Open Voices: Planting the OER Seed

Post by Ailish Larkin

As someone who, on a personal level, tries to be thoughtful about where she shops, for example doesn’t use Amazon, and tries to support local businesses, the academic publishing business model always made me somewhat uneasy. On reading this article in the Guardian one weekend, I realised the outrageous profits accrued in the industry. I had a notion of what Open Educational Resources were and liked the equitable and accessible idea of them. I decided I needed to research OER more thoroughly. The Western Regional Section of the Library Association of Ireland summer seminar was held at Shannon College of Hotel Management in 2019 and included a lively world café on Open Science/Scholarship. From then I was hooked. Through subsequent outreach activities, faculty at Shannon College are well apprised of the benefits of OER, and in one module we were able to save students a total of €3750 through swapping a commercial textbook for an OER.

In the spring/summer of 2020, with the pandemic at large, a lot of my time was spent on accessing e-resources for our various hospitality and business modules at Shannon College. Around this time, I attended the NUI Galway webinar on ‘OER for Affordability and Accessibility’ and the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education’s session on ‘Creating and Sharing OER’. I was so impressed with the lecturers who used OER and with the students who spoke of their benefits. I also loved how OER could contribute to a more inclusive and accessible higher education system.

At Shannon College, we’ve always been conscious of the cost of third-level education for our students but this was even more of a concern during the Covid-19 pandemic. As many of our students might not have been able to work and families could have been under financial pressure, Management emailed all staff about the importance of keeping costs down for students. Our students get a booklist each year which includes a few mandatory texts that they are to purchase. I am involved in putting this booklist together and have always tried to keep costs to a minimum. Within this context of keeping costs down, I spoke about OER at a staff meeting. I also sent all staff the recording and slides of the NUI Galway webinar noted above, which had been shared as OER themselves.

I then focused my attention on finding relevant OER for our various modules. The number of OER available varied from module to module but I found something for all the modules on, for example, Openstax, Open Textbook Library, Lyryx and BCcampus Open Publishing. Examples of modules at Shannon College include Management, Economics, Wine, IT, Human Resource Management, Intercultural Communication, Research Methods, Entrepreneurship, Revenue Management and Tourism. I then emailed all lecturers the OER I had collated for their modules, extolling their advantages.  

I was very pleased that three lecturers added an OER to their reading list, for Marketing, Economics and Management. For the 1st year Management module, Dr. Sean T. Ruane chose an OER, Principles of Management, as the core textbook. This OER replaces a book that students had to purchase; this means a saving for each student of €50. With a class enrolment of 75 this year, the total amount saved for the module comes to €3750. Dr. Ruane had the following to say about choosing this book:

"I was attracted to this book first and foremost because the various chapters are written by experts in that specific area, as opposed to a generalist.  The fact that is it an open source book that is free to students and academics is an added bonus".  

I continue to promote OER in the college and spoke at our End of Year Review meeting about the advantages of them. I highlighted our OER libguide and also AIT’s OER libguide as it has a section on Business and Hospitality which is relevant to us at Shannon College. I showed staff the National Forum’s excellent resource on Using OER for Teaching and Learning and, finally, gave an overview of Pressbooks. I know there is great potential at Shannon College to create OER and I plan to help staff to do this.  I feel Shannon College is at the beginning of its relationship with OER and I am delighted to be part of it.

Ailish Larkin is the School Librarian at Shannon College of Hotel Management, NUI Galway. Her main areas of responsibility are Collection Development and Information Literacy education. She would like the world in general to be much more equitable and sees OER as one way of achieving this.