Open Education Reinforces Academic Freedom

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials in the public domain or designated with an open license that are freely available to curate, remix, and revise.  On the surface, adopting OER can seem like a simple process of changing from a commercial textbook to an equivalent openly licensed one.  However, with the open license, OER can play a significant role in academic freedom since they offer faculty greater control over materials they use in their teaching.

Traditionally published commercial textbooks often present topics in a standardized manner and incorporate a fixed narrative without reflecting the diversity of perspectives within a discipline. Commercial textbooks can also quickly become outdated and cause faculty to update materials by assigning newer journal articles or trying to explain to students why the textbook is incorrect.

By contrast, OER allow faculty to curate, adapt, and create instructional materials that reflect their expertise, scholarly interests, and pedagogical priorities.  This process reinforces academic freedom because it enables faculty as the experts to determine what information is most valuable and how to best teach it to students.

Commercial publishers have not met students in that classroom, but faculty have and know how to best approach teaching their students.  Faculty actively publish scholarship in their field and should act as producers and curators of knowledge, not simply consumers in the classroom.  The iterative nature of creating or adapting OER also encourages reflective teaching practice, prompting instructors to reconsider learning goals and how those align with course materials.

Many faculty members report that engaging with OER is professionally empowering, as it gives them the opportunity to shape materials that are more relevant, inclusive, and contextually meaningful.  OER also support culturally responsive teaching, allowing instructors to incorporate local histories, contemporary issues, and community knowledge that may be absent from commercial texts.

This flexibility can deepen student engagement and promote greater equity.  Furthermore, open licensing of OER promotes collaboration among educators, who can share revisions, adaptations, and new resources freely.  This collaborative culture aligns closely with foundational values of academic freedom.  OER not only remove cost barriers for students, but also reinforce intellectual freedom of faculty and the shared mission of higher education.