Findings
Finding 4: Student Experience and Agency
Robert "Bob" Awkward and Caroline Sinkinson
While there is a dedicated component of the Rubric focused on students, participants in the pilot also centered students throughout the self-assessment process. The grantees stressed the critical importance of student engagement, awareness, advocacy, and input for programmatic success and ongoing promotion of the equity dimensions of OER. Grantees provided numerous valuable insights related to student experience and agency, including: elevating students’ voices, creating mechanisms for student input, designing learning that is culturally responsive, and student awareness and understanding of automatic textbook billing programs.
Observations
Student Voice and Input
Finding effective ways to capture students’ perspectives and voices was a significant goal for many grantees, whether with survey instruments, focus groups, student employees, or collaborations with student organizations or government. Grantees found value in engaging with students to gain a deeper understanding of their use and awareness of OER. The interactions helped practitioners think more intentionally and responsively about what strategies, approaches, and tools would best match the needs of their unique students. Furthermore, student interactions provided opportunities to teach and familiarize students with OER and their impact on creating equitable learning environments. Students’ perspectives also provided compelling evidence that could sway educators, policy makers, legislatures, and institutional leaders not yet convinced of the role OER play in addressing equity and student success.
Several grantees were eager to learn more student engagement strategies from colleagues and peers. They noted that there is still much more to be learned from students and any support in creating effective engagement and advocacy strategies would be welcome. They also noted the need to develop better mechanisms for assessing students’ access to technology and internet connectivity to ensure equitable access to course materials.
Maricopa Community College District plans to hire and train a student worker to engage with their OER initiatives, providing an opportunity for the student to learn about OER, copyright, accessibility and more. This model may be of interest to other institutions. In addition to supporting OER programming, the grantee had plans to leverage the student’s perspective to create a student awareness campaign with language meaningful to a student audience.
Alignment with Campus Initiatives Related to Student Success
Grantees found it was successful to attach and clearly align OER programs with complimentary campaigns on campus, for example, initiatives to enhance students’ sense of belonging or to strengthen student success. One grantee planned to position OER as key to promoting a sense of belonging specifically in efforts to serve Latinx students at an emerging Hispanic Serving Institution. When speaking with students in the classroom and outside of it, grantees suggested that framing OER as a student success initiative could be compelling to various audiences and stakeholders.
Culturally Responsive Pedagogies
When promoting OER to campus colleagues, several grantees highlighted the ability to customize and localize OER to better represent students and to be relevant to their contexts. Grantees observed that the ability to make materials culturally responsive has an enormous potential impact on students’ sense of belonging. In contrast, when OER were adapted without customization, students were notably disappointed, which may lead to poor student impressions of OER. For that reason, some grantees encouraged their communities to carefully match OER customizations to their teaching approaches, assessment strategies, and students’ individual needs.
Grantees demonstrated a desire to learn more about culturally responsive pedagogy and the ways in which OER can help to create more diverse and tailored representation in course materials. Additional grantees shared a goal of enhancing open pedagogical approaches in unison with OER.
Automatic Textbook Programs and Agency
Several grantees are struggling with the implementation of automatic textbook billing programs and the misleading language that accompanies them. There is a sense of urgency among grantees to better communicate that students have choices, agency, and opportunities to not fall prey to these programs. The degree to which grantees were interacting with bookstores varied a great deal across institutions. Many have plans to cultivate those relationships to counteract these challenges and to take advantage of the bookstore’s student facing position on campus.
Recommendations
- Encourage grantees to include students early and often.
- Invite grantees to share materials and methods used to gather student feedback for reference of fellow grantees and future users.
- Provide grantees with models or examples of engaging students in OER awareness, education, and advocacy (collaboration with student government, awareness campaigns, student OER employees, ambassadors, student-led awards for open educators.)
- Invite grantees to share student engagement strategies with co-participants early in the grant cycle.
- Provide content or references for learning more about culturally responsive pedagogy.
- Encourage grantees to foreground equity impacts rather than only highlighting cost saving benefits when discussing OER with students.
- Encourage grantees to leverage student voices to shift faculty reliance on commercial course materials.
- Share institutional language examples to frame OER as a student success initiative and to counteract harms of automatic textbook billing programs.