In the summer of 2021, two colleagues and I undertook a grant-funded project to rework our U.S. History survey courses to use open-access educational resources (OER). Prior to beginning the grant project, only one of our team members had experience working with OER. The impetus for our work came from the Pennsylvania Grants for Open and Affordable Learning program, a special initiative prompted by the constraints on learning brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and funded through the Pennsylvania Department of Education.

Our goals for the project were two-fold: first, we hoped to make the overall cost of college more affordable for our students, offering an option that was more accessible to lower-income students. With the support of this grant, we planned to transform all sections of our U.S. History survey courses to use open-access materials (approximately ten to twelve sections per year, taught by three to five instructors). Given the range of publisher-generated materials we were using at the time, we originally projected that the redesign would result in a net savings of about $60–$110 per student per semester, for a total projected savings in textbook costs of about $7,000 per semester. Second, we wanted to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in the content we teach. We aimed to restructure our U.S. History survey courses to amplify the voices of underrepresented peoples in American history. Through this course redesign, we customized our curriculum to include a wider variety of voices that publishers have often excluded from mainstream textbooks, and which have only recently been reintroduced.

To begin, my colleagues and I researched existing OER to assess which might work best for our students. We settled on The American Yawp for its breadth of coverage, evolving narrative, and supplementary resources. For the remainder of the summer, we crafted two master syllabus templates (one for each half of the survey course), compiled exam questions for each course, and developed supplementary assignments where appropriate. With the help of a student researcher, we also crafted primary source discussion questions to supplement the syllabi. These syllabi use the Yawp as their core textbook, and move chronologically through the material, assigning roughly one chapter of reading each week.

The editors of the Yawp have done an excellent job in producing a primary-source reader that offers ample opportunities for discussion according to each chapter’s themes. We wanted to add to this breadth, giving educators (and ourselves) even more options to be able to tailor our teaching toward themes such as immigration, gender, and the voices of people of color. To do this, we created primary-source “pathways” within each syllabus template. For each week in the syllabus, there are three or four thematic pathways that provide supplementary primary source readings and images on a dedicated theme related to the main chapter content. Within each pathway, there are typically two to three primary sources for student examination. Each primary source has been located in an online repository that is free for public access and is linked in the master syllabus. Thus, instructors have approximately nine to twelve supplementary primary-source readings and materials to choose from each week—in addition to the excellent resources compiled in the Yawp—and can tailor their conversations with students as desired. In an effort to support faculty as they reworked their syllabi to use OER, we also crafted weekly discussion questions tied to both the Yawp chapter and thematic primary-source pathways. Many of these questions are focused on individual sources. Finally, each syllabus also contains sample essay exam questions for three examinations in each semester. These resources are in addition to the multiple-choice exams and other assessment materials made available through the Yawp. Modeling the goals of the Yawp, we made our own materials available through our institution’s digital repository, using a Creative Commons license. This work has become highly visible, seeing over 1,500 downloads worldwide since we posted it online three years ago.

To date, we have implemented the revised materials in all face-to-face sections of the U.S. History survey, and have seen the material implemented in some online courses as well. This project positively impacted 95 students in the first semester, and has averaged an impact of about 100 students per semester since we first implemented the redesign in fall 2021. Since then, we have served approximately 600 students in these survey courses, resulting in a savings of about $66,000 in textbook costs for our students.

Anecdotally, I can say that my students have consistently expressed appreciation for our conscientious effort to save them money by reducing the cost of required textbooks. A small liberal arts college located in a semi-rural region of northeastern Pennsylvania, Misericordia still serves a large percentage of first-generation college students, many of whom come from working-class backgrounds. As the cost of textbooks has grown, many of my current students can only afford to rent the textbooks that previous generations could buy and resell. At the conclusion of our first semester using these new materials, we conducted a survey of the students enrolled in the courses using the OER. Most students reported that the online resources were easy to use and positively affected their learning experience in the course. Students noted that notetaking remained easy, and many of them noted that they used the OER more than they anticipated they might use a printed textbook. Aside from that, the Yawp makes for a handy reference for classroom use and studying; laptop-bearing students in the classroom can quickly pull up primary sources for use in class discussion or group work, and the online nature of the textbook means it’s keyword-searchable (a handy tool for finding those tricky study-guide terms students might have missed).

Faculty response also was generally positive. Traditionally, our department had not typically used a common syllabus or required textbook for the U.S. history survey courses. Transitioning to this new framework was made easier because, at the time, the three faculty members (two full time and one adjunct) who worked on the PA Goal project were the only folks teaching those courses. Since then, we’ve acquired new adjuncts, and full-time faculty have shifted their loads to include these courses, but all of them have received the Yawp master syllabus positively. I suspect this is largely because the thematic pathways we created were deliberately broad, and allow for a range of customized primary-source readings and discussions. But as a department chair, I’ve also been flexible in how I’ve shared the materials with new instructors; they are free to tailor the syllabi as they prefer, as long as we adhere to the goal of foregrounding OER. I also have really great colleagues.

Moving your survey course to OER can be challenging. It is a goal I held for many years, but one that I avoided because I lacked the time and resources to find the right materials to replace my tried-and-true textbook and primary-source reader. The PA Goal grant encouraged my colleagues and me to take the plunge, and I’m so glad that we did. Our students have benefited tremendously from this seemingly small pedagogical shift. It is our hope that the resources we created will inspire others to consider shifting to OER as well.