon enrollment, was discussed.
Automated Billing Increased Costs
Barbara, her husband, and four children are all in college right now in Tennessee where automated billing has been gaining traction as institutions attempt to lower costs for students. Unfortunately, it has not lowered their costs as automated billing eliminates previous discounts available with used books and sharing books among classmates.
Faculty Pressure
As an OpenStax Intern since 2019, Barbara learned about open education and OER and how it helps students to enter and stay on track in college. She focused on campus advocacy to encourage more faculty to adopt open textbooks in 2019-20. Her research indicated that many faculty either felt pressured or did not believe they had the ability to choose their own instructional materials.
OpenStax Institutional Partnership
With Volunteer State Community College joining the OpenStax Institutional Partnership program in 2020-21, Barbara is able to combine her campus advocacy internship focus with the partnership program goals to help more students during the pandemic and beyond. Read her OpenStax intern blog posts.
- When one door closes… Musings from a first-generation, non-traditional college student.
- Taking flight: Rising above in Phoenix
- Chaos in the wake of many storms: The impact of tornadoes and the coronavirus on a small Tennessee community
- Virus disruption + conference interruption = virtual construction
- My invisible son: The struggles of a rural area first-generation college student
Barbara is available @CollegeShopTalk on Twitter.