Plymouth State University Biology faculty have been working diligently to transition from requiring their students to purchase commercial textbooks to using Open Educational Resources (OERs) in their courses. OERs are openly-licensed learning materials created by faculty, scholars, and researchers that are free for anybody to use and share, and which also allow for revision, addition, and customization by users.
(photo courtesy C. Chabot)
Several faculty members have been working with OERs and other free resources for years, but this year, Biology coordinator Dr. Chris Chabot has helped to establish a program-wide effort to transition to open materials. Chabot says, “We are excited about this move to free open resources. This will both save our students a lot of money and allow us to tailor the material to better fit the students’ specific needs.”
An example of the cost savings that students will experience in this transition is Biological Science I, a course required for all Biology majors. Until recently, students had been required to purchase a textbook (Campbell’s Biology) that cost $140. Now, students will use the highly-rated OpenStax Biology textbook, which is free online; they can browse on or download to their computers, phones, kindles, tablets or any other device. If students prefer a bound and printed version for the OpenStax book, the series of printed textbooks usually runs between $30 and $50 per book. With 96 students slated to take Biological Science I in the Fall, this one book shift alone could safe PSU students and their families as much as $13,440. And that’s just one class!
This coming Fall, 54 of the 57 Biology courses will utilize OER and other no-cost alternatives, and will have a $0 cost for learning materials (there may still be the usual lab fees for some of these courses). Chabot says that he is hopeful that within a year, all Biology courses will charge students nothing for learning materials. Ultimately, the program hopes to offer a Z-Degree, meaning that the Biology major at Plymouth State would guarantee no cost for learning materials across all of its required courses, including math, chemistry, and physics, but that goal is still a ways out on the horizon.
Plymouth State has actively been encouraging its faculty to transition to OERs since 2015, and many faculty have made the switch across many programs. Since 2016, the University System of New Hampshire has funded ten faculty members per year at PSU to redesign their courses so they use more open materials, and Plymouth State currently offers small review and adoption grants for faculty who put in the extra time to evaluate, curate, organize, and implement OERs in their courses. The Plymouth State General Education faculty have designed an OER for the required First-Year course, “Tackling a Wicked Problem,” which all students take and which now has no cost for books. In addition, many faculty are also incorporating “open pedagogy” into their courses that use OER; open pedagogy involves students in the contribution of work to the knowledge commons, and works with students as partners in the creation of teaching materials, scholarship, and/or curriculum.
Some Biology faculty are especially excited about these pedagogical benefits of using openly licensed materials. Biology professor Brigid O’Donnell offers: “Why I’m doing this? Well, because it is incredibly flexible, allows us to be at the cutting edge of scientific findings, make use of excellent online materials, and shift/change our content in a fluid and nimble fashion.”
O’Donnell continues,
It also allows me to break free from “teaching from the textbook” and covering specific topics in a certain order, when there are pressing new areas that textbooks don’t even cover yet! PFAS chemicals as endocrine disruptors linking to locally important environmental concerns in my “Ecology & Development” course is a good example of this.
The Plymouth State Biology program was inspired by similar progress happening in Biology departments at both Keene State and in the Community College System of New Hampshire; faculty in all of these New Hampshire institutions are collaborating to share ideas and materials to facilitate cost savings for our students. The New Hampshire Open Education Public Consortium, primarily supported by OER leaders and librarians at Manchester Community College, Granite State College, and Plymouth State, is developing a new hub that will make it even easier for faculty in our state to share the OERs that they create or use in any discipline.
Plymouth State expects cost savings from OER to soar for students and their families in the next 1-3 years, which will be welcome news for those who struggle to afford college. Plymouth State is committed to being affordable and accessible to all learners, and OER is just one way we demonstrate our commitment. Congratulations to Biology for being an inspiration to all our faculty for what can be achieved when a program pulls together on behalf of students!
For more information about OER at Plymouth State, contact the Open Learning & Teaching Collaborative.
