The stars are aligning in interesting ways to start this academic year.
It will certainly be a year of big challenges. And with those challenges will come the potential for breakthrough risk :: reward scenarios.
One of the challenges alluded to by the tweet copied above will be how institutions and instructors manage access to published educational resources for their courses, given the decision by UBC and a growing number of Canadian universities to back away from Access Copyright agreements. The proposed tariff increase was rightly viewed as gouging, and so 26 post-secondary institutions have decided to explore other options.
The options include direct negotiation with authors and publishers, as well as increased exploration of emerging alternatives such as open textbooks and other open educational resources (OER). No doubt there are many instances where the best resource is a published textbook or authored work. So, institutions will directly negotiate those rights as required to provide the resources that instructors and students can use.
And yes, it may be painful initially to move away from the current method of acquiring course-pack licenses, but the opportunity horizon is optimal for a new economy based on open resources, collaboratively built and shared among educators using Creative Commons licenses. This scenario is the upside that will be catalyzed by the proposed Access Copyright (AC) tariff increase that many major institutions are emphatically rejecting.
This may be the year that open educational resources become a mainstream alternative.
I can testify to that initial pain. So far, we seem to be caught in the role of telling instructors that they can’t do what they want (even if they have been doing it for years)… I will be blogging some specifics when some of the details have been vetted for public consumption.
Then again, this has been an opportunity to tell some instructors about the alternatives, and at least some of them are receptive. There’s no question we will be reusing more OER at UBC this year. And hopefully this object lesson will illustrate the importance of sharing more of our own stuff.
Thanks for this action-level perspective, Brian. I’ve been anxious to hear about the nature of the pain points and about potential upsides with respect to a shared culture.
Looking forward to your upcoming blog post on this item. Taking a stand on this item *will* require work and the commitment to facilitate a viable alternative path.
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