Social Work and the Open Education Movement
Matthew DeCarlo
Editor’s Note: Matthew DeCarlo is an assistant professor of social work in the School of Social Work at Radford University. In this blog post, he describes the open educational resources (OER) movement and how social work educators can get involved.
Why should social work care about open educational resources?
The rising cost of textbooks is an issue of social justice for social work education. The average undergraduate student in the United States, according to The College Board (2017), spends $1250 on textbooks each academic year. Two years ago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2016) reported the cost of textbooks increased at a faster rate (87.5%) than tuition (62.7%), housing (50.5%), and all other student costs. Students report that textbook costs are more financially stressful than meals and food, healthcare, and housing—with 43% skipping meals and 70% getting a job to pay for textbooks (Cengage, 2018).
Although dollar-for-dollar, textbooks are less of a financial burden to students than other costs, the high cost of textbooks negatively impacts student academic performance and retention. A survey of all students at Florida higher education institutions found that due to high textbook prices, 67% of students do not purchase the required textbook, 38% of students receive poor grades because they could not afford the textbook, 20% fail a course because they could not afford the textbook, 48% take fewer courses, 46% avoid registering for a class, 48% drop a class, and 26% withdraw from a course (Florida Virtual Campus, 2016).
One solution, as proposed by traditional textbook publishers, is for students to pay for subscriptions that turn textbooks from a good into a service, like Netflix or Spotify. In this model, students rent access to digital editions of textbooks which can be viewed in the publisher’s platform. Given the high price of textbooks, publishers point to the idea that students are okay with this bargain—lower prices for rented digital books viewable in a publisher’s proprietary app.
Professors, on the other hand, should be suspicious of subscription platforms and their implications for academic freedom. Unlike Spotify, which catalogs music from nearly every music publisher worldwide, subscription platforms will be balkanized. For example, only Cengage books will be offered in Cengage Unlimited. In that case, if an educator prefers a book published by Pearson or McGraw Hill to teach a course, they may find it difficult or impossible to adopt it if their department, institution, or students already subscribe to a different service.
Another solution to skyrocketing textbook costs proposed by publishers is “inclusive access.” Billed as a solution for both professors and students, “inclusive access” allows students to rent access to a less expensive virtual edition of the textbook through a publisher’s proprietary platform. Professors can still choose which book to use, and indeed, publishers will build in customized interactive elements, homework assignments, and other services. If a professor chooses an “inclusive access” text, students face a complicated opt-out process if they prefer a paper textbook and the proprietary applications required to view the material are often inaccessible on mobile devices and for those with disabilities. Additionally, inclusive access rentals often end at the close of the semester, cutting off student access to knowledge and eliminating the used textbook market completely.
Both subscription-based and inclusive access solutions drive home the point that social work knowledge is currently owned by textbook publishers, not the community of social work scholars. In the publishers’ preferred future, that knowledge will not be owned by students and faculty, only rented for a limited time.
Solutions to the broken textbook market
Students engage in a number of clever stopgap solutions to minimize the costs of the broken textbook market. Cost-cutting measures include such innocuous things as sharing a book with a classmate, purchasing a used book, purchasing a previous edition, or buying from an online retailer. Many students will delay the purchase of a book until they know it is absolutely necessary in the course, use the free sample pages on Google or Amazon previews or simply never purchase it at all. Other students will pirate textbooks using Library Genesis or simply by taking pictures of a classmate’s book. Faculty often support these initiatives by allowing old editions of textbooks for a course, negotiating with publishers for lower textbook costs, or simply turning a blind eye to piracy.
These solutions do not deal with the root of the problem. Social work knowledge is typically locked behind paywalls protected by traditional copyright and not for the benefit of students and faculty. While this arrangement often supports the publishers’ bottom line, it prevents students and faculty from accessing and interacting with social work knowledge easily and freely. One solution that addresses this root problem is open educational resources (OER). OER includes any instructional resource—including textbooks, activities, videos, examples, case studies, and so forth—that are openly licensed and do not use traditional copyright. Instead, OER materials use Creative Commons licenses, which provides the legal and structural foundation for an academic culture of free access, sharing, collaboration, and learning.
OER in higher education has a substantial and growing evidence base. Students and faculty rate OER textbooks to be of equal or superior quality to traditional materials. Multiple OER studies find that students are satisfied with the OER materials they used in the classroom. Students value the more accessible format of open textbooks, including the ability to access the text anywhere, search for specific keywords and content, and rescale the text size for easier reading. In addition to positive perceptions, students using OER earn higher grades, do better on final exams, take a higher course load, and withdraw less frequently, though not all studies find consistently positive results for all outcome measures (see the comprehensive Open Education Group review of the literature here).
Why Open Education Matters from Blink Tower on Vimeo.
In a recent large-scale study of 21,822 students at the University of Georgia, Colvard, Watson and Park, (2018) found that the effects of textbook costs disproportionately impact students from groups historically marginalized from higher education. Low-income students and non-white students were most impacted by the use of traditional textbooks and the transition to open textbooks impacted their failure and withdrawal rates to a greater degree than white students, middle-income students, or high-income students. Not only did the implementation of open textbooks save all students a combined $3,266,930 over six years, it improved learning outcomes and educational engagement for those students who need it the most.
How can social work educators get involved in open education?
Unfortunately, social work lags far behind other disciplines in adopting and creating OER. My textbook on social work research methods is the only social work textbook in the University of Minnesota’s Open Textbook Library. In psychology, the Open Textbook Library includes textbooks for core courses, and the Noba Project creates customized open textbooks based on an instructor’s need. Social workers seeking to adopt OER will find their desire stymied by the death of materials in our discipline.
The disparate impacts that textbook costs have on learning outcomes for students should be a wake-up call for social work educators. If this post has inspired you, here are some ways to get acquainted with OER.
OER Commons and Merlot: I have talked a lot about textbooks, and you probably don’t have one you’re ready to share quite yet. But you certainly have some resources you think other educators can use. OER Commons and Merlot are libraries of resources with hundreds of social work resources—ranging from activities to videos to trainings—created by educators and social workers in practice. My project, Open Social Work Education, has curated these in our OER Commons Group and we are working on doing the same in Merlot. I encourage you to browse around for resources, build off of other people’s work, and always leave a review. Additionally, always make sure to attach a Creative Commons license to your work.
Creative Commons: This is an international non-profit organizations that provide free, and public copyright licenses. The permissions granted by OER are bound by the Creative Commons license chosen by the content creator. The least restrictive is CC-0, or public domain, which contains no restrictions on what users may do with the content. The most commonly used is CC-BY, which allows anyone to copy, redistribute, and remix your content, provided they credit you as the original author. For my textbook, I chose a more restrictive CC-BY-NC-SA license. That means users of my textbook can copy, redistribute, and remix my content, provided they give me credit, do not make money off of it, and keep the same license on their work. It’s important to note that the license binds users, not creators. You could, for example, share activities as OER that you later publish in a workbook covered by traditional copyright.
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC): OER is not only a movement within academia but within public policy, as well. SPARC has successfully lobbied for federal and state government support for OER, including 5-million-dollar federal pilot grants in the previous and current sessions of the US Congress. In my home state of Virginia, HB 454, supported by SPARC and other open education advocates, mandates each public university to create a plan to implement OER and other low-cost textbooks. Their state policy tracker can keep you up to date on policy actions within your state, and I suggest making friends with librarians at your institution who may be aware of grant programs to support your work in open education.
OER is the future of higher education. While there will always be a place for for-profit publishers that create quality content at an affordable price, the existing marketplace is unsustainable for both students and professors. Social work educators can build a future in which social work knowledge is owned as a common-pool resource, sustained and maintained through communal effort and civic responsibility.
References:
Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2006, January). College tuition and fees increase 63 percent since January 2006: The Economics Daily: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/college-tuition-and-fees-increase-63-percent-since-january-2006.htm
Cengage. (2018, July 26). New Survey: College Students Consider Buying Course Materials a Top Source of Financial Stress. Retrieved from https://news.cengage.com/corporate/new-survey-college-students-consider-buying-course-materials-a-top-source-of-financial-stress/
Colvard, N. B., Watson, C. E., & Park, H. (2018). The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Various Student Success Metrics. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 30(2), 262–276.
Florida Virtual Campus. (2016). 2016 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey. Tallahassee, FL: Author. Retrieved from http://www.openaccesstextbooks.org/pdf/2016_Florida_Student_Textbook_Survey.pdf
The College Board. (2017). Trends in College Pricing 2017. New York, NY: Author.
How to cite this post:
DeCarlo, M. (2018, October 2). Social Work and the Open Education Movement. [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2018/10/01/social-work-and-the-open-education-movement/
