Using Open EducationAL Resources to Facilitate Statistical Comprehension
Before I started my teaching career at the City University of New York, I was involved in developing curricula for K-12 STEM education. I worked in a city with a 20% poverty rate, where most of my students were underrepresented in STEM – so accessibility and inclusion were constantly on my mind. These experiences shaped my approach to teaching and are primarily why I was drawn to using Open Educational Resources (OERs) in my courses. I believe that Open Educational Resources create an equitable learning environment for my students and, in doing so, help promote diversity in STEM - or at the very least, remove additional barriers in higher education for students from underrepresented groups.
What are Open Educational Resources?
Open Educational Resources (OERs) are materials for teaching or learning that are either in the public domain or have been released under a license that allows them to be freely used, changed, or shared with others. This can include anything from images and worksheets to free, online textbooks (see the Open Textbook Library). The idea behind OERs is simple – it aims to strengthen students’ educational experiences and make sure learning is accessible to students. By now, I have taught a range of courses, including Social Psychology, Statistics for Social Science, Experimental Psychology. In my own classes, I have used free textbooks, Google platforms, YouTube videos, and additional materials to guide student learning.
Open Education in psychology (and other STEM disciplines)
Psychology – like many other sciences – has been making a push toward the use of Open Educational Resources, so it is relatively easy to find content that you can use online. The Society for the Teaching of Psychology is a great resource for finding materials for any psych-related courses. For example, Project Syllabus (created by the Society for the Teaching of Psychology) includes quality examples of syllabi that have gone through a peer-review process for positive communication, inclusion, clear goals, and creativity. The Society also provides different resources by course topics, which can range from discussion questions to in-class activities. Some of my favorite activities have centered around rephrasing microaggressions, identifying misleading graphs, and comparing pseudoscience to science.
If you are like me, there may be times when you may also need to find publicly available data (this is especially critical if you are teaching research methods or statistics courses). The great news is that the Open Government Data Act requires federal agencies (in the United States) to publish their information online as open data, using standardized, machine-readable data formats (available at data.gov). This leaves educators with plenty of options for data that students can browse through. Outside of government data, large-scale social science surveys and polls (e.g., GenForward, Pew Research) provide students with opportunities to analyze data that are personally interesting to them. Because most of these surveys are focused on social issues (e.g., attitudes toward the overturning of Roe v. Wade), they also provide students with opportunities to engage in real-world problem solving.
Related to the use of publicly available data, I also aim to use openly-sourced statistics (e.g., RStudio, JAMOVI, JASP) and survey (e.g., Google forms) software in my classes. The benefit of using open software is that when I am unable to figure out how to troubleshoot an issue, my students can find tutorials online, find pre-written code online, and interact with live forums for additional help. I chose to move toward free statistics software because the use of software through a virtual desktop (which is often the case at public institutions) makes it difficult for students to save information on their personal laptops. Finally, in using public data and free software, students can also contribute to the open science movement and practice reproducing other researchers’ analyses.
Finding ways to learn about Open Educational Resources at your institution
I am lucky to have learned about Open Educational Resources through the Open Knowledge Fellowship at CUNY. Though your institution may not provide funded opportunities to learn about open practices, your institution will likely have a Teaching and Learning Center. This office is designed to help you grow as educators and will generally offer professional development workshops (e.g., on data management, student engagement) as well as guidance in your shift to Open Educational Resources. Librarians are also helpful in directing you toward open resources (librarians as a whole are an underutilized resource in graduate school!). So, while your experience might not be the same as mine, you will likely have plenty of opportunities to redesign your courses using Open Educational Resources.
Are there any “costs” to open education resources?
While I am a big proponent of Open Educational Resources, I recognize that not everything is perfect. The biggest con to using Open Education Resources is that not all resources are made with the best quality. You will likely need to sift through materials to ensure that they are appropriate for your class. Additionally, while Open Education Resources are generally accessible (in that they are free), they do require access to technology, which not everyone has. Finally, you might have concerns about copyright, and as a general rule, you should only use resources that are registered under a Creative Commons License (I encourage you to read more about licensing and register your own work with Creative Commons here).
Despite these relatively minor concerns, I think the move toward Open Educational Resources is something that will greatly impact your students’ success in higher education because finances are no longer a barrier for them. In classes where statistics software and survey software are involved, finances tend to be the number one barrier to education (even as an instructor, I have to find ways to conduct analyses without having to pay for software). My students are already recognizing and appreciating the move toward Open Education Resources. One student, in their first week survey said, “thank you for making the textbook easily accessible!!!!!” Not only does the move toward Open Education Resources increase their accessibility to course content, but I believe it will increase my students’ trust in me as their professor and help them feel confident that my goal in teaching is to create an equitable learning environment. I encourage you all to consider incorporating open materials into your own courses.
About the Author
Grace Flores-Robles is a PhD candidate in Basic and Applied Social Psychology at The Graduate Center, where she received a Quantitative Certification and an MA in Psychology. She currently teaches Statistics for Social Change and is a Quantitative Reasoning Fellow at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. In her spare time, you can find Grace practicing the euphonium or training for her next long-distance run.
