In January of next year, Dr. Eric Fauss, a history professor and one of my colleagues at Amarillo College, and I will be teaching other faculty at AC about "How to Adapt an OER Textbook to Your Class."
The idea for the session grew out of our practice of using an OER in teaching American History at AC. Specifically, we use a free, online textbook called The American Yawp. (The title was inspired by a line from Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself"--"I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world").
Something we want to bring out in our session is that one of the best things about OERs is the price. A 2018 article in The Atlantic magazine featuring AC and its president took note of something that Eric and I witness routinely: at this school "poverty intrudes into the classroom every day."
Back in the early 1980s, a few months after I graduated from high school, I experienced one of those American college-going rites of passage: sticker shock at the bookstore. As young and dumb as I was, I understood all about tuition. You had to pay to go to college. But I had no idea the textbooks for my classes would be so expensive. What made it relatively painless for me was that my parents and my scholarship could cover the cost.
But what about students who aren't as fortunate as I was? For them, the prices of textbooks can be a serious problem. Every member of the AC faculty has heard about any number of students who began a semester without a required course book. Student loans or grant money had not yet arrived. In other cases, no money was on its way, and the student simply couldn't afford the book.
Because it is an online OER, The American Yawp eliminates those kinds of problems. No paying. And no waiting for it to arrive.
