6 Course Material Decisions and Factors: Unpacking the Opaque Box
6 Course Material Decisions and Factors: Unpacking the Opaque Box
Anita Walz
Introduction
Course material adoption within higher education is a complex, pedagogically driven, but relatively opaque process. To students, librarians, and those not teaching semester-length courses or involved in curriculum design, course material evaluation and selection in higher education can feel like a black box: opaque, proprietary, and mysterious, minimally transparent with only a few clues available through institutional policy requirements or instructor disclosures. Few instructors seem to openly discuss course materials among themselves or others. For open education advocates this opacity poses a problem. How can one provide relevant, customized information regarding open options when scant information is available regarding instructor motivations, criteria, processes, and ultimately curriculum or pedagogy decisions?
Several reasons exist for this opacity: a lack of training during instructors’ college and graduate programs, and cultural factors which perpetuate limited discussion of course material selection processes. Authors in both K–12 and higher education indicated that there are few training opportunities (Stein, Steuen, Carnine, & Long, 2001, p. 8; Allen & Seaman, 2014, p. 5) or that they have “little formal knowledge” (Smith & DeRidder, 1997, p. 367) of criteria used to evaluate textbooks or of protocols used by other institutions for textbook selection. A humanities faculty member reflects the limited, but changing culture of sharing within higher education:
There is a strangely idiosyncratic culture around course resources that is perhaps the consequence of academic freedom traditions in the US. There is little centralized sharing of best practices [regarding learning resource evaluation], although social media has changed this somewhat—I have witnessed substantial Facebook threads on textbook selection and approaches to teaching specific topics. Resource awareness and selection should be part of teacher training, which graduate students at Research I institutions do not receive. (Full-time humanities faculty in Allen & Seaman, 2014, p. 5)
There are likely other reasons including limited time, few perceived rewards for sharing, political factors, or a perception that course material selection falls outside of one’s area of research and expertise.
To education advocates, this lack of transparency may be viewed a missed learning opportunity for instructors and graduate students bound for teaching, as well as students themselves who might miss out on the benefits of their instructors’ knowledge and skill. For open education advocates, especially those based within libraries, the lack of transparency also poses some practical problems. The least of these problems is the barrier to joining and contributing to existing conversations and processes. At worst, lack of transparency regarding course material selection negatively affects the abilities of open