Introduction

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), “Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others” (UNESCO 2019). Besides using UNESCO’s definition or similar ones from other sources, advocates of OER as tools for learning, teaching, and research at universities also often characterize OER as “free” in their proposals, policies, and practices. “Free” is not absolute, however, because there are certain cost concerns and practicalities that can limit the type, scope, and scale of OER use, creation, and assessment. Addressing the assumptions and realities about what exactly is “free,” for whom, and under what conditions can clarify the opportunities and risks of OER for different stakeholders and systems for the purposes of improved decision-making, implementation, and evaluation. Addressing the costs of OER also has implications for “open pedagogy,” sometimes referred to as open educational practices (OEP). One feature of OEP is the use of OER to engage with students not just as consumers of information, but also as creators of it. Students can essentially be a part of the process of creating information such that the resources have a greater impact on the community at large (University of Texas-Arlington 2022).

While “free” has multiple meanings and connotations for OER and may necessitate becoming comfortable with the ambiguity that sometimes exists in applying the term (McGowan 2020), of particular interest to the authors of this paper is the cost element. Specifically, what are the professional and personal costs of OER for faculty? As such, this paper understands and frames “free” as “no-cost” in a financial sense (e.g., McGowan 2020; Disu et al. 2022; Henderson and Ostashewski 2018; Jhangiani et al. 2016; Belikov and Bodily 2016) and provides an interdisciplinary case study of cost concerns and practicalities from the position of faculty members at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) in Texas to highlight the ways in which OER might be considered “no-cost” to students but can come at a significant cost to the faculty adopters themselves.

One of the main financial benefits of OER is not charging students and instructors for the use of openly licensed materials; but what about other potential and actual costs incurred? Cost savings in one process or outcome such as student budgets does not guarantee cost savings in other domains like instructors’ time, labor, and resources for OER endeavors, which can in turn have negative professional and personal consequences for those instructors. In this way, the decision to use, create, and assess OER can be analyzed through the lens of cost shifting. This paper aims to extend the dialogue on what can happen when the burden of cost is removed from students and shifted to faculty who are uncompensated or not incentivized for this effort (Disu et al. 2022), thereby adding to the emerging literature about the lived professional and personal experiences of university faculty who utilize OER (Martin and Kimmons 2020).

Understanding and accommodating for the nuances and limits of “no-cost” in the context of OER is necessary if education stakeholders, especially those situated at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), are truly invested in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and social justice as a set of values and praxis. On the one hand, OER can be no-cost for select user groups and can have the advantages of facilitating open pedagogy or OEP, learner-driven approaches, accessibility, digital literacies, collaboration, etc., which all align with DEI agendas and plans. On the other hand, there can be significant burdens for the individuals who are using, generating, and assessing OER. Two major considerations for education stakeholders and OER adopters are (a) a lack of infrastructure and resources to offset or minimize cost concerns and practicalities related to time and labor for faculty along with (b) missing or insufficient compensation and incentives for faculty. Without careful attention to these considerations, the general framing of OER as an instrument for DEI and redistributive justice is incomplete or incorrect because faculty are being excluded from the equation and negatively impacted. For OER truly to be a public good and for the public good, universities must focus, balance, and support the needs of both students and faculty.

In this interdisciplinary case study, the authors take a multipronged approach in sharing their experiences at an HSI in Texas as well as existing research literature from a range of disciplines to illuminate the professional and personal costs of OER for faculty. Each section describes a set of benefits and challenges for OER at the individual-, unit-, and/or institution-level. Each section also analyzes the ways in which “no-cost” is not totally without cost since OER are directly and indirectly affected by cost concerns and practicalities related to one’s status, positionality, and resources as a faculty member.

Case Study Context

For institutional context, “MSIs” are universities and colleges in the United States (US) that enroll a significant percentage of self-identified minority students from historically underrepresented and marginalized racial and ethnic groups such as American Indian, Alaskan Native, Asian, Pacific Islander, Black (not of Hispanic origin), Hispanic, and two or more of these groups. When determining eligibility for MSI status and access to federal funding and resources, the US government usually classifies MSIs as two-year or four-year, public or private, not-for-profit postsecondary institutions whose minority student enrollment percentages of total enrollment are “significant” or that serve certain populations of minority students under various programs created by Congress.[1] Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (TAMUCC) is one such MSI with the additional federal designation of “Hispanic-Serving Institution” (“HSI”), which indicates an enrollment of undergraduate full-time equivalent students that is at least 25 percent Hispanic students.

Since 2018, the Carnegie Classification for TAMUCC is “R2,” meaning a doctoral university with “high research activity” (Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research 2021). Not all colleges within the university are technically “R2,” however, since most programs and departments do not confer master’s degrees or doctoral degrees and instead largely focus on undergraduate students. One of the emergent expectations and pressures related to R2 status is that select faculty groups need to pivot from prioritizing teaching to finding ways to simultaneously prioritize teaching and research or prioritize research above teaching. This expectation and pressure can significantly alter and increase workloads, especially for faculty with existing teaching commitments in first-year programs, core curriculum courses, and/or large lecture courses (i.e., 175 or more students) alongside intensive service obligations, which are customary at TAMUCC.

According to the TAMUCC Data Center (2022), 10,762 students were enrolled at the university during Fall 2021, of which 60 percent (6,438 students) were from underrepresented minority groups. For further context, nearly 50 percent of TAMUCC students self-identified as Hispanic, and almost 50 percent identified as first-generation college students. Furthermore, the five-year trend at TAMUCC shows a steady decrease in the percentage of first-generation students, while the percentage of students from underrepresented minority groups has increased from 58 to 59.8 percent (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi 2022). The percentage of Hispanic students has remained unchanged in the last three years. The authors were unable to obtain transfer student data, but the Carnegie data set indicates a high transfer-in rate for TAMUCC (Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research 2021). The authors also did not have institutional data about students’ socioeconomic backgrounds, but their own observations suggest high percentages of students who work part-time or full-time while carrying full course loads. A subgroup of those working students has substantial caregiving responsibilities as well. It is common to see student cohorts carrying heavy professional and personal workloads themselves (with or without adequate resources and preparation), which means TAMUCC faculty often spend a lot of time planning, adapting, and implementing their teaching pedagogies and assessments in ways that best meet the needs and interests of their students. This is additional work for the faculty members in addition to their pre-existing teaching, research, and service workload.

In terms of retention, the TAMUCC Data Center (2022) statistics show the overall one-year retention rate of first-time, full-time students entering TAMUCC in Fall 2020 to be 67.2 percent, which represented nearly a 2 percent decrease from 2019. Underrepresented minority students overall (66.3%), and Hispanic students specifically (66.7%), were retained at slightly lower levels than white students (67.9%). First-generation students (65.2%) were retained at moderately lower rates than non-first-generation students (68.6%). Looking at the 2019 beginning cohort as reported in Summer 2021 to compare TAMUCC with other universities nationally, the overall retention rate at four-year public institutions was 76.3 percent with the retention rate of Hispanic students at 73.2 percent (National Student Clearinghouse 2021, 6), while for TAMUCC, the overall retention rate for that 2019 cohort was 69.1 percent with the retention rate for Hispanic students at 68.3 percent (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi 2022). With an emphasis in the university’s mission, vision, and strategic plan on “student success” and “closing achievement gaps,” faculty pay close attention to retention rates and actively engage in activities to improve those rates for their courses, programs, and departments, which creates yet another added set of labor expectations and efforts.

One of the ongoing challenges for retention and DEI efforts at MSIs like TAMUCC is textbook costs. Existing research reveals that textbook costs have risen more than 1,000% since the 1970s (Popkin 2015), so not surprisingly, one of the most documented benefits of using OER is cost savings for students (Henderson and Ostashewski 2018; Jhangiani et al. 2016; Belikov and Bodily 2016). Furthermore, prior research describes how the increased burden of textbook costs is a real barrier to education. Students have reported that rising textbook costs have resulted in them not purchasing required course materials, enrolling in fewer courses, receiving worse grades, and even dropping, failing, or withdrawing from courses (Florida Virtual Campus 2019, 4).

While rising textbook costs can hurt students from a wide variety of backgrounds, certain student groups such as racial and ethnic minorities, low-income students, and first-generation students are disproportionately affected (Jenkins et al. 2020, 4). These student groups are less likely to have the textbook on the first day of class (which is strongly linked to performance); they are more likely to drop or avoid taking classes because of cost (in turn delaying graduation); and they are more likely to fail classes due to the inability to pay for textbooks (Florida Virtual Campus 2019, 4; Jenkins et al. 2020, 5). One alarming comparison is first-generation students are twice as likely and Latinx students are three times more likely to fail a class because of textbook costs compared to white students (Jenkins et al. 2020, 5–6).

Because MSIs are concerned about enrollment, retention, and graduation rates in the context of DEI and education economics (e.g., budgets and “the bottom line” for all involved), MSI stakeholders are increasingly searching for interventions and solutions for their student populations who are disproportionately impacted by high textbook costs. Contemporary research on OER’s academic impact delivers inspiring possibilities and pathways. For example, transitioning courses to OER has been associated with higher grades and lower drop, fail, and withdrawal rates, and these associations are most pronounced among Pell-eligible students (Colvard, Watson, and Park 2018, 267–269). Since the COVID-19 pandemic also likely exacerbated the educational disparities caused by textbook costs, there are OER advocates who endorse OER not only as an emergency stopgap, but as a long-term solution to promote equity and inclusive access to educational resources (Bartholomay 2022, 66; Van Allen and Katz 2020, 210; Green and Vézina 2020).

Given that OER help students financially and results in comparable or even improved academic outcomes (Fischer et al. 2015, 168; Jhangiani et al. 2016, 23), there appears to be little to lose and much to gain by endorsing widespread adoption of OER. While these considerations are important to this case study’s authors and their colleagues at other MSIs, the time, labor, and resource burdens associated with using, creating, and assessing OER can have negative career consequences that can potentially outweigh or undo the positive impacts that OER have for students. Moreover, without tangible and substantial institutional support to offset or minimize the costs of OER coupled with a lack of compensation and incentives for faculty, their abilities to actualize DEI visions, goals, programs, and projects are restricted.

For context, all four authors are faculty members at TAMUCC who deeply value DEI and have first-hand experience engaging in labor-intensive efforts in the initial decision-making processes and subsequent implementation stages for using, creating, and assessing OER. The authors hold varied institutional statuses as tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure track faculty with corresponding teaching, research, and service loads. Their collaborative work on this paper emerged from a shared vision of the power of open pedagogy; regular conversations about the direct and indirect benefits of OER for student learning and outcomes; common experiences at professional development workshops and communities of practice; consultations with one another about “best practices” to incorporate into their respective pedagogies; mutual understanding regarding political and economic constraints related to their positionalities in different settings; and empathy for the challenges and consequences that arise from using, creating, and assessing OER. Over time, the authors decided to formally describe and analyze the costs incurred by faculty in the vetting and use of OER to validate their experiences and those of faculty at other MSIs or HSIs, have a “product” for the purposes of annual reviews and promotions, and increase information sharing and awareness within or between OER communities at TAMUCC and elsewhere.

Cost Concerns and Practicalities for Using OER

To better support TAMUCC’s diverse student body and their financial needs, social science faculty are increasingly exploring the use and adaptation of OER in their courses. Daniel Bartholomay and Jennifer Epley Sanders know firsthand the benefits and challenges of using and adapting OER in their undergraduate core curriculum and upper-level courses. Bartholomay was hired as a tenure-track assistant professor of sociology in Fall 2019 and typically teaches three face-to-face, hybrid, and/or online courses a semester with class sizes ranging from 15 to 200. Since starting at TAMUCC, he has not required students to purchase a textbook. Bartholomay has used and supplemented pre-existing OER as well as assembled his own collection of freely available materials through various online outlets and library resources. Epley Sanders was hired as a tenure-track assistant professor of political science in Fall 2010, was promoted to associate professor in Fall 2016, and became a full professor in Fall 2022. She, too, typically teaches three face-to-face, hybrid, and/or online courses a semester with class sizes ranging from 35 to 250. Like Bartholomay, Epley Sanders has used and supplemented pre-existing OER.

Although OER can be “no-cost” and academically advantageous to students, Bartholomay and Epley Sanders have found that the use and adaptation of OER comes at a cost to them in terms of time, labor, and resources. For example, faculty who choose to use OER may need additional training on pedagogical strategies and technology (Jhangiani et al. 2016, 19; Lantrip and Ray 2021, 897). They may also need specialized training about the distinct types of copyrights and licensing restrictions that determine how OER can be used and edited. Many OER require attribution, some can be modified and adapted, and others can be used commercially. Understanding the nuances of OER licensing typically requires instruction from librarians or other experts in open education. The responsibility of seeking out these trainings and informational resources is often placed upon individual faculty members since institutional support for OER is not a universal practice (Belikov and Bodily 2016, 243). Bartholomay first started using OER while teaching as a graduate student, so he initially had minimal access to OER professional development opportunities. He took it upon himself to research OER and learn strategies from reputable sources, such as the Open Education Network. In Spring 2020, after his first year as an assistant professor at TAMUCC, Bartholomay was identified as an OER advocate and was asked to co-chair the university’s Affordable Learning Tools committee. He continues to co-chair the committee, which involves facilitating monthly meetings, monitoring university textbook policies, maintaining communication with faculty senate and student government regarding textbook pricing, and spreading awareness and education on OER to both faculty and students through various formats.

Even when there are opportunities to get formal training about common strategies, technology, and copyrights or licensing, the process can be time-consuming while lacking corresponding compensation. For instance, Epley Sanders participated in a Communities of Practice in OER Course Unit Redesign during Spring 2019 which involved multiple meetings, workshops, and dedicated time for curating and using OER. The university paid her a $250 stipend at the end of that semester and did not give her additional funds when she later piloted OER during several consecutive semesters. When Epley Sanders co-facilitated a community of practice during Spring 2020 and Spring 2021, the facilitator stipend was $500 each time. Her professional development activities and university service related to OER were on top of the already substantial teaching, research, and service loads that are common at HSIs and schools aspiring to, or that have recently obtained, R2 status like TAMUCC.

Besides the unpaid or underpaid labor involved with OER training, preparation, and implementation, there is an extra related cost and “risk” consideration for faculty because many institutions do not incentivize OER efforts and lack clarity on how such work contributes formal credit for promotion and tenure (Delimont et al. 2016, 10). Current guidelines and policies for annual reviews, merit, and promotion and tenure (P&T) at TAMUCC do not delineate types of OER nor how they should “count” in one’s portfolio even though OER faculty adopters address content delivery, responsiveness to students’ needs, and advancement of the university community in distinct ways. P&T guidelines differ in their criteria both across institutions and within an institution at the college, department, and program levels. Elder et al. (2021) believe OER can fit into all three of the areas that faculty are typically assessed (i.e., teaching, research, and service). Something like the OER Contributions Matrix[2] (Coolidge, McKinney, and Shenoy 2022) might be useful to help incentivize the use of OER and OEP by indicating ways in which the adoption, modification, and creation of materials could fit within a university’s P&T requirements. When Bartholomay and Epley Sanders completed their annual reviews and promotion portfolios, they did not have a reference point like the OER Contributions Matrix nor did they have a standardized, formal, or technical way to report in a physical binder, Faculty Activity Report system, or online portfolio system like Interfolio partial or complete information about the quality and quantity of their OER work in any given class, semester, or as part of a comprehensive teaching pedagogy or DEI framework. It is as if that work did not take place at all. In this way, OER labor can be very costly for faculty members’ professional and financial trajectories.

Despite limited or non-existent OER-related incentives for annual reviews or promotion and tenure, faculty may still decide to proceed with OER to leverage a particular type of academic freedom. Within the realm of Creative Commons[3] licensing, faculty are afforded the autonomy to revise and remix OER to fit their educational needs (Van Allen and Katz 2020, 209). The flexibility and innovative possibilities that accompany adapting OER are often identified as driving factors that motivate faculty to adopt OER (Belikov and Bodily 2016, 242; McGreal 2019, 142; Ren 2019, 3489). This adaptability may be advantageous for faculty at MSIs as it allows them to incorporate timely and culturally relevant content into their courses.

Bartholomay and Epley Sanders appreciate the academic freedom that OER can provide. They are intentional about including OER that matter to their students in order to facilitate learning comprehension, retention, and community, even more so when focused on DEI as a set of values and praxis. However, this pedagogical approach has transactional costs related to their time and labor as faculty members. An example of such costs is having to consistently review and update OER, which can have a cumulative negative effect on faculty. Since many OER are produced independently by individuals who donate their time and talents, updated versions are not guaranteed. Therefore, faculty may be able to use OER for a brief period before the content and references become dated or no longer germane. Because several OER that Bartholomay and Epley Sanders use are now “old” in the social sciences, they will need to revise them directly or curate new collections in the coming years. In those instances, the burden to adapt or create resources falls solely on the instructors. To illustrate this concern and practicality, one open textbook Bartholomay uses has not been updated since 2012. Lacking current examples and scholarly innovations from the past decade, Bartholomay spends much time searching for and creating supplemental instructional materials for his students.

Besides curating or revising existing OER collections for relevant content, Epley Sanders must also carefully consider when and how to make technical updates in her courses because data and multimedia on websites from government institutions (e.g., the White House, the US House of Representatives, and the US Senate), non-profit organizations, mass media, and educational channels (e.g., Khan Academy and YouTube) are frequently changed, moved, or deleted. More websites are creating paywalls, too, that require paid subscriptions or expensive upfront one-time fees by instructors, students, or institutions. The best available resources are then no longer completely open or free. Without institutionalized mechanisms in place to compensate, incentivize, and recognize faculty for their efforts, using and adapting appropriate material that students may use freely becomes extra unpaid and unrewarded labor semester after semester.

The costs imposed upon faculty who use OER are also situated within a broader system of inequality. Faculty at community colleges (Doan 2017, 665) and MSIs (Seaman and Seaman 2021, 38) are more likely to use OER than faculty at other institutions. While an extensive study capturing the demographics of faculty who use OER has yet to be published, research in related areas—such as the finding that women faculty and faculty of color complete disproportionate amounts of underrecognized service work (El-Alyayli, Hansen-Brown, and Ceynar 2018; Joseph and Hirschfield 2011; O’Meara et al. 2019)—would support the hypothesis that faculty who belong to marginalized groups are most likely to use OER. Without institutionalized efforts to compensate, incentivize, and recognize OER work, using OER can worsen pre-existing gender, racial, and other inequalities in academia, as has been the experience of Bartholomay and Epley Sanders.

Cost Concerns and Practicalities for Creating OER

Amanda Marquez began working at TAMUCC in 2011. She presently is a Professional Assistant Professor and the First-Year Seminar Coordinator in the First-Year Learning Communities Program (FYLCP), which is a program designed to support first-year students as they make the transition to university. Established in 1994, the nationally recognized program enrolls all incoming first-year students in learning communities during their first year of college. The FYLCP has previously implemented OER into its First-Year Seminar courses, but Marquez’s journey into OER and OEP emerged from her role as a part-time lecturer for the Humanities Department.

Because of Marquez’s expertise on Mexican American history, she was invited to speak and participate in a Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon during Hispanic Heritage Month in Fall 2018. After that invitation, Marquez began collaborating with Wiki Education[4] and the Wikipedia Education Program[5] to investigate ways to embed a Wikipedia component into her Mexican American Women’s History course. Wiki Education’s commitment to “Equity, Quality, and Reach” (Wiki Education 2022a) aligned with Marquez’s belief that OER created by faculty and students can help close critical gaps in educational experiences.

With a colleague in the Department of Psychology and Sociology, Marquez held a working group in which both instructors agreed to embed a Wikipedia component into their respective undergraduate upper-level courses. Marquez’s goal was to create a project-based assignment that would challenge students to combine “traditional” research methods and “new” technology to enhance their information and digital information literacy skills. However, the decision to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool in an upper-division US History course was not without controversy. Using Wikipedia can be problematic because of perceptions that Wikipedia is not part of the “legitimate” academic canon, so encouraging her colleagues and students to adopt an unfamiliar perspective was initially challenging for Marquez and risky, professionally and personally. As more faculty are increasingly utilizing Wikipedia in their classes, stereotypes of the site are slowly shifting, however. Wikipedia is now being seen less as an untrustworthy site and more as a valuable centralized data repository that simultaneously can function as an effective teaching tool.

Marquez persisted and embedded Wikipedia into her history course as a 15-week, high-stakes longitudinal project. Her “Wikipedia Scholars Project”[6] was not simply treated as an afterthought or superficial supplement to the course. With the support from Wiki Education program managers, students completed mandatory training modules and participated in regular debriefing sessions. Students received support to help them identify gaps in editorship and limited representation in content areas related to Mexican American history, especially Mexican American women’s contributions. Students could either edit an existing page or create a new one. Wikipedia instructional sessions included supplemental materials curated by Marquez, and she integrated those sessions into her traditional lecture classes. Class activities centered on resources from the Wiki Education platform to support student research and writing. Editing standards, guided peer reviews, and content development sessions were also incorporated into the weekly course schedule. A publication showcase of the students’ work on the last day of classes was open to the public and made for a meaningful community experience, too. The shared experience of having their contributions “go live” on Wikipedia led many students to deeply consider the kind of impact their academic work could have beyond the classroom setting. In conjunction with this awareness, students gained applied public service experience as content creators and editors, which are models of OEP and DEI in practice.

In terms of academic benefits, a Wiki Education survey (Wiki Education 2022b) reports high rates of faculty satisfaction with its programs. For example, 97 percent of instructors surveyed agreed that a Wikipedia assignment improved their students’ digital and media literacy skills. Ninety-six percent of instructors agreed that a Wikipedia assignment helped their students develop a sense of digital citizenship. Additionally, 93 percent of instructors agreed that a Wikipedia assignment improved their students’ research skills. Seventy-seven percent of instructors also agreed that a Wikipedia assignment helped their students to become more socially and culturally aware. These survey results match common student learning objectives and outcomes that emphasize the importance of digital literacy and citizenship for twenty-first-century learners. TAMUCC is currently in the process of a Quality Enhancement Plan for digital information literacy, so individual faculty and specific programs increasingly are exploring and implementing innovative teaching practices and assessments such as those centered around Wikipedia.

As a result of Marquez’s participation in the Spring 2021 Wikipedia Education Student program, her course (25 students) was part of a cohort of 344 courses (6,091 student editors). The entire cohort contributed 4.31M words to Wikipedia. The students in Marquez’s course added 12.1K words to Wikipedia, edited seventeen articles, created two new entries, and added 105 references. The impacted article pages received about 78.7K page views in a one-month period. While these metrics are impressive for student and community outcomes, Marquez could have benefited from direct institutional support each step of the way and formal incentives upon project completion.

While a faculty member’s disciplinary expertise can help with the evaluation of students’ contributions to Wikipedia on the backend, vetting and implementing the Wiki Education instructional training resources for students prior to and during a course carries a significant labor cost. Marquez faced similar infrastructure, resource, and incentive challenges for using, adapting, and creating OER as her social science colleagues Bartholomay and Epley Sanders. The aforementioned survey results do not mention faculty feedback about the significant investment of time and effort in planning the sequence of Wikipedia training or navigating and using the course dashboard tools. While each participating faculty member is assigned one program manager to serve as technical support and troubleshooting liaison, faculty must be open to and prepared for the steep learning curve, continuous use of the site’s editing tools, and ongoing enforcement of Wikipedia’s editing guidelines with Wiki personnel and students.

Marquez’s Wikipedia Scholars Project highlights some of the benefits and challenges in the creation of OER but also has implications for open pedagogy and DEI more broadly. Derosa and Jhangiani (2017) note that open pedagogy “as a praxis, is a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures.” Hegarty (2015) identifies arc-of-life learning, which is “a seamless process that occurs throughout life when participants engage in open and collaborative networks, communities, and openly shared repositories of information in a structured way to create their own culture of learning,” as the foundation for open pedagogy. OER can serve as a complementary tool for open pedagogy and DEI.

For Marquez, open pedagogy and DEI in practice at TAMUCC necessitates a heightened focus on “community” and the shared collective use of resources and knowledge for the purposes of empowerment and social justice. She borrows and builds upon the open pedagogy model of teaching and learning by Hegarty (2015) with a specific emphasis on the attribute of “Connected Community.”[7] Marquez understands the latter to involve acknowledging and supporting the student as a whole person and respecting the knowledge and experiences that they bring to the classroom. Acknowledgment and support must extend to the communities and networks of which the students are members, too. The benefits of employing an open pedagogy alongside using or creating OER in ways that emphasize “connected community” include enhanced collaborations, cross-cultural communications, and cross-cultural understanding. There is an important additional advantage of helping to close the equity gap in education for students and communities that have been excluded because of institutional, structural, and systemic barriers. Marquez’s students were able to leverage their distinct sets of knowledge, experiences, and skills in a “connected community” to add crucial content to Wikipedia and increase its reliability, validity, and public reach while getting real-time support for their professional development and passions at the same time. The process and space for creating OER and “connected community” should not disproportionately burden faculty and take advantage of uncompensated or unrewarded labor, however, because the very orientation of a social justice agenda is to be inclusive and fair. In short, meaningful and substantive DEI requires a focus on students and faculty including more evenly distributed costs and benefits.

Cost Concerns and Practicalities for Assessing OER

Anthony Zoccolillo started working at TAMUCC in Fall 2013 and is now an Associate Professional Professor in the Department of Psychology and Sociology. Despite teaching since 1996 and being formally involved in assessment for almost as long, Zoccolillo’s OER journey is more recent. In 2021, the Department of Psychology and Sociology completed a redesign of their General Psychology course to use OER. The department is in the process of completing their first year of the project. According to the department’s budget estimates, students will save $100,000 in just one year based on the cost of the previously required textbook. Although there was buy-in for redesigning the course because of huge financial savings from which students would benefit, the department soon realized that adopting OER involves multiple considerations and integrated planning for overall curriculum development and assessment which would come at a cost. The latter is what Zoccolillo will focus on in the psychology program in the coming years.
When academics think of assessment in higher education, they often think about student-level outcomes based on metrics that serve institutional goals of continuous improvement. For example, the current assessment of the General Psychology course at TAMUCC involves a rotation of achievement-based skills including critical thinking, written communication, multicultural competence, and empirical and quantitative reasoning. These are assessed using modified versions of the AAC&U Value Rubrics (Association of American Colleges and Universities 2009). While these types of assessment are important for all stakeholders in a higher education setting, it is also important to realize that assessment can serve other purposes.

Assessment can and should be a means of accurately pinpointing areas to increase equity by helping to identify and remove barriers that impact outcomes for students from marginalized groups (Singer-Freeman and Robinson 2020, 8). There are perceptions that using OER, open pedagogy, and OEP increase inclusivity, but how can we be sure that the practices are serving their intended purpose? Like many higher education institutions in the US, Zoccolillo has observed that assessment methods at all levels at TAMUCC do not usually factor in DEI. The biggest challenge Zoccolillo and others involved with assessment face is how to incorporate equity-minded assessment effectively and efficiently into standardized assessment methods. In a recent survey, more than half of all respondents indicated that increasing equity was in their top three challenges with assessment, with a full 21% indicating it was their single biggest challenge (Singer-Freeman and Robinson 2020, 7). Even though there is attention to the social mission of making education available to all, there is little clarity regarding the actual processes of OER and OEP within institutions or any clarity on whether this emphasis indeed serves the needs of disadvantaged learners (Lee 2020, 192–193).

When we view OER and OEP from a DEI standpoint for students and faculty, time cost can mean more than selecting, assembling, and editing content. OER also require a commitment to assessment practices that support using OER in an inclusive way. Data suggests that while traditional assessment of classroom assignments, formal essays, and exams can perpetuate equity gaps (Singer, Hobbs, and Robinson 2019, 15), the more formative types of assessment that are better suited to mitigate these gaps (e.g., frequent low-stakes quizzing/assignments, minute papers, and student response systems) carry with them additional costs. This type of assessment requires extra time, knowledge, and resources both in the creation and maintenance of such assessments, as well as the additional time grading and providing substantive and useful feedback.

Much of the existing research focuses directly on the time commitment to conduct assessment (e.g., Andrade et al. 2011, 160; Belikov and Bodily 2016, 241; Hassall and Lewis 2017, 78). However, a closer look at the research uncovers other barriers that translate into additional time and effort on the part of faculty, including a need for training (Murphy 2013, 214); lack of support, tools, and resources (Andrade et al. 2011, 160; Hassal and Lewis 2017, 79); and a lack of human resources necessary to complete a costly course redevelopment (Murphy 2013, 212). TAMUCC’s redesign of General Psychology was not without these costs. Zoccolillo underwent training as part of an OER Community of Practice to learn the basics of adopting and adapting OER as well as to fulfill training requirements imposed by the grant the department received for the redesign. Evaluating multiple OER textbooks for content and support was time consuming. Given the department’s comprehensive use of the materials released by the traditional textbook publisher with the standard curriculum design, course redevelopment with the chosen OER included adapting all in-class and assessment materials, as well as creating new materials. All of these tasks were done in addition to a full teaching and service load with one other General Psychology faculty member who contributed when they could. The development and deployment of proper assessment methods are being done in addition to the summative assessment that will continue to take place and without the support of additional administrative, research, or teaching assistants, time releases, or financial compensation to offset the real-time burden of faculty members’ investments.

When we consider the cost and inclusion aspects of OER and OEP, we can see the ways in which the affordability of higher education is a social justice issue, and the skyrocketing cost of textbooks is a major part of the escalating expenses. Current methods of assessment lose sight of the social justice component, however. Zoccolillo and his colleagues have not yet been able to solve this assessment matter in General Psychology at TAMUCC. While the redesign project is in its second full year, their sights must soon shift from the adoption and adaptation phase to an assessment phase with an eye toward efficacy, DEI, and sustainability.

Addressing DEI and social justice agendas during assessment phases can be hampered if there are no formal incentives or funding for faculty. Zoccolillo’s department did have grant support of $5,000 to complete the course redesign, but the grant funding only covered implementation and basic assessment. The grant funds were also given after all of the work was completed. The grant did not include funding for ongoing updates or long-term meaningful assessment. The department will have to figure out a way to assess the effectiveness of the redesign based on both traditional (i.e., outcome-based) and non-traditional (i.e., equity-based) approaches without compensating or incentivizing the faculty’s time and effort. It will be labor-intensive because effective and reliable assessment starts at the individual classroom level with a sustainable plan that improves course quality, retention, and grades and then flows up to a program level where the positives of the course redesigns will have to be weighed against the costs. Although OER resources are increasingly available at TAMUCC, those resources are scattered throughout different departments. Starting in 2022, the institution is attempting to centralize OER efforts but is overlooking assessment-related processes, structures, and incentives. It remains to be seen if or when assessment will be comprehensively integrated into the university’s OER strategic plans.

If we view OER and OEP as primarily for the benefit and empowerment of otherwise non-privileged learners (Lambert 2018, 239), then these goals should be reflected in our assessment plans and practices as well. This will require that higher education institutions shift from merely implementing OER either without assessment or with poor assessment practices, to adopting a properly integrated OER-OEP-DEI-Assessment system. Institutional goals should be aligned with transparent equity values and purposeful attempts to minimize the equity gaps that exist (McNair, Bensimon, and Malcom-Piqueux 2020, 17), and assessment is one way to know if institutions have done so, how well, and for whom.

Recommendations and Conclusion

This interdisciplinary case study illustrates how OER adoption and creation can benefit students at an HSI by saving them money and providing them with the skills necessary to become curators and producers of openly accessible knowledge. The time, labor, and resource costs involved for faculty are problematic, however. For long-term viability, sustainability, and DEI goals, institutions will need to provide OER stakeholders with sufficient and ongoing infrastructure, resources, and incentives to use, create, and assess OER in individual courses, within programs and departments, and across universities. Tangible examples include course releases, one-time startup funding, periodic maintenance funding, evaluation funding, revising promotion and tenure guidelines and policies, professional awards, professional recognition, development and training workshops, networking events, advising and mentoring opportunities, structured peer reviews, positive publicity, communities of practice, and technology tools such as software or hardware as needed. These kinds of examples could also help offset or minimize costs to those OER implementers who are tasked with changing the climate and culture of OER on their respective campuses.

TAMUCC is in the preliminary stages of exploring and implementing some of these recommendations, which influences the authors’ viewpoints in this case study. For institutions that have not yet started to build their OER infrastructure, the authors suggest factoring in these building blocks early in a scaffolded strategic plan to avoid the pitfalls of uncompensated and unrewarded labor. Where possible, planning for assessment should be incorporated from the beginning as well. To think about assessment after the fact perpetuates the myth that assessment is only about evaluating outcomes and ignores the fact that assessment should support the learning process.

Additionally, funding agencies should more heavily consider the value of OER as tools of DEI and redistributive justice for underrepresented and marginalized students and prioritize grants for faculty using, adapting, creating, and assessing OER at MSIs. Given that the COVID-19 pandemic likely exacerbated educational achievement gaps for underserved students, incentivizing the use of OER at institutions that disproportionately serve those communities needs to become a prioritized DEI initiative in higher education.

One last consideration is acknowledging the various roles that local, state, and national governments play in the context of shaping or limiting institutional initiatives for OER, open pedagogy, and OEP. If political actors and entities do not support OER and OEP as tools for DEI and redistributive justice, for instance, then public higher education institutions will face even more challenges than they already do in formally supporting their programs, faculty, and students. Future case studies could examine the similarities and differences for OER-related processes and outcomes at MSIs within and between states. Such data could better inform strategic planning, decision-making, and evaluations so that institutions may improve their OER statistics, but more importantly, align and fulfill their promises of DEI for all stakeholders.