Open Educational Resources: Financial Accessibility is Important, Too

Doug Ensley

Since the beginning of the 2021 spring semester, Shippensburg University students have saved over $100,000 on classroom materials, thanks to the efforts of faculty in the SU Mathematics Department. In that time, five different courses, affecting over 1000 students, have changed textbook requirements, switching from a commercial textbook platform that cost each student approximately $100 to a combination of free Open Education Resources (OERs) and a free platform for online homework called MyOpenMath. The impacted courses—College Algebra, Precalculus, and Calculus 1, 2, 3—are among the most impactful for STEM majors. When we make the corresponding changes to introductory statistics courses during 2022-2023 and to the business calculus courses soon thereafter, we will be impacting over 1500 students per year, more than 60% of our annual enrollment in mathematics and statistics.

There are often concerns about open source products and resources, concerns mostly centered around content coverage, quality assurance, and accessibility. Many OERs are available in an editable form such as LaTeX, PreTeXt, HTML, or even MS Word, and most use a form of ‘share and share alike’ licensing (like Creative Commons) that allows an instructor to modify, delete, reorder, etc. The highly customizable nature of open source materials ensures that content is extensible and quality concerns can be addressed directly, albeit both come with a commensurate resource commitment from the faculty and administration. More on that below.

Accessibility of the material (such as accommodating screen readers for text and providing closed captioning for videos) is a bit trickier. Many commercial products take this responsibility seriously and allocate significant resources toward it. However, they do so at a price (literally) to everyone. In our experience at Ship, using course material involving no cost to the student is also addressing an important accessibility concern, though for a different student demographic. Our primary motivation in this project has been for our large (and growing) population of economically disadvantaged students to have the learning tools they need from day one.

With open source products, the responsibility lies with the instructor, not a publisher, to ensure that content is accessible, but fortunately the products themselves at least support this effort. The online homework system (MyOpenMath) we used for this project offers tools and advice for making course content accessible, particularly for screen reading and closed captioning, and the user community is tremendously supportive through user forums and how-to videos.

You might have noticed that this screenshot has headings that look like a full-fledged content management system (CMS), and that’s because it is. You can maintain a gradebook, create discussion forums, post learning objects, and use the system as a communication tool, just like any good CMS.

You can even embed the various chunks of MyOpenMath into most existing campus content management systems. Some Ship faculty ran their courses through MyOpenMath as a standalone CMS (either supplementing or replacing our campus CMS) and other instructors simply embedded the online homework part of MyOpenMath into their normal campus system (we use D2L Brightspace), which made the MyOpenMath interface completely invisible to the students. There are pros and cons to each approach.

How do you ensure the content supports local student learning objectives?

Can you simply copy a MyOpenMath course and use it, as is? Yes, you can browse through a wide array of courses that are shared on the site, and most will include a specific open source textbook in some format or other. Once you make a copy of a course, you will be able to customize it to your heart’s content. Within most courses, you will see a link to an open source textbook and folders for each textbook chapter/section containing links to online assessments or videos for that unit. Some courses have even more structure (like copies of handouts, discussion forums, and more), and you can easily remove/hide/rearrange until it suits you.

Of course, many of you will want to make changes: What exercises are provided? Which problems are assigned? How are answers checked? (Do fractions have to be reduced? Are fractional answers required?) If you are planning a large, multi-section switch, you will need someone (or sometwo) to take the lead on piloting and organizing the course materials to be consistent with what your department is accustomed to. This could mean rearranging (or deleting parts) of the open source textbooks, setting up custom problem libraries in MyOpenMath, and organizing some training for colleagues once it is all set up. If you are using an OER textbook that is not associated with an existing course in MyOpenMath, then the “row to hoe” is a bit longer, but you can take advantage of a large public question library to find existing homework problems fairly easily. Once you become familiar with the library structure, building out your own homework sets goes pretty quickly.

For our project at Shippensburg we made the following textbook choices. I am just offering these as specific examples, not intended to be taken as recommendations. We are still in our first couple of semesters at this, so some settling may occur.

How did the switch go?

Several Ship professors are known for their extensive use of technology in teaching mathematics, so it is no surprise that we have been able to pull this off. But even with our collective experience, this was no small lift. Many people worked on this: editing questions, organizing question libraries, setting up course shells over the breaks, and meeting regularly throughout the semester. There are hundreds of person-hours of work reflected in this effort, and it speaks volumes about Ship Math faculty that they did the work for no compensation, motivated entirely by the needs of the students. Much of the work was spent creating a local library of customized problems that was organized in a way that was familiar to our instructors based on the commercial products we had been using. As more people became involved, the work accelerated, and subsequent changes should be easier now that the entire department is familiar with MyOpenMath. And of course, there are no other courses as entangled as those in the sequence “College Algebra through Calculus,” so future work can be focused on one course at a time.

The general feeling of the department faculty is that the switch to MyOpenMath has improved assessment efforts over the previous commercial system. MyOpenMath is highly customizable, so instructors are better able to align assessment activities to student-learning objectives and course goals.

How do you get started?

There are many good open source textbooks out there written in a variety of formats. Those with both web-based and PDF versions will maximize your options for staying accessible to students who have challenges with hearing, visual, and motor functions.

The American Institute of Mathematics (https://aimath.org/textbooks/) curates a list of textbooks that have been reviewed.

The OpenSTAX project (https://openstax.org/subjects/math) has many more.

The list of books at https://www.opentextbookstore.com/ include many that have sample courses already set up in MyOpenMath (see below).

Then set up an account in MyOpenMath at http://myopenmath.com, peruse the resources in the

training course, watch some getting started videos, and reach out to the community for help. You will even find some already-curated problem libraries matched to some of the open-source textbooks in the lists above!

Doug Ensley is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics from Shippensburg University, where he devoted a 29-year teaching career to curriculum, pedagogy, and instructional technology. He is currently PI for the MAA OPEN Math grant, an NSF-funded project to provide online professional development to mathematics instructors.

INCLUSIVITY, MAA LEADERS, TEACHING & LEARNINGAnnie PetittDoug Ensley, Open Educational Resources, OER, MyOpenMath