The Future of Education

UNESCO defines Open Educational Resources (OER) as “learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, which permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others” [1]. This paper presents the experiences of five faculty who collaboratively created an OER textbook [2] to be used for graduate-level educational research courses. The first phase of the project included engaging with the principles of open licensing, accessibility, and andragogy while identifying gaps in the existing textbook and imagining an alternative which responded to the needs of the students. While the previously used commercial textbook had dictated the curriculum, critically examining and creating a new curriculum design became the focus of the project and led to authorship, and the politics of knowledge production. Through structured collaborative inquiry, participating faculty conceptualized the scope, learning outcomes, organization, and andragogical features of the OER textbook intended for an instructional context. Pressbooks [3], a user-friendly platform, was used to create the digital book. After a peer-review process; and piloting the digital textbook, it became accessible through the university scholars repository. It was also added to the Open Textbook Library [4] and was “free to use and distribute.” Analysis of faculty conversations and collaborative artifacts suggested that this approach 1) strengthened curricular coherence; and 2) promoted a shared sense of ownership in course design. Implications signified that the OER textbook development offered a scalable and low-risk entry point for faculty engagement supporting sustainable adoption while cultivating institutional cultures of openness, collaboration, and equity.