Internet Learning Volume 6, Number 2, Fall 2017/Winter 2018 | Page 44

Access to Information Doesn’t Have to Come with a Pretty Cover and a Price Tag
might find the entire book available
online; however, in many cases the material
is not posted. So, students seek
other material on the subject that may
or may not be relevant or even accurate.
The problem is that they may not have
the information literacy skills needed
to find appropriate academic material.
A frustrated student may simply rely
on Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers. As a
community encyclopedia, Wikipedia
even cautions on its website that the
content contained therein may not be
accurate, and information on Yahoo
Answers may be taken out of context
(Moran, 2011). That, of course, raises
the question of whether those students
are even getting the same education as
those who can afford the texts. That
is why we viewed moving to OERs as
serving a greater purpose beyond saving
the cost of textbooks. We saw it as
an opportunity both to help lower-income
students receive the same access
to educational materials as wealthier
classmates and to model information
literacy skills for all students.
The impact of choosing OERs
can go beyond the years students are at
university. There is a more profound access
issue at stake here. We do not know
what the financial future of our students
will be, but we can be certain that a reasonable
number of them will face financial
straits at some point. We need to
teach our students to access knowledge
in the most efficient and affordable ways
possible so that they can be self-directed,
lifelong learners. Our students have
access to an enormous amount of material
through both the internet and university
library, but when they start their
university careers, many do not have
the information literacy skills necessary
to access it. Our first task in the process
of teaching our students these lifelong
learning skills is to model them by
culling the vast amount of information
available to provide them solid course
materials. They need to see that not all
information comes neatly packaged in
one book and that they can find creative
ways to access information from various
sources. Our second task is helping
them learn to do this for themselves
through the context of research courses
and projects.
Collegial Resistance
While it was not difficult to
convince some colleagues of
the logic of our arguments,
we received some resistance from others
who felt the challenges of moving
away from commercial textbooks were
just too great. Some of the pushback
we have received has revolved around
the idea that students would be missing
something crucial that they could only
learn from textbooks. This prompted us
to ponder about why textbooks would
seem to be more useful than open educational
resources to some students.
Are textbooks automatically acceptable
because of their familiarity, or is there
really some inherent superiority aspect
to the use of them? In many cases, such
as when professors assign a book but
only use a few chapters; use the book
as a convenient organizing guide; or,
when there are quality alternatives, the
textbook probably adds little value for
students.
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