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OER Information, Adoption and Planning

     ⋮   Audio version below

Fellow instructors - Thank you for taking the time to review Off the Shelf. We hope it’s enjoyable to teach and that it’s compelling and cost-effective for your students too. The information below gives you a brief overview of this resource and provides some suggestions for using it in your own classroom.

OERs, Opportunities and Limitations

The term OER (Open Educational Resource) is somewhat self-explanatory on the surface, but to elaborate a bit, it includes any class materials that replace traditional ones and cost students no money. OERs could be as simple as a week-long individual unit or as complex as a fully completed course. This OER is somewhere in-between: Off the Shelf is meant to be a standalone replacement to a traditional textbook. OERs are open licensed and able to be modified by others, and they’re usually created by single or small groups of faculty members who are dedicated to free and accessible information for their students. All of this contrasts with the traditional for-profit textbook model, though there are certainly opportunities and limitations to both.

Opportunities

Off the Shelf can benefit you in several ways:

  • It’s a complete anthology - If you’re looking to replace a traditional textbook, this style of OER is as close as you can get. It has an introduction, three chapters with well over 100 stories and several chapters of high-quality supplemental material too.
  • Design - It has also been professionally designed by instructional designers here at Columbus State Community College. It was created in Kotobee and is device agnostic so it’s as accessible and usable as possible for students. It also looks good across different devices, includes a fair amount of visual art and several sections have audio options to make it as multimodal and flexible as possible.
  • It’s free – The big benefit to all of this, of course, is that Off the Shelf is completely free. You no longer have to request sample copies, students don’t have to spend any money or worry about using their financial aid, no one has to deal with the headache of finding a cheaper copy online and it contributes to cost-saving initiatives at your institution.
  • Regular updates – This OER will be improved and updated over time too. Beginning Autumn 2019, we will use Off the Shelf in our own classes and we’re very invested in its upkeep and improvement.

Limitations

OERs are far from perfect though, so it’s a good idea to carefully consider the drawbacks:

  • We’re not publishers – For all the benefits of this OER, we’re not a publishing company and we don’t have an army of authors, editors, marketers and sales reps at our disposal. At the end of the day, this was created by two dedicated English professors plugging away on our laptops after hours, so it will have imperfections compared to more professional publications.
  • Online only – This OER is only available in a digital format, which is generally a good tradeoff for students because it’s free. However, for students, instructors or institutions who want hard copy textbooks, or specific formats, this OER might not be the best fit.
  • Copyright limitations – This is the big one. Short stories before 1925 are in the public domain, so no problems there, but all stories after 1925 are under some sort of copyright. Because we have no budget to pay for licenses, more recent stories are linked rather than fully included in the OER, and all linked sources must be legally posted in the first place. This limits what stories we can include. Also, linking stories is less desirable from a design standpoint and it’s certainly less stable (e.g. if a story is taken down or moved and our link breaks, we’re going to have to find an alternative). We have done our best within legal copyright limitations, but a professional textbook that pays for licenses might just be a less involved option for some people, and that’s fine too.

Ultimately, we can’t tell you if Off the Shelf is the right choice for you, your class or your institution. Weigh the opportunities and limitations above and make a good decision. OERs require more work by instructors to make them fit their class, but few traditional textbooks are perfect fits either, so we think Off the Shelf is a worthy option to consider.

Your Options for Adopting Off the Shelf

If you do choose to adopt Off the Shelf for one of your classes, you have several good options for how to do it:

  • Full textbook adoption - If you really like the content, you can adopt it as a standalone textbook for your class. There are more than enough stories and support materials included to fill a full semester class without requiring you to find additional stories or your students to purchase additional materials.
  • Textbook adoption with supplements – If Off the Shelf doesn’t exactly suit your needs, you could use it for most of your class content, but supplement with additional readings on your own. Since it costs your students no money, there’s no pressure to use it a certain amount to justify the costs. Use what you like and supplement the rest.
  • As a minor supplement – If you have other materials for your class but just want to use Off the Shelf for a small number of readings or support materials, that’s great too! It doesn’t have to be the primary textbook at all. Since it’s fully online, link to it and direct students to specific sections as needed.
  • Modification – Remember that Off the Shelf is licensed Noncommercial ShareAlike, which allows you to remix, tweak, and build upon a work non-commercially, as long as the new creation is licensed under identical terms. If you feel like using or reworking our content, feel free to do so. Just make sure you license it the same way and give credit to us or our sources, depending on what you’re using.

Planning Your Term

If you’re new to teaching a mostly or completely short story-based literature class, the following suggestions might help you think through your early planning:

  • For context, we teach Introduction to Fiction on 16-week semesters during Autumn and Spring terms and on an 11-week semester during Summer term. The class is offered in three modalities: a traditional, two-day-a-week class that meets in-person, a one-day-a-week, in-person blended course with a robust online component, and a fully online web course with no in-person classes.
  • Our classes are generally separated into three parts with a lot of flexibility and variation built-in as well. Assuming a 16-week semester, we focus on classic/canonical short stories for eight weeks, contemporary 21st century stories for four weeks, and we discuss a contemporary 21st century novel for the final four weeks. This works out to be a 50-50, classic-contemporary split, which seems to work well, though there are enough short stories included in Off the Shelf to structure your class differently.
  • For example, if you're so inclined, there are enough stories in Chapter 3 to teach a full semester of classic short stories. There are also enough 20th and 21st century stories in Chapter 4 and 5 to build a mostly contemporary class with just a small number of classic stories as needed. It all depends on the parameters of your class, the needs of your students and your preferences as an instructor. Either way though, there are enough stories here for you to experiment and have fun with the reading list.
  • Though it’s outside the scope of this OER, we do require students to read a novel each term. Since Off the Shelf is free and novels (even recently published hardback ones) are relatively cheap, the total cost for the class should still be under 20 dollars. If you’re fully dedicated to no textbook costs, Project Gutenberg and other organizations offer full versions of older novels in the public domain for free.

Finally, if you have any questions about Off the Shelf or how to use it in your classroom, you’re welcome to email us (Stephen at slogan5@cscc.edu and Heather at hthompso@cscc.edu). We would love to connect with other literature teachers and OER users. Best of luck with your planning and classes!