The Migration to OER

For the past couple of years, the school has been pushing various departments to start adopting Open Educational Resources (OER) for various courses to help reduce educational costs to students. It has finally trickled down to our department where, starting this coming Fall, the General Physics courses will start using OER texts for the first time.

I have zero problem with doing this. I remember when I was a student, textbooks were hugely expensive. Adopting OER texts for General Physics courses will save students quite a chunk of change, especially if they, or their parents, are footing the costs.

The only issue I have is that, using texts from various publishers doesn't stop just at the textbook itself. I've been using Pearson and Cengage for General Physics texts, and they come with their online services consisting of the e-text and homework/quizzes capabilities.

But even that does not convey everything. Both Cengage and Pearson's website offers rather substantial student support that I have made used of, especially when we went remote. When I assign homework on Pearson's Mastering website, for example, I often select one or two "tutorial" items. These are questions in which, if the students are stuck, there are guided hints and prompts to help students overcome the barrier or difficulty at that stage. I find these types of tutorial very useful for the students and often had the students attempt one of them during class session.

The other thing that I find useful is the "adaptive learning" feature. I can set it up so that if a student struggled with one problem and finally thinks that he/she understood how to solve it, it will prompt the student to solve a similar problem to that one to see if the understanding can be nailed down. The student then has the chance to really test his/her understanding in solving the similar problem, and I can see for certain of the student's progress.

Unfortunately, none of these extensive feature are available in any of the OER sources. These features were extremely useful during remote learning where I'm not there to help the students in person. Yet, these features gave real-time feedback on how the students are doing and assisting the students in solving the problem, all done automatically without needing my intervention. These are what I will miss when I start using OER texts because so far, from what I can see, they only provide the text and maybe a set of homework questions, and that's it. It is no different than the old-fashioned way when I was in college, except that these are in electronic form.

It is still months away from the start of the Fall semester, but I'm already thinking and planning ahead on how to approach this. We will definitely be back to in-person instructions, so maybe the need for all the bells and whistles of online capabilities might not be as great as it is now. Still, I'm anticipating a few hiccups as I dive into a new set of challenges in running a class.

Stay tuned....

Zz.