Inclusive and Accessible OER

The purpose of this chapter is to provide tools and important considerations to guide instructors in creating inclusive and accessible Open Educational Resources (OER) for misrepresented and marginalized students in academia: people with disabilities; queer, trans, and non-binary folks; and Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and other people of color.

In 1984, the poet and essayist Adrienne Rich wrote in her essay Invisibility in Academe : “invisibility is a dangerous and painful condition (...) when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.” OERs, as well as providing different options from traditional textbooks, can also push back against the invisibilization of individuals and communities described by Rich.

OERs already promote certain material equality among students since they can be distributed freely. Still, they may not necessarily be diverse nor represent marginalized students or empower them to speak out equally. Achieving this, to a large extent, is the task of course instructors and institutions, with the power to create, edit and distribute inclusive and accessible OERs.

Image by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash licensed under the Unsplash License

Inclusive OER

Educators can easily revise open materials to make them diverse and inclusive because open licenses allow OERs to be adaptable (review our chapters Creating and Publishing New OER, Revising and Remixing OER, and Reusing and Redistributing OER to Students). Getting editable files from traditional textbooks is uncommon, so this is an advantage of OERs. In the United States, almost half of the college students are people of color, while more than 70% of their instructors are white cisgender men. These educators are the ones who, for the most part, contribute to creating and peer-reviewing traditional textbooks. As a result, the examples in these books and the images often reproduce the notions of these white cisgender men.

To diversify classroom materials, educators may revise examples, exercises, images, or questions in open textbooks to represent their local context and the experiences of students of color and other unrepresented students. In this sense, when revising or creating an OER, instructors may ask themselves:

- Who are my students?

- Who is not represented in the material?

- Are there derogatory or stereotypical viewpoints on marginalized communities?

- Which experiences are reflected in the examples of the textbook?

- Who appears in the images?

By reflecting on who their students are and how they identify, instructors can review who is left out of the open resources and create or include pre-existing materials about them. However, making teaching materials inclusive and diverse goes beyond just changing names and images in a text. In a way, what it requires is a shift in perspective. Instead of asking what my students should be like, the instructor can ask: from what point of view do my students look at the world, and how can I approach that perspective so that they feel included in my class and I can better communicate with them?

These kinds of questions are crucial if, for example, an educator wants to revise an OER to be queer-inclusive. Because traditional textbooks replicate the notions of white cisgender and typically straight men, many common conceptions of "universality" in traditional textbooks are informed by an assumption that the "universal student" must be heterosexual, allosexual, and cisgender, which leaves out queer and transgender students. The ease of adapting OERs can help address this drawback.

As Sabia Prescott explains in Supporting LGBTQ-Inclusive Teaching. How Open Digital Materials Can Help, with the growth of the LGBTQIA+ movement, resources about the queer community have also increased exponentially. However, the LGBTQIA+ community is not a homogeneous, fixed community. The open and adaptable nature of OER facilitates the update of materials as the queer community grows and evolves in the ways in which members describe and represent themselves. This openness and adaptability mean OERs are better equipped to evolve alongside marginalized communities than traditional textbooks.

Having teachers edit or create their OERs with these questions and concerns in mind can not only improve the student's engagement with the classes but also enhance their life outside of the educational institution. Since students can keep the openly licensed materials even after the course ends, having queer-inclusive and multiracial OERs could also encourage students to share these resources outside the classroom, thus impacting their communities.

Such inclusive textbooks are not yet common in the academic world. The OER community is lagging behind even in some basic inclusions. For instance, most OERs are in English and not readily available in other languages or dialects. In addition, most are only available on the Internet or through technological media, to which not everyone in the world has easy access. However, all these issues can be solved: as they are editable and sharable, OERs can be translated and printed without permission.

Accessibility with OER

With OERs, instructors can lower barriers to access and facilitate the usage of course materials for people with disabilities. Educators can ask themselves: How may someone with disabilities approach the materials of my class? Do my viewpoints communicate a particular idea of able-bodiedness that exclude people with disabilities?

Open education advocates Amanda Coolidge, Sue Doner, Tara Robertson, and Josie Gray published an Accessibility Toolkit, an open text that provides resources to create accessible OERs. The toolkit itself models the accessibility for which it advocates: All content can be navigated with a keyboard; links, headings, and tables are formatted to work with screen readers; images have alt tags (check what an alt tag is on this article); information is not conveyed by color alone; and there is the option to adjust font size. The toolkit likewise teaches how to organize content and use videos, mathematical formulas, or color contrast in open textbooks so they can be used by people with the widest possible range of abilities and who operate in the widest possible range of situations (environments, conditions, and circumstances).

There are a number of other resources that can be consulted to consider when making digital products accessible. At NYU, there is a Digital Accessibility Checklist and a list of testing tools to review the accessibility of the virtual content you are assembling or presenting. In addition, the Inclusive Design Research Center created a project to support educators who want to design more inclusive open resources: the Flexible Learning for Open Education (FLOE). On their website, you can review the Inclusive Learning Design Handbook, the Inclusive Design Guide, Weavly (a coding environment co-designed for children with complex disabilities), or We Count (a project addressing bias, discrimination, and barriers to participation within the field of data science and data-driven systems).

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Creating inclusive and accessible textbooks is an important step, but still insufficient to fully address systemic classroom and societal issues. The next chapter, Participation and Social Justice with OER, examines how educators can use OERs to build a socially just education.

The information in this chapter was adapted from

-Supporting LGBTQ-Inclusive Teaching: How Open Digital Materials Can Help by Sabia Prescott for New America,

-Centering Diversity and Inclusion by Iowa State University ,

-A Reflection on the “Open for Antiracism” Course by Kim Grewe for Community College Consortium for OER,

-OER and Accessibility: Working Toward Inclusive Learning by Camille Thomas for SPARC ,

-the Accessibility Toolkit by Amanda Coolidge, Sue Doner, Tara Robertson, and Josie Gray for BCcampus,

-the FLOE Project by the Inclusive Design Research Center , and

-Can OER be more Inclusive and Equitable? by Prathima Appaji for Creative Commons USA

all of them licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

There is a quotation from Adrienne Rich, taken from “Invisibility in Academe” (1984) in Blood, Bread, and Poetry. Selected Prose 1979-1985, published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1994.

Go to: What is an Open Educational Resource (OER)?; OER and its Benefits; Finding OER; Evaluating OER; Revising and Remixing OER; Creating and Publishing OER; Reusing and Redistributing OER to Students; The Myths of OER; Critical Perspectives for Engaging with OER, or Sustainable Financial Models for Funding OERs