Why have just one source of information?

In the first part of this workshop, we looked at a 2014 review of literature that concluded in general that a) students and faculty have considerably positive responses to using open textbooks and that b) open textbooks have been shown to be at least as effective as traditional publisher textbooks. (See What the Research Suggests if you want to refresh your memory.) You can definitely save your students money and get them immediate access to materials when you switch to an OER textbook, and it looks like there's no reason not to.

We also saw, however, that part of UNESCO's description of what OER should be (in Open Educational Resource: Definition) includes the idea that "to be re-usable easily, OER should be released in small chunks, or be easily separable into smaller chunks." (We covered this in a bit more detail in Be Discrete.) It turns out, in fact, that most OER are not complete textbooks or complete courses. Instead, you often find individual handouts, exercises, files, presentation slides, etc. On the one hand, this helps with the idea that they might be fit easily into existing course structures, but, on the other, it also has the potential to change the way we get our students thinking about how they deal with information.

Byte: Part of open pedagogy is the idea that involving students in the analysis and curation of information might be a better way to help them towards mastery of content.

One way of illustrating the power of OER to potentially change the way we approach content delivery is nicely put in Wiley's analogy of the plane on the road (which, if you took my advice, you've already read):

"Using OER the same way we used commercial textbooks misses the point. It’s like driving an airplane down the road. Yes, the airplane has wheels and is capable of driving down on the road (provided the road is wide enough). But the point of an airplane is to fly at hundreds of miles per hour – not to drive. Driving an airplane around, simply because driving is how we always traveled in the past, squanders the huge potential of the airplane." (David Wiley, "What Is Open Pedagogy?")

We will find that this analogy implies a lot of potential, but the specific point I'm trying to make here is that with a variety of openly-licensed resources our students can do much more than passively absorb/memorize information from the relatively limited source we might have provided. There are a lot of brilliant textbooks out there--don't get me wrong--but when we bring the permissions of the 5 Rs onto the scene and get students themselves involved in figuring out how resources differ and which might be better or clearer or more relevant, they are challenged to engage at a higher level.

So do we want to drive the plane down the road, or do we want to soar?