One key component of Open Pedagogy might be that it sees access, broadly writ, as fundamental to learning and to teaching, and agency as an important way of broadening that access.

When faculty use OER, we aren’t just saving a student money on textbooks: we are directly impacting that student’s ability to enroll in, persist through, and successfully complete a course. In other words, we are directly impacting that student’s ability to attend, succeed in, and graduate from college. When we talk about OER, we bring two things into focus: that access is critically important to conversations about academic success, and that faculty and other instructional staff can play a critical role in the process of making learning accessible.

OER are licensed with open licenses, which reflects not just a commitment to access in terms of the cost of knowledge, but also access in terms of the creation of knowledge. Embedded in the social justice commitment to making college affordable for all students is a related belief that knowledge should not be an elite domain. Knowledge consumption and knowledge creation are not separate but parallel processes, as knowledge is co-constructed, contextualized, cumulative, iterative, and recursive.

Open Pedagogy invites us to focus on how we can increase access to higher education and how we can increase access to knowledge.

Remixed from Open Pedagogy and Social Justice by Rajiv Jhangiani and Robin DeRosa, published in the Digital Pedagogy Lab in June 2, 2017.

How OER Can Help Overcome the Higher Education Equity Barrier

“Up to 40 percent of low-income students who were admitted to college in the spring do not ever make it onto college campuses because of the cost barrier.”

That cost barrier is a prohibitive one for many reasons, panelists said, but the cost of educational materials like textbooks is one area where leaders can have a more immediate impact, Jasmine Roberts said.

“Students shouldn’t have to choose between buying their textbooks and buying their groceries,” Daniel Williamson said. “These are real decisions that students are making. There really isn’t a choice. You buy groceries and you live and you hope down the road your faculty member chooses to make this more affordable to you.”

In a 2017 update to the Department of Education’s National Education Technology Plan, the federal agency continued its emphasis on open materials, as well as bolstered its #GoOpen initiative.

While the federal government continues its OER embrace at a policymaking level, states are increasingly creating and curating OER as well. More than half of U.S. states are currently developing, or have already developed, digital libraries to house OER, according to an EdScoop Special Report from February 2018.

“Part of open is enabling the unexpected,” Allen said on the panel. “It doesn’t’ mean you need to write your own textbook tomorrow, it means you can think about open and how it relates back to your mission. Education is ultimately about sharing knowledge — see what steps we can take to make it more open and equitable.”

Excerpted from Jake William’s article from EdScoop.