The Adler University Library has secured a State of Illinois grant to launch a two-year pilot program aimed at developing and providing open educational resources (OER) — no-cost, openly licensed course materials — to its students.
This initiative will begin with the creation of a textbook for the PSY 737 Statistics course, led by Peter Ji, Ph.D., associate professor in the Doctor of Psychology in Clinical Psychology program.
Dr. Ji, who is based on the Chicago Campus, will write and develop the OER statistics textbook, which is expected to be available by the fall of 2025.
Dorinne Banks
“The high cost of textbooks is one factor affecting our students’ learning outcomes and student success,” said Online Campus Librarian Dorinne Banks, who initiated the grant application and whose experience with OERs prior to arriving at Adler sparked the creation of the pilot program.
“I’m taking on this project because I feel so strongly about this service,” she added. “Students should not struggle to access their learning materials. Yet many do, due to the high cost of course materials. This is an important starting point to addressing these challenges.”
OERs are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium — digital or otherwise — that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation, and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Examples of OERs include case studies, assignments, assessment tools, software, simulations, videos, workshops, lab manuals, and test banks.
Unlike freely available resources on the internet, which are protected by copyright and restricted in their use, students are permitted to use and repurpose OER course materials at no cost due to a Creative Commons license.
Dr. Ji
Banks said Dr. Ji was selected for the initial grant to create OER course materials that not only address the key learning outcomes and competencies of PSY 737 — a core course for Psy.D. students — but also for his vision to use psychology topics to illustrate statistical concepts and explanations specifically tailored for a diverse audience of graduate-level psychology students. Dr. Ji’s OER course materials will also demonstrate how statistics can be applied to examine social justice issues.
“Statistics is not a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Dr. Ji. “Statistics, as it applies to psychology and social justice, can have its own nuances.”
For example, he added, scores obtained using psychology measures are not easily interpretable in the same manner as in physical sciences or where the numbers are readily known, such as economics.
“Obtaining a sample is more difficult in social justice work because it is not easy to obtain a sufficient sample size when engaging in populations or issues that are difficult to assess,” Dr. Ji said. “Over the years of teaching statistics within the Adler University community, I’ve learned their questions, how they understand and approach statistics, and how to make statistics effective for them. The OER textbook is being written with these qualities in mind.”