In our blog post series, we’ve explored how OER offer an alternative to high textbook costs, rely on Creative Commons licenses to enable sharing/distribution, and represent an educational trend that is spreading across CUNY and beyond.
Part of this widespread excitement stems from the ways that OER allow for new interactions between students and course content.
One option is to integrate student feedback into the course texts themselves. Plymouth State University Professor Robin DeRosa notes, “Students are the perfect people to help create textbooks, since they are the most keenly tuned in to what other students will need in order to engage with the material in meaningful ways.” On her blog, DeRosa explains that there are many ways to do this – for example, by adding Hypothesis to a website and enabling live, interactive annotation.
The Wikipedia Foundation proposes that engagement with its sites can be educational. A student involved with one of their projects reflects, “Where a paper will most likely only be read by a single professor, these edits are documented on the web for all to see. While the stakes are high, so are the rewards.”
If you’re interested in learning more about how to engage students with OER, check out “A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students,” itself an open textbook compiled by Rebus Community, and with contributions from multiple authors.
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