Motivating Educators to Use OER

This week we enjoyed a rare chance to Zoom with Dr. Wiley, whom I have mentioned in previous posts and directly ask all of our questions we garnered from the previous weeks’ learning. Certain that David (yes, he insisted we drop the formalities) would have the most experience, I asked the following question: “How do you motivate educators to want to adopt OER in their classrooms?”

Before I share David Wiley’s answer to my question, I want to share from my research a few ways other places of learning have motivated their educators:

Appeal to their heart Most articles I read about approaching faculty about OER encouraged beginning with this entreaty: “think of the student”. OER levels the playing field for those with less money. It is at the heart of Creative Commons and Open Learning, and often the reason many educators chose their career in the first place. However, this appeal probably won’t motivate the textbook loyalist or the tenured professor.

Appeal to their pocketbook After reading an article on Higher Ed by former president of the University of Idaho, Dr. Charles Stauben, I wrote and asked for more information about his implementation ideas. Dr. Stauben began by telling me, “Frankly, most faculty members have little concern about what texts cost students…but faculty can be motivated by remarkably small monetary incentives.” Though not all of his ideas have been implemented at IU, other colleges like the University of Houston pay faculty extra to implement OER, and the University of Illinois Chicago increases incrementally the amount of extra pay based on whether an educator adopts an open textbook, modifies an open textbook, or creates their own open textbook.

Appeal to their confidence Another often unspoken barrier of using OER is the insecurity of using and remixing OER for the first time. Many teachers have never had to create an entire course, much less write a textbook. Colleges like the two I mentioned above as well as Bay College wisely set up their skilled and knowledgeable librarians to offer workshops for first-time users of OER and introduce their vast array of learning tools while fielding questions of more-practiced or adventurous educators. This naturally encourages collaboration, and the sense that they do not have to do this alone.

Appeal to security For those ready-to-relax-or-retire tenured professors, the University of British Colombia has an incentive. The university is moving toward revising their tenure and professional development requirements to include promotion and implementation of OER. This idea could easily be adapted for use by graduate teaching assistants and adjunct professors. For K-12 teachers, creation of OER resources could become an alternative way to get their continued education credits or professional development hours.

Use Market Pressure Though all of the above are valid ideas, David Wiley said in his experience, educators tend to resist change from the top-down. Instead, allowing the pressure to come from the bottom-up (from the students rather than administrators) seems to be the best way. If there are 2 identical classes, but one class has a low-to-no textbook cost, that class is going to be full and waitlisted every semester as students comparison shop. The other professor, seeing his empty class and low numbers, will likely decide using OER is the only way to stay in the game. Besides the resistant teacher, everyone else—the students with more money in their pocket, the professor with more academic freedom, and the administration with higher enrollment numbers—is happier.

Which of these ideas above would motivate you the most? The least?

Can you think of other ways to creatively motivate educators to use OER?