Andrew Raisbeck
Student OER Ambassador, Public Information Subcommittee,
Middlesex Community College
The following is an excerpt from a panel with students from the Massachusetts Student Advisory Council (SAC) to the Board of Higher Education from Open Education week 2021. The entire panel is available – Unleashing the Power of Massachusetts Students to Increase OER Awareness.
What do you think about providing Open and affordable course markings to show which courses use OER content?
I believe, especially from a student perspective, that OER course markings should be adopted because it gives students the agency to make their own economic decisions. They know which courses going in are going to be more affordable. They can plan their degrees. They can plan their semesters. They can plan around the bills that they expect. Those course markings can appear as little notes underneath courses when you’re scrolling through a digital catalog. They can appear as details of the course, just like the course time and dates. And they can just be markings that are accessible to the advisors when they’re speaking with students as they register.
But that’s not the only aspect of course marking that’s important. It’s important at a faculty level because these faculty can see:
What are my colleagues doing?
Are OER courses getting higher enrollment?
Are OER courses getting more engagement?
What do the GPAs look like between different sections of courses?
–without infringing on academic freedom, of course.
How can we improve the courses that are open?
Are there improvements from courses that aren’t open?
–and that can increase knowledge within the group of faculty.
At an administrative level, you can map which courses are adopting OER and which departments to target to increase the implementation of OER. And if those institutions can work together on a federal and a state level, then you can see which courses have more OER generally. And you can plan things like transfer programs that have little or no cost beyond tuition in terms of fees, in terms of student materials, in terms of textbooks, across a state or across a nation and I think that’s the broader goal with course marketing. It can all come back to student information, but it goes all the way up. It’s useful for everyone.