This week, we heard from Ben Cheung, Lecturer and Indigenous Initiatives Coordinator in the Department of Psychology.
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What motivated you do adopt/adapt/create open educational resources in your work?I adopted OERs because, at the time, a new edition for the textbook I was using was coming out, so students would’ve had to pay full price for the text as there would’ve been no used copies. A suitable OER had just come out, co-edited by a colleague I deeply respect, so I thought it was the perfect time to adopt it.
Can you tell us about the open education projects you have been working on?Currently, I am primarily focused on how to properly implement the OER that I’ve adopted. This involves updating gender pronouns, diversifying names of people used in examples, diversifying pictures used, and updating the research to both exclude outdated information that is no longer valid and include new research. Aside from that, I am not doing any empirical work on OERs.
What benefits have you seen from using open educational resources in the classroom?
The biggest benefit is that students love that the textbook is free. The feedback I’ve received from students thanking me for using a free textbook tells me how much of a crunch students find themselves in due to textbook costs. I also love that I have so much control over what goes in and out of a textbook.
What was the biggest challenge you faced and how did you overcome it?Biggest challenge has been balancing my motivation to have more control over what goes into the text, and not going overboard. I have made a lot of changes, and that’s been very time consuming.
Do you have any advice for other faculty developing OER?
Get people to help you make edits, especially if you want to make large changes (like cutting out whole sections, or rearranging sections). It’s the little things like figure and table numbering that always slip by.
Is there anything else you’d like to add about OER at UBC?
It may take more time on the front end to get everything going; but what method of adopting new systems doesn’t require that? Once you’ve made the change that first go around, things will be much easier, and you get the satisfaction of knowing that the students will get to use the whole book! There is no longer the feeling of guilt about getting students to purchase a text, but telling them “But you don’t need to read Chapter 2” (obviously not applicable to everyone). Regardless, there is so much support for this work – you’ll love it, and the students will love it.
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Thank you Ben for taking the time to participate!
