Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed; Calculating (and Acknowledging) the Costs of OER
"The news releases regularly roll in to the email inbox
these days with headlines like "College X has saved students $5 million
by adopting open educational resources." Not only have these
initiatives made a higher education more affordable, the colleges and
universities note, but students who might have forgone buying an
expensive textbook in the past are actually getting and using the OER
content, ideally contributing to their academic success.
Amid those successes, rarely mentioned is the reality that in many
cases, the institution itself is picking up the costs that were formally
borne by the students, through some combination of direct subsidies to
instructors to create the content and a loss of textbook revenue to a
campus store, among other costs.
A session this week at the annual meeting of the National Association
of College and University Business Officers addressed that issue
head-on, in a way that would be unusual at a conference of OER
advocates. It's not that the session took a skeptical view of OER -- far
from it. The featured institution, the Pierce College
District in Washington State, has fully embraced the use of open
resources for affordability and efficacy, among other reasons. But the
enthusiasm of the community college's open education project manager,
Quill West, was balanced by the even-keeled acknowledgment of Choi
Halladay, the district's vice president of administrative services, that
OER comes at a price to the institution -- though a price very much
worth paying, he said."
Issues and developments related to IP, AI, and OM, examined in the IP and tech ethics graduate courses I teach at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information. My Bloomsbury book "Ethics, Information, and Technology", coming in Summer 2025, includes major chapters on IP, AI, OM, and other emerging technologies (IoT, drones, robots, autonomous vehicles, VR/AR). Kip Currier, PhD, JD
Showing posts with label textbook revenues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label textbook revenues. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
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