A Walk in the OER Woods

Author: Charlotte Lee, Berkeley City College

Part I. Trailblazing: Encounters with OER

Skepticism. Doubt. Dismissiveness. Then: curiosity. These all describe how I felt about open educational resources (OER) when I first learned about them. As with many good things in life, it was a group of librarians who tugged me, gently, into the world of OER. My walk through the OER woods began innocently enough, with a daylong workshop. A group of talented OER adopters across my community college district introduced me to the ways that OER were turning the commercial academic publishing model upside down, and I realized that classroom costs were one domain where faculty members had real decision-making power. That day was a time for discovery, reflection, and reinforcement of my commitment to open access education. Though OER have been in existence for decades, I did not truly learn about them until my early years as a community college faculty member. In the time since that first workshop, I have become an adopter, content creator, remixer, and booster of the OER cause.

What Are OER?

OER are open access educational materials. The term open access translates to a suite of use rights for end users and, bottom line, zero cost for students. End users of OER enjoy rights to hold OER indefinitely and share them with others. An additional aspect of these materials is the ability of OER creators to grant permission to others to modify materials, essentially crowdsourcing the creation, editing, and updating of materials. In these regards, the OER movement is deeply democratic and characterized by a generosity of spirit. These materials spring from the core idea that knowledge and learning should not be locked behind a price tag but rather available for others to enjoy freely.

Evolving from their beginnings in the 1990s, OER today comprise a vast array of teaching materials (Wiley). Most are available in digital form. They can include textbooks, journals, articles, essays, course modules on online platforms, homework problem sets, websites, videos, oral histories, and more. There are many different ways in which OER are used in education. In one of my courses, Introduction to International Relations, I assign OER textbook chapters that were originally published via a UK-based online repository of open access teaching materials, E-International Relations. In an example of remixing OER content, I modified and reordered select chapters from this OER textbook by updating the text and adding openly licensed images, tables, and info boxes. Together with a team of other community college faculty members, I uploaded these edited textbook chapters with lesson plans and other ancillary materials such as videos and government reports (in the public domain) as complete course modules on OER Commons (oercommons.org). The modules are available for adoption, separately or as an entire course, by faculty members anywhere in the world.

OER are not free to create, though they are free to end users. They upend the traditional publication model for academic texts, where publishers typically require authors to transfer copyright, while authors receive an advance and/or royalty in exchange for publication. In the creation of OER, authors retain copyright and can designate how they wish others to use their work—for example, granting all users full rights to retain, share, modify, and even sell the work. With the establishment of Creative Commons in 2001, the OER community could indicate open use rights in a more uniform and globally recognized way, ultimately contributing to a more robust global “knowledge commons” (“Who We Are”).

There is now institutional support for faculty members to create OER rather than work with a commercial publisher. A major textbook initiative supported by Rice University, OpenStax, has published dozens of open access textbooks for teaching introductory courses across the humanities, social sciences, and other fields. In California, the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges (ASCCC) has provided one alternative framework by allocating millions of dollars in support of OER creation and awareness building. ASCCC has awarded dozens of grants to community college faculty teams; these collaborations have generated bookshelves of open access materials for courses taught throughout the California Community Colleges system (“About Us”). Authors were compensated for their time through one-time grants and would not receive a traditional royalty, but materials were free for instructional adoption. Today, OER have been embraced by organizations from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO; see “Open Educational Resources”) to global publishing houses such as Cambridge University Press.

My Walk in the OER Woods

After learning about OER and their potential, I began to explore the universe of materials available in my areas of study. This walk in the OER woods took place in community with many others, beginning with OER advocates at my college library. With their guidance, I journeyed along the paths that had already been forged by other OER content creators. I could see how the movement was global in scope, with materials authored in Canada, Poland, Japan, and beyond. Despite the many repositories that I was starting to learn about, I soon realized that there were gaps in available resources. As recently as 2020, there were still no English-language OER textbooks in my primary field, comparative politics, for teaching introductory courses.

Fortunately, there exists institutional support for OER-curious faculty members in California. When I made the decision to shed commercially published textbooks in my courses, I did so slowly and on the edges of a busy community college calendar. The process was incremental and spread out over many academic years. I began revisions in courses where I knew there were some OER available, if not enough for a full-semester course. These were the starting point for a full course overhaul, as I could remix existing OER to suit my vision for the course. Perhaps this method of building on existing resources was a reflection of my scholarly training: conduct the literature review, integrate ideas and concepts, and build mindfully on the work of those who have come before.

In the process, I met other faculty members in the California community college world who were wandering through the same woods. We formed writing teams, applied for grants, and began creating textbooks. We expanded our networks to include faculty members from across the country. A next step would be to form an international network of OER content creators in political science and global studies, the subjects that I teach, and forge a more inclusive vision for what these fields of study might look like when taught to learners around the world. More and more US-based faculty members in political science have grown attuned to the long shadow cast by racist and colonial mindsets in the shaping of the discipline, and many are seeking to understand this history and proactively forge new directions, especially in what is taught to new generations of students. Bringing together international voices in the creation of materials, including the critical perspectives of scholars outside of the North American and European core, has the potential to build a stronger classroom experience. In California, about one in eight (seventeen percent) of community college students is a non-US citizen (“Citizenship Status Summary Report”), and international teams of OER content creators are better poised to craft and revise existing materials so they are reflective of our students’ globe-spanning experiences.

My OER work has taken three paths. The first path consisted of curating and bringing OER into all of my courses. Accomplishing this required patience and division of the goal into many smaller tasks. I ended up building “zero textbook cost” (ZTC) courses, which are not based on a single OER textbook. Instead, each includes a mix of Creative Commons–licensed OER, content in the public domain, and subscription-based library materials that are available to students, such as scholarly articles from JSTOR and EBSCOhost. Each course syllabus comprises OER and copyright-protected material. The end result is no additional cost to students for enrolling in my classes; they can learn about the perils and poetry of world politics for free.

The second path that I pursued was to become a content creator. This was done in fellowship with other community college faculty members, supported by grants from the ASCCC’s OER Initiative, which is ongoing as of publication. Over the span of five years, from 2019 until 2024, I joined faculty teams comprising political science and global studies faculty members, the latter including scholars in geography, history, and political science. These teams collectively wrote three introductory-level textbooks and one textbook equivalent and produced ancillary materials (e.g., lesson plans, lecture slides, quiz banks) to support student learning. Writing textbook chapters and related course materials while maintaining a full teaching load required very strict time management, but we all managed to cajole and pester and cheer each other along. I found myself completing the work in part because of the pull of the team effort and, more importantly, the fun of writing down ideas that I had been exploring for years with my students. I knew that my future students would prod me to refine those ideas further and revise them for the next teaching cycle. OER materials enable this kind of rapid and bespoke revision process; I no longer have to amend each textbook edition pushed out by a mass market publisher.

A third path was to merge my research with OER creation. As a Mellon/ACLS Community College Fellow (2022–23), I returned to my abiding interest in Chinese politics and carried out original research on contemporary China. My research focused on Chinese leaders’ efforts to promote the concept of a China Dream, an idea meant to pair China’s global resurgence with prosperity for all. I was especially interested in how this idea has been received by global audiences. Beyond the joy of exercising my research muscles, this project culminated in the creation of OER materials for instructors interested in adding a module (or two) on contemporary “global China” to their introductory courses in global studies, political science, Asian studies, and related fields.

Looking back, I am grateful for the sprawling ecosystem that supported all of these endeavors. That ecosystem has included expanding networks of colleagues, from those in my college and district to those throughout the California Community Colleges system and community college faculty members nationwide. While the writing process had its moments of solitary thought, it was in conversation with others, including colleagues and peer reviewers, that I found a stronger writing voice. There has also been crucial support from key organizations such as the ASCCC and Mellon/ACLS and, to decisively push the movement forward, mandates from the state legislature (California State, Legislature).

Part II. Fertile Ground: OER Creation and Adoption in Community Colleges

Community colleges are in a unique position to advance the creation and adoption of high-quality OER. Today, community college educators are creating and adopting OER materials that are student-centered, equity-focused, and deeply collaborative in nature.

Student-centered. Our first asset is the diversity of our students. A typical California community college classroom will comprise students with a breathtaking array of life experiences, beyond the known demographics; the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office reports a student body that is sixty-two percent economically disadvantaged (in 2022-23), thirty-five percent first-generation (in 2022-23), and seventy-two percent identifying as a person of color (in 2023-24) (“Student Enrollment”). When selecting OER to teach, community college faculty members have a hard test to pass: finding materials that might pique the interest of extremely diverse classes. Texts must be illuminating and challenging for everyone, from a working parent, to an Ivy League–bound high school student, to a carpentry student taking a college-level liberal arts course for the first time. The feedback from this range of students, in turn, shapes the crafting and re-crafting of relevant materials. The remixing feature of OER materials is especially well suited for this teaching environment: after selecting OER materials, instructors may edit texts further—for example, adding new content and media and otherwise tailoring materials for their instructional setting.

Related to this is the sensitivity of faculty members to student needs. I have taught at a variety of institutions over my career, and my community college colleagues have impressed me as superbly attuned to student needs. Without the buffer of graduate student teaching assistants, community college faculty members are on the front lines when it comes to disrupting barriers to student success, on an individual-student level. This is labor-intensive work. But it also means that faculty members are always at the street level and see the daunting economics of higher education for millions of students across the country. Those same faculty members are in a position to remove final classroom costs, which can help with student retention. Faculty members are poised to advocate for and create OER content which is responsive to and reflective of the community college student population—which includes individuals who would benefit most from a sense of belonging in higher education. There are now more resources coming online for building culturally responsive OER, including the ASCCC OER Initiative’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism (IDEA) Framework, which offers concrete guidelines for building stronger classroom texts (see “ASCCC OERI IDEA Framework”).

Equity-focused. Our second asset is a whole-college commitment to equity. This aligns with OER efforts to bring down educational costs while remaining committed to high-quality education for all. Community colleges are interested in adopting as many “poverty interrupting” interventions as possible. Within liberal arts classrooms, OER falls squarely within an equity agenda. The numbers are startling: in a 2020 national survey conducted by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, nearly two-thirds (sixty-five percent) of surveyed students reported that they did not purchase a course textbook due to cost (Nagle and Vitez). In one North American student campaign, #textbookbroke, students shared via social media platforms the amount of money they spent on textbooks per semester—often totaling in the hundreds of dollars—to raise awareness and urge OER adoption and ZTC conversion. In more granular analysis of student survey data, scholars have found that lower income, first-generation, and Latine students experience significantly more stress and decreased academic performance due to textbook costs. OER and ZTC efforts are not just a scholarly exercise; they contribute to the broader social justice efforts that are built into community college work and the work of minority-serving institutions of higher education (Jenkins et al. 2).

There was once a certain beginning-of-term script, one that is familiar to many faculty members from their own college days: enroll in classes, go to the bookstore, and browse the shelves for assigned texts. Those simple tasks assumed certain resources that many community college students—and university students—have in very short supply or not at all. Announcing to my students that they have everything they need to succeed in my classes from day one has been one of the most gratifying aspects of the shift to a zero-textbook-cost classroom. This is now a statement repeated in more and more college classrooms, saving college students millions of dollars in educational costs. It removes one of the obstacles to course and degree completion that overextended students must navigate.

Collaborative. There is strength in pooling knowledge. Because so many of us are specialists in our fields, collaborative writing of introductory texts is a way to leverage our respective areas of expertise. This ensures that OER for our students cover the breadth of our disciplines. A brief look at the many political science titles now on offer in the Open Textbook Library highlights the importance of a multiauthor approach in creating robust introductory texts (see “Political Science Textbooks”). Out of forty titles in the 2024 political science catalog, nearly two-thirds were written by two or more authors. California’s OER Initiative encouraged textbook creation by teams comprising faculty members from multiple colleges and districts, which meant the inclusion of more perspectives in the finished work. Given the different student populations of a coastal, urban community college compared to an inland, rural counterpart, instructors at each have something unique to contribute to a shared text. The collaborative spirit extends beyond the initial circle of authors, as OER may be licensed for others to edit and refine the original product further.

Part III. On the Horizon: Accomplishments and Challenges

The transition to open access materials is taking place in hundreds, if not thousands, of classrooms across the country and worldwide. Community college educators are creating resource libraries and professional networks to share ideas. A variety of materials is now available in many fields of study.

There has been steady progress in OER creation and adoption. During the 2018–19 academic year, nearly one in eight (fourteen percent) of faculty-member respondents in a nationally representative survey reported that they assigned required OER materials in at least one course. This increased to one in four (twenty-six percent) for introductory courses (Seaman and Seaman 31). The OER movement dovetails with current efforts to encourage ZTC classrooms (“Zero Textbook Cost Program”); at my own college, forty percent of course sections were ZTC in Spring 2025, a dramatic increase from twenty-five percent the previous semester. In California alone, this work has the potential to impact a community college student body of two million learners.

Challenges loom on the horizon. One overarching aim is maintaining the momentum behind OER creation and adoption. Existing legislation allocates limited funds and sets deadlines for the exhaustion of funds. While the adoption trendline has grown steeply over the past decade, a majority of courses taught in community colleges require students to pay for course texts and other materials. There is much work to be done in raising awareness about OER and helping faculty members convert their courses to ZTC (Aesoph). All of these are formidable hills to climb. Students, for their part, are appreciative of the turn to OER and ZTC classrooms. As one of my students reflected on her experience in a ZTC class, “It’s been brilliant. … It opens up the possibility for being able to get reading material from a variety of places, and that makes class that much more interesting if you’re able to access a variety of viewpoints and a variety of sources. … I’m sure it’s more time on [instructors’] part to collect the materials … and I really really appreciate that extra work that they’re doing in support of their students.”

For those disciplines that have made progress in offering OER for gateway introductory courses, another challenge is procuring the talent, time, and resources to update texts and related teaching materials. In political science and other disciplines where current events are often incorporated into course materials, this is especially true. It is helpful to view many OER as living documents that require further refinement and amendment to achieve the level of wraparound service and ancillaries available via commercial textbooks. In my own experience, creating an OER textbook with a team of colleagues was just the first step; potential faculty-member adopters wanted additional materials such as test banks and sample assessment activities to smooth their transition to a new textbook. With these considerations in mind, the most meaningful support for OER must have a long time horizon and be guided by a strategic vision.

Critiques that OER are lower quality compared to commercial texts must be addressed, as this is a significant barrier to faculty members’ adoption. One leading open access textbook publisher, OpenStax (openstax.org), has peer review and editorial oversight in the publication process. California’s OER Initiative also requires successful completion of accessibility checks and peer review prior to publication. And with the digitization of many educational materials, platforms such as Pressbooks offer powerful tools for OER creators to build beautiful and sophisticated learning materials. Because OER can be modified by many users over time, this presents additional complications. To maintain the quality of OER materials, there are standardized peer-review checks on OER in certain repositories, such as California State University’s MERLOT, which is supported by an international community of scholars (“MERLOT Peer Review Information”).

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) raises new questions. Community colleges, and institutions of higher education more broadly, are in the midst of turbulent, dynamic times. Questions abound: How might OER materials contribute to and reflect the integration of artificial intelligence into teaching and learning? If OER were generated using AI, what are professional norms for content review and disclosure that AI has contributed to the final product? Given the plethora of generative AI models now publicly available, which are most appropriate for education settings and pairing with OER in specific disciplines? These are all new frontiers for exploration. Because AI has been dominated by the private sector, public-private partnerships will be the norm as this field develops. AI might be used in the production of new OER—for example, generating alternative text for images or providing feedback on the organization of content. It might be used for data analysis or to generate chapter summaries. Instructors are engaging in a weighing of “pedagogical benefits and pedagogical risks” associated with the use of AI in the classroom and by students (Mollick and Mollick 1). A first step is evaluating and identifying the principles that inform AI use, as all of these potential applications hinge on deeper thinking about the core values that shape the goals and uses of these technologies in OER creation and adoption. Guiding principles might include human-centeredness, transparency, and the primacy of demonstrating critical thinking, all of which are at heart deeply democratic values.

In closing, my short walk through the world of OER has the characteristics of many memorable journeys: fellowship, milestones, and discovery. Community colleges are poised to continue being leaders in the creation and adoption of these materials. This is motivated by our students, who remain ever astonishing and inspiring, and the dedicated faculty members who anchor the institutional work. Community colleges are among the most open access institutions of higher education, and OER are part and parcel of that endeavor.

Works Cited

“About Us.” Open Educational Resources Initiative, Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, asccc-oeri.org/about-us/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2024.

Aesoph, Lauri M. Adoption Guide. 2nd ed., BCcampus Open Education, 2019, https://opentextbc.ca/adoptopentextbook/. Accessed 1 May 2025.

“ASCCC OERI Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism (IDEA) Framework.” Open Educational Resources Initiative, Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, asccc-oeri.org/asccc-oeri-inclusion-diversity-equity-and-anti-racism-idea-audit-framework/. Accessed 12 Sept. 2024.

California State, Legislature. Zero-Textbook-Cost Degree Grant Program. Education Code, Title 3, Div. 7, Pt. 48, Ch. 1, Article 4. California Legislative Information, 2021, leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?lawCode=EDC&division=7.&title=3.&part=48.&chapter=1.&article=4. Accessed 15 Aug. 2024.

“Citizenship Status Summary Report.” California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, 2024, datamart.cccco.edu/Students/Citizenship_Status_Summary.aspx. Accessed 12 Sept. 2024.

Jenkins, J. Jacob, et al. “Textbook Broke: Textbook Affordability as a Social Justice Issue.” Journal of Interactive Media in Education, vol. 2020, no. 1, 2020, pp. 1–13.

“MERLOT Peer Review Information and Process.” MERLOT, info.merlot.org/merlothelp/MERLOT_Peer_Review_Information.htm. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

Mollick, Ethan, and Lilach Mollick. “Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students with Prompts.” ArXiv, 13 June 2023, arxiv.org/pdf/2306.10052.

Nagle, Cailyn, and Kaitlyn Vitez. Fixing the Broken Textbook Market. 3rd ed., U.S. PIRG Education Fund, 2021, pirg.org/edfund/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Fixing-the-Broken-Textbook-Market-3e-February-2021.pdf.

“Open Educational Resources.” UNESCO, www.unesco.org/en/open-educational-resources. Accessed 15 Aug. 2024.

“Political Science Textbooks.” Open Textbook Library, open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/subjects/political-science. Accessed 15 Aug. 2024.

Seaman, Julia E., and Jeff Seaman. Inflection Point: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2019. Bay View Analytics, 2020, www.bayviewanalytics.com/reports/2019inflectionpoint.pdf.

“Student Enrollment and Demographics.” California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, 2024, https://www.cccco.edu/About-Us/Chancellors-Office/Divisions/Information-Security-Technology-Innovation/Research-Analytics-Data/data-snapshot/student-demographics. Accessed 1 May 2025.

“Who We Are.” Creative Commons, creativecommons.org/mission/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2024.

Wiley, David. “History of Open Educational Resources.” Expert Meeting on Open Educational Resources, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation, 2006. William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, hewlett.org/library/history-of-open-educational-resources/.

“Zero Textbook Cost Program.” California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, www.cccco.edu/About-Us/Chancellors-Office/Divisions/Educational-Services-and-Support/burden-free-instructional-materials/zero-textbook-cost-program. Accessed 15 Aug. 2024.