Open Educational Resources (OER) are a very impactful use of freeing a market that can often times be overly saturated and fundamentally working against the needs of students.
As a fifth year university student, I have looked at each year of my education at the University of Victoria, and I found I have spent over $3000 in the span of 5 years on textbooks and learning materials. That money would have been enough to feed myself for a year. Professors will often explain and justify it as a necessity, since their present knowledge in a textbook they wrote is “fundamental” to their classroom. I have previously had a professor explicitly state that it was mandatory to purchase their textbook, and it would be marked as a part of our grade by submitting the receipt to prove we each purchased it in that semester. This would all make sense if they were not also going directly against their own logic when they would reuse and duplicate their presentation slides from other classes in order to save their time and money. So by this example the professor clearly respects their time and money, however a student attempting to do the exact same thing is considered to be violating their so called “academic integrity” by wishing to not have to pay $150 for a new edition of a book that was only slightly adjusted in chapter arrangements in order to make the writers and publishers more money.
As a Political Science student I should delve deep into how the capitalist structure functions to which all humans are held to either “follow or fall”, or how Marx warned us of the toxic roots of capitalism, and yet the pursuit of the “American Dream” leads us all to believe we should extort one another for our own personal gain, however I hope to see a new future. OER’s allow people to not have to scavenge for free sources, and instead it allows the creators to still have the rights to their research, however it also allows the people to learn more beyond what is available in a library. As time goes on more professors at the University of Victoria are working towards not exploiting their students, which unfortunately is a statement that while it should be the norm, is everything but. Nonetheless it shows that professors are also starting to move away from their exploitative ways, which OER’s provide a wonderful function to do exactly that.
