OER Takeover: Day 3 - Student Involvement in OER

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 By Alexis Moschopoulos & Helen Moore

Using existing OER and open access resources on reading lists 

Do you think legacy publishing models are expensive, exclusionary, and out of date? I do, so I was very excited to be able to use OER in my teaching. As you might have read in the first post in this series, OER are available to anyone, so no longer is high quality learning material locked behind a paywall. They are also adaptable, so educators can re-use or re-purpose all or part of an OER without having to pay a license fee, as long as a fair attribution is given to the original author. And because they are mostly digital they are very easy to keep up to date with the latest research findings or methods. What a utopian idea! 

Last year I decided to use exclusively OER and open access resources for the reading list on my Foundation Year Psychology module. Student engagement with the material on the reading list is high, as shown in the image, possibly because the materials on the list are open. Students had asked for more multimodal, less dense reading material, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to see if OER would work well to meet this requirement. A standout feature of OER revealed itself to me when I came to assign reading for the session on creativity. One of the main psychology OER that I use had a chapter on creativity published only a few months ago, by one of the leading creativity researchers in the world. Did the established, expensive psychology textbook have anything to say about creativity? It did not! How exciting to be able to find a high-quality, engaging OER, hot off the press, on a topic that legacy textbooks don’t appear to cover.


Several academic staff at the university have created case studies about their experience using or creating OER if you’d like to see more examples of different types of OER around the University. 

Involving students in the use and creation of OER

As an institution we aim to make access to learning materials as streamlined as possible, and our students should not be concerned about how the material that supports their studies is made available. Unfortunately, recent challenges in the textbook publishing market (explored in our first blog post) mean this isn’t always possible and students sometimes experience barriers in accessing material. 

Being able to critically evaluate sources is a key part of the Sheffield Graduate Attributes and some of the commercial resources we provide may lack diversity and may not accurately reflect our student community. We are in a position now to promote the benefits of OER to students and involve them in evaluating, customising, contextualising and creating open content. Some examples follow of how we can involve students in OER:
  • asking students to use their experience of their own programme of study to find and recommend open textbooks, e.g. from the Open Textbook Library, for inclusion on reading lists
  • trialling your own material with students and seeking feedback before formally publishing it
  • co-creating material with students. This could include writing text, providing illustrations, designing a book cover, and proof-reading. Staff can use opportunities like this to help students understand their intellectual property rights and take those early tentative steps into publishing.
In tomorrow’s post we’ll look at what we’re doing to address some of the challenges and make the most of the opportunities provided by OER.


Alexis Moschopoulos is University Tutor in Psychology on the Foundation Year and a member of the OER Steering Group. 

Helen Moore is Faculty Librarian for Engineering and Science and helps to lead the University’s OER service. Helen co-chairs the University’s OER Steering Group, is a member of the LIBER Educational Resources Working Group, and sits on the advisory group for the UK and Ireland OER Community of Practice.