Open Educational Resources: OER and Equity

Practical tips and guidelines for building representative voices into OER and learning materials.

The Equity Through OER Rubric includes three broad organizational categories, each with several dimensions, and each of which is essential to build and
sustain capacity. The categories represent not only areas of focus and engagement, but also stakeholder communities that sometimes intersect in terms of
practice and responsibility: Students, Practitioners, and Leadership/Administrators. Within these categories, rubric users are asked to engage and evaluate
themselves along a set of key dimensions.

The Peralta Equity Rubric is a research-based course (re)design evaluation instrument to help teachers make online course experiences more equitable for all students. The rubric’s criteria include: addressing students’ access to technology and different types of support (both academic and non-academic); increasing the visibility of the instructor’s commitment to inclusion; addressing common forms of bias (e.g., implicit bias, image and representation bias, interaction bias); helping students make connections (e.g., between course topics and their lives; with the other students); and following universal design for learning principles.

This training approaches curriculum design using open resources and practices, universal design and an equity lens to improve course materials.

While a growing body of literature documents the benefits of converting courses to use OER, there is little research available that examines what teaching practice looks like in the OER classroom and how it affects students. Teaching and Learning with OER addresses the urgent need to better understand how the use of OER can support educational equity, particularly in educational settings that serve historically marginalized student populations.

The report identifies five dimensions of open education and culturally responsive teaching:

Study agency and ownership, or the extent to which the course and positions students as leaders of their learning
Inclusive content, or how the instructor brings in diverse perspectives and tailors the content to students’ backgrounds
Collaborative knowledge generation, or how students apply/develop new theories or contribute to “renewable” or generative assignments.
Critical consciousness, or how the instructor provides students with real-world assignments, decolonizes the curriculum, and addresses power imbalances
Classroom culture, or how the instructor cultivates strong relationships and an inclusive environment

This article reports the results of a large-scale study (21,822 students) regarding the impact of course-level faculty adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER). Results indicate that OER adoption does much more than simply save students money and address student debt concerns. OER improve end-of-course grades and decrease DFW (D, F, and
Withdrawal letter grades) rates for all students. They also improve course grades at greater rates and decrease DFW rates at greater rates for Pell recipient students, part-time students, and populations historically underserved by higher education. OER address affordability, completion, attainment gap concerns, and learning. These findings contribute to a broadening perception of the value of OERs and their relevance to the great challenges facing higher education today.

This paper provides several recommendations to increase accessibility within OER and help design more accessible OER for students with functional diversity.

The paper begins by outlining the method of texts selection, including defining the three principles of social justice (redistributive, recognitive and representational justice) used as an analytical lens.

Book chapter detailing bringing inclusivity into course design.

Design matters in higher education. Inclusive design and design justice provide frameworks and strategies that are attentive to learners for whom education has not typically been designed.

This chapter explores how we can ensure that learning materials are not only affordable, but equitable for a diverse population.

A series of four webinars focused on ways to use OER for antiracism education.

“Open Pedagogy,” as we engage with it, is a site of praxis, a place where theories about learning, teaching, technology, and social justice enter into a conversation with each other and inform the development of educational practices and structures. This site is dynamic, contested, constantly under revision, and resists static definitional claims.

Teaching to Promote Inclusion and Celebrate Diversity

This report aims to help set a research and practice agenda for education leaders that envisions ways to combine lessons learned from both the LGBTQ advocacy and open education fields.