Critical Perspectives for Engaging with OER
OERs have been around for several decades but are still seen as “new,” especially in institutions where these resources are less commonly used. One word frequently used to support or criticize OER is “sustainability.”
Sustainability is sometimes used to defend open resources since OER allows a more cost-efficient education for students and supports environmental sustainability by decreasing the reliance on physical materials, such as paper, and having a stronger presence in the digital realm. On the other hand, the word sustainability is used with apprehension when referring to labor sustainability. Institutions often consider the distribution and creation of OER to be unsustainable.
Thus, in this chapter, we want to review and critically present three issues that we consider fundamental to understanding the general discourse of open resources: “environmental sustainability,” “cost sustainability,” and “labor sustainability.”
Image Sustainability by Made from the Noun Project licensed under CC by 4.0 (free use).
Environmental Sustainability
Although it would be easy to refer only to how OERs could end the unnecessary printing of books and decrease the use of paper, it is crucial to mention how the Internet, hosted on servers and transmitted via networks that are powered by fossil fuels, is also part of the climate crisis.
As stated by the authors of The Overlooked Environmental Footprint of Increasing Internet Use , the energy of data centers, where these servers are located and which often comes from fossil fuels, use 1% of global energy, which is more than what several countries usually employ.1 Water and land use in these data centers are of equal concern. According to the same article, what they exploit is equivalent to filling a million Olympic-size swimming pools. The Internet employs approximately 3,400 square meters of land worldwide, the size of Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and New York combined.2
Many organizations and activists are calling for a greener digital world. For example, in the Digital Humanities and the Climate Crisis manifesto, the authors “aim to surface the ecological impacts of our work while learning with and from our DH community about ways to reduce harm to the environment and the people most impacted by environmental injustices.”
The first step to changing this situation is to be aware of it. On the Branch website, you can find articles or artistic pieces on this subject. We recommend reading Envisioning the Sustainable Internet, Green Tech: What Solutions Are Being Advocated? , Data Garden, and “If I am a Techie, How Can I Help Solve Climate Change?”
We still advocate for OERs because, although it will not solve de facto all of the world’s problems, it does help solve others. In principle, it can make the cost of education more sustainable for students.
Cost Sustainability with OER
Since OERs are created with open licenses (you can review our chapter on open licenses, Creating and Publishing OER), the creation, publication, and distribution of these materials can be done at a low cost. Thus, OERs make education more economically sustainable for students. As evidenced by a U.S. Government Accountability Office study (College Textbooks: Students Have Greater Access to Textbook Information), the price of textbooks has skyrocketed more than three times the inflation rate for decades. Some college and university students can spend up to $200 per book.
OERs are a solution to this problem because they can be distributed free digitally, printing is possible and affordable, and they can be kept even after the class ends. As the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) proposes, resources that would otherwise be spent on textbook purchases can be redirected to technology, educational improvement, or debt reduction.
However, it is still difficult for many institutions, in general, and professors, in particular, to be willing to teach their classes with open resources. There are prejudices surrounding these materials that have been disputed (review our chapter, The Myths of OER). One of the most significant difficulties is that using OERs to their full potential (remixing, revising, distributing, etc.) requires work that people within academic communities are not used to.
As David Wiley states in his article On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education , commissioned by the OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), any university or college adopting OER will face two fundamental challenges: 1) sustaining the production and distribution of OER, and 2) sustaining their use and reuse by faculty and students.
Human resources, workflow processes, and technological equipment are needed to produce and distribute OERs. They require people who compile content and create the files from their computers to distribute the material over the Internet, upload it to the cloud or a platform, and those who print it, if necessary, and distribute it physically.
Labor Sustainability for OER
Due to the labor that OERs require, many institutions add the creation and distribution of open resources to the workloads of librarians and faculty. In the Rebus Community’s April 2019 Office Hours dedicated to Defining The Invisible Labour of OER, several OER librarians reported that they had to work with open resources in addition to their primary job, and there were so many roles to serve that it was impossible to do it as an additional job.
So, one of the first questions that may arise is: who will do the work of administering and implementing OERs in an academic institution? How will that labor be compensated? How will it be equitably distributed? If OERs appeared to question traditional educational materials, they could also be a source for revisiting labor sustainability within academic institutions.
Lindsay Inge Carpenter and Jessica Dai, concerned with this issue and worried that librarianship is feminized but not feminist, in their article Bad (Feminist) Librarians: Theories and Strategies for OER Librarianship suggest that employees should:
- ask the right questions: “How does OER align with institutional priorities?”, “What percentage of my time will be spent on OER?” and “What resources will I have available to support me in this work?,”3
- document their labor: position descriptions, workplan, journaling,
- and build community through listservs, social media, and communities of practice. (Holyoke Community College Library’s list of OER listservs is a useful resource for those looking to connect with others about OER work).
To create communities of practice, they suggest bringing together similarly positioned OER librarians to coordinate regular conversations to discuss open resources. For example, within NYU Libraries, an OER Learning Group meets monthly to examine different topics around open resources inside and outside the University.
A question remains about the institution’s budget to pay for creating and distributing these free resources. There are ways to incentivize OER work without altering budgets. For example, the University of British Columbia's Guide to Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure Procedures indicates that instructors who create or distribute open resources are rewarded in tenure and promotion processes. In our next chapter, Sustainable Financial Models for Funding OERs , we will delve more deeply into this topic.
The Commonwealth of Learning, in a discussion on Teaching in a Digital Age, states that OERs are like coal, which by itself is valuable, but needs to be mined, stored, shipped, and processed to bring out their potential. We prefer to think of OERs as plants: with sun and water, they survive, but to reach their maximum splendor, they need care and time.
The information in the first part of this chapter was adapted from
- PennState, OER and Low Cost Materials at Penn State,
- On the Sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education by David Wiley, commissioned by the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) for the project on Open Educational Resources,
- Defining The Invisible Labour of OER , by the Rebus Community,
- Bad (Feminist) Librarians: Theories and Strategies for OER Librarianship, by Lindsay Inge Carpenter and Jessica Dai,
all of them licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The information in the Environmental Sustainability section was adapted from the Digital Humanities and the Climate Crisis manifesto, licensed under a CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. The metaphor of OER as coal originated from a discussion in the course Teaching in a Digital Age , published by the Commonwealth of Learning.
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, or The Myths of OER
1. [Renee Obringer, Benjamin Rachunok, Debora Maia-Silva, Maryam Arbabzadeh, Roshanak Nateghi, Kaveh Madani, The overlooked environmental footprint of increasing Internet use, Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Volume 167, 2021.]↩ 2. [Baillot, Anne, James Baker, et al. A Manifesto. Digital Humanities and the Climate Crisis. https://dhc-barnard.github.io/dhclimate/. Accessed 22 July 2022.]↩ 3. [Dai, Jessica Y. and Lindsay Inge Carpenter. Bad (Feminist) Librarians: Theories and Strategies for OER Librarianship. The International Journal of Open Educational Resources. Accessed 22 July 2022. ]↩