Switching Costs

For the goal of creating these more open and equitable systems of scholarship to become a reality, we need to understand the real-world friction that inhibits change instead of looking for villains.

Posted on August 1, 2018 in Publisher Editorial

One of the most gratifying aspects of our work at Choice has been the opportunity to witness the deep commitment of teachers and librarians to improving the lives of their students, particularly as they relate to educational outcomes. Issues of social justice figure large in this commitment, fueled by the incredible sense of mission that people in these professions possess in abundance. Among the more conspicuous examples of this is the growing advocacy for open educational resources and the enormous energy it has liberated in the educational community.

Perhaps nowhere has the OER movement gained more traction than among librarians, many of whom see open educational resources as part and parcel of a more ambitious transformation of educational practices as a whole. In furtherance of this, ACRL counts among its five-year goals support for the “[acceleration of] the transition to more open and equitable systems of scholarship,” and SPARC, itself an offshoot of the Association of Research Libraries, remains a powerful and effective advocate for open education on many fronts.

Through our work developing Open Choice we have become familiar with many of the challenges to the realization of these goals, particularly as they relate to the adoption of open educational resources. At the end of the day, adopting OER means redesigning one’s entire course. The discovery and evaluation processes for the new texts alone are time-consuming, particularly given that open resources live in another region of the academic world altogether. A terra incognita to most. Then come the associated problems of finding new and congruent ancillary resources, reworking homework and research assignments, finding or creating new problem sets, and, ultimately, recasting the entire array of assessment tools. Adjuncts (assuming there are any) need to be retrained, libraries put on notice as to new reserve readings, and new materials loaded into the LMS. Whew!

By now the perspicacious reader will have discerned a potential source of disjunction between advocacy and realization, one no more complex than the fact that while adoption of open educational resources is something of a cause for many academic librarians, it involves a tremendous amount of labor, high “switching costs,” for teaching faculty, many of whom also worry that the quality of these new resources, and thus of their teaching, may decline if they adopt noncommercial resources.

In their zeal to become advocates for open educational resources, some in our community direct a righteous anger toward commercial publishers and see them as the major impediment to their goals. However well placed this anger may be in some instances, I think these people have overlooked a simpler, more mundane reality. Teaching faculty and academic librarians inhabit separate, if interrelated, worlds, with separate, if interrelated, priorities. For teaching faculty, even the best intentions can be confounded by a simple lack of time. The antidote to this is more education, more encouragement, and more support, not assigning blame. For the goal of creating these more open and equitable systems of scholarship to become a reality, we need to understand the real-world friction that inhibits change instead of looking for villains.—MC

About the author:

Mark Cummings is the editor and publisher at Choice

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