The workshops introduced me to resources I had no idea existed and with that, to the immense possibilities of OA and OER to enrich our courses not only in terms of public access but also our own imagination as scholars and instructors.

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I found myself slowing down. The labor of building just one syllabus+website with legitimate OER materials forced this slowness.

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When I stepped inside, trying to put together an open version of the Freshman Composition class that I teach most often, I realized how much nuance there was to pay attention to (there were ethical and legal distinctions to keep in mind), and how much I’ve been relying on resources for students that were free and accessible but still shadowy, still closed behind paywalls or legality.

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This is the third in our current series of short essays by participants in the Open Knowledge Fellowship coordinated by the Mina Rees Library, these from Fellows in the Spring 2022 cohort. Fellows share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or […]

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While the Open Access movement is an explicit response to the increasingly redundant barriers that copyright protection puts to knowledge in the digital age, the political issue that it surfaces is an entrenched mechanism of enclosure.

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I was surprised when many of [my students] asked me the first week where they could buy the book I assigned. I don’t think textbooks are a good investment—at least not in my field, philosophy—and I didn’t intend for them to buy the book.

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I was able to “reuse” [my colleague's] syllabus, then “revise” it to add and/or delete components, and finally “remix” it by adding my own interpretation of items or other forms of OER.

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Crucial in this conversation is accessibility, not only in terms of access to scholarly materials, resources, readings, and other materials, but in the material conditions of accessibility. Many students (myself included) cannot pay the steep price of textbooks.

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