OERs at StFX

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, students didn’t spend thousands of dollars on textbooks, for many were freely provided by the institution they attend. But wait, this isn’t a fairy-tale—for many students attending university in British Columbia, it’s reality. Since 2012, students on the West Coast have saved almost $24 million dollars as many of their courses are taught using open textbooks. It’s not just students that benefit from these open textbooks, either—hundreds of faculty members have made the switch and have a variety of free textbooks at their disposal.

What is AtlanticOER and Why Does it Matter?

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are online, freely distributed textbooks, but can also include a variety of resources such as videos and educational materials. To learn more about these OERs, I attended the virtual launch event of AtlanticOER and spoke with its lead organizer, StFX alumna Tiffany MacLennan ’19, ’20.

First, MacLennan explains, “AtlanticOER is a repository of open educational resources that are going to be available to any student in Atlantic Canada. That means that once it gets off the ground and gets building itself a little bit more, it will be a place that any professor in Atlantic Canada can put in either their textbooks, educational materials, or videos. As it grows, the aim is that students get access to free educational materials and we can ween away from the traditional textbook model.” You don’t have to convince any student about the benefits of OERs. Many of us know that textbooks can be expensive, unengaging, and unhelpful to the learning process. Many students choose not to buy textbooks for a class because for them, it is a choice between textbooks and groceries.

There are benefits for professors, too. MacLennan explains that “bringing OERs into your classroom can provide you with a new learning opportunity and can force you to have more exciting and inviting conversations with your students. Through using OER, you get to learn more yourself… and you get to play with it—it’s a fun initiative. We also have librarians who can comfortably find OERs for a classroom to remove some of the burden.”

AtlanticOER was established to eliminate some of the barriers to creating OERs, McLennan shared. First, “it gives educators the platform to start creating and sharing their own OERs,” she said. It also helps overcome the challenges that come with creating textbooks and educational materials by addressing the barriers of limited time and resources. “Creating a textbook isn’t very fast–they take a lot of work. With the AtlanticOER repository, there are grants you can apply for that compensate your time spent on OERs or to hire students to help create OERs.” The organization also places a great deal of emphasis on disseminating knowledge, helping people understand the benefits that come with OERs. For McLennan, “the end goal is that no student makes the choice not to buy a textbook based on affordability. The grad gift this year is

for student food insecurity due to an uptick in food related asks from the financial aid office. That tells us those decisions are being made more and more often.”

Students’ Union Advocacy

I also sat down with Siobhan Lacey, current Vice President Academic (VPA) of the StFX Students’ Union to find out what they’re currently doing to advocate for OER adoption. Provincially, they’re working with StudentsNS, the province’s non-profit advocacy group that represents post-secondary students, to advocate to the provincial government for OER funding, such as providing financial incentives and grants to professors. Close to home, the Students’ Union is facilitating conversations with key stakeholders such as faculty and students.

Prior to the launch of AtlanticOER, StFX did not have the on-campus resources to push for OERs; but now, Students’ Unions across the Atlantic region are undergoing training to advocate for OERs at their University Senates. Moving forward, it is important for our Students’ Union to make a bigger push on OERs, but this change can only happen if students want it. It will require students talking to their professors about OERs to create an Open Education culture on our campus.

When asked about the barriers to implementing OERs, Lacey said that “there are a couple big ones. The biggest one is obviously funding. It’s always going to be funding. But to first develop an online infrastructure that can host a variety of OERs… is going to be very expensive, maintaining that even more so. The funding [barrier] is why I think we’re seeing such communal effort around OERs, and why no separate university is developing them. It would take a big budget that I don’t think one university would be able to sustain. Another barrier we’re seeing is incentivizing faculty to develop their own OERs. Obviously, developing a textbook is time consuming and can be a lot of work for faculty. But, ultimately, we know that it’s so much more beneficial for students. So, it’s about incentivizing those folks and showing them the benefit it has to student academic success.” The final barrier Lacey identified was awareness: “trying to encourage faculty to develop OERs because students want them while the majority don’t know what they are is a little difficult to do!” Earlier this year, StudentsNS ran an awareness campaign focusing on this final barrier, and is currently putting a lot of emphasis on knowledge translation to provide students with the skills to engage in conversations with faculty about OERs.

Offering advice to future VPAs or students interested in OERs, McLennan says “not be discouraged by the slow uptake at first, because all good things take time. Starting conversations isn’t easy, especially when faculty have been teaching with these books for [several] years. Use the time it takes to build things to build things right. We need more students to know about OERs to get more students to talk about them… with our faculty, administrations, and librarians to actually push this forward.”

University Administration

The university administration can play a big role in implementing OERs. On March 5, 2021, University Academic Vice President and Provost Dr. Kevin Wamsley agreed to sit down with me for an interview. “I’m a fan of educational resources being distributed to as many people as possible,” he said. “Education is difficult, it’s hierarchical, it can favour those with more resources, and textbooks have, for the past twenty-to-twenty-five years, become very expensive. Textbook companies have become unfair in their pricing. While education has been brought onto the open market readily, the burden of this falls to the student… providing free or low-cost educational resources makes education more accessible.”

When asked about benefits for faculty, Wamsley emphasized that the role of the professor is to disseminate knowledge. “I think it’s important that professors are actively involved in producing materials for class. Professors creating and modifying OERs is an important part of the process… professors are excited to talk about their work and that’s the way it should be. Once you begin to contribute, and you see how it can be dynamic in your classroom, I think people are going to be all in,” he said.

Coming back to one barrier identified by the Students’ Union in implementing OERs, I asked Wamsley about incentivizing professors to adopt and create them. He said there are no current plans to incentivize professors to take this project on, but went on to explain that the school does have a plan: “we have a fabulous teaching and learning centre over in Mulroney Hall operated by Dr. Angie Kolen, and this presents a marvellous vessel to get the word out and provide workshops about OERs and how to get involved.” Further, he says, “professors are not getting rich selling textbooks. They’re not, they never will,” so there’s nothing standing in the way of making future publications accessible.

International Student Speaks Out about Recruitment

An inside perspective into the life of an international student

I want you to use your imagination for a second. Imagine leaving your home, the country you were born and raised in, to gain a higher education and pursue a bright start to your future. Imagine saying goodbye to your family and friends and packing up two bag-loads of your life to take with you as you travel alone to an entirely new continent with which you are not entirely familiar with. Imagine arriving at your destination and failing to see anyone in the distance who remotely looks like you, and then later discovering that this will be the setting of the next four years of your life. 

When I was recruited by Saint Francis Xavier University, I was quite literally sold the Canadian dream. With promises of a diverse, peaceful culture that embraces and celebrates other nationalities, of renewable bursaries and opportunities for work that would “reduce the cost of my tuition tremendously,” there were hopeful stars in my eyes as I pictured my future at this university. I was going to make tons of new friends with whom I would share my culture as I equally experienced theirs, and I would perhaps even return home with a Canadian accent after a few months. 

The reality could not have been any more different. In all of the dreamy tales fed to us in the large assembly hall of our high school, it seems that the university recruitment team simply forgot to mention that the tuition at StFX was going to be hiked by 6% every year for the next three years because the university is in so much debt, and that this would actually translate to a 12% increase for international students, since they pay double the tuition fees compared to Canadian students. 

The lovely recruiters also had a little ‘slip’ of memory and neglected to inform us that the total cost of residence for the year does not include or cover the two/three-week Christmas break during December, and that all students are required to evacuate their rooms and expected to independently find alternative accommodation for themselves over this period. Of course, mentioning these vital factors to potential students was not of great importance at the time. As long as they managed to successfully rope in and recruit a couple of us, the rest would figure itself out. After all, the university is kind enough to perform favors such as providing alternative campus living arrangements for those international students who are unable to go home for Christmas, all at a little charge, of course! What is an extra one or two-hundred dollars to someone who already pays $30 000 to be here?   

 My question is, why, oh why, then, would StFX continue to recruit a large number of international students, if they constitute most of the debt carried by the university? Is their solution to this problem, therefore, to hire a debt-collector masked as an International Student Advisor, who will deceive international students into a trap of sharing their financial struggles, only to add them to her ‘blacklist’ of individuals to monitor and watch out for? The international population is truly better off not having an Office of Internationalization, if it houses individuals who intentionally advocate against them. The very students whom she is purposed to be a support for (at least, according to her job description), are the ones whom the university has mandated her to take a strong position against and, quite frankly, get rid of. 

Moreover, university administration made it very clear that 2018 would be a year of change and uncompromising rule. Whereas the university was previously quite understanding and lenient towards international students, and permitted them to construct plans for payment that would still allow them to register for courses so long as they had been making some steady payments to their accounts during the year, this policy changed overnight. With an ironclad fist, the university denied access to course registration to all international students whose student accounts were anything above the new threshold of $5 000. Lo and behold (and this should certainly not come as a surprise to any of us), this new policy was not transparently communicated to any students, nor was there sufficient notice given prior to implementation of this new practice. 

So, when July came around and it was registration time, many unsuspecting international students received devastating emails from the Accounts Office that informed them that they would not, in fact, be able to register for classes, and they essentially would have about one month to miraculously decrease their balances owing to $5 000 if they wished to continue their enrolment with the university for the upcoming year.

I’ll ask you to again to imagine being an international student on the receiving end of this news; having traveled a long way from your country to this foreign land for an education, which, so abruptly, was snatched away from you. Imagine being halfway through university at this point, and being unable to join your peers as they progress into the year ahead while you remain behind, a balance of $10 000 or worse, $50 000, standing between you and your future, as you work tirelessly to reduce it just so you can catch up. 

Worse off, the concept of government loans or assistance to students is virtually non-existent in many of the countries from which StFX recruits its international population, and most parents are paying 30 thousand dollars straight out of their pockets, in economies that are not half as stable as Canada’s. Yet, international students are being held to the same merciless standards as Canadian students who have these privileges.

This is the unfortunate reality of several international students who attend(ed) St Francis Xavier University. Unexpected, uncommunicable costs are constantly flung in their direction, and they are expected to just bear the increments and tough it out, with no compromise on the part of the university. Just this month (on November 8 2018), StFX residence services sent out an email regarding accommodations over the Christmas break for internationals who are unable to go home, indicating that they would be placed in FX Hall (formerly Coady MacNeil Hall) for the break at a daily rate of almost $30 for a single room, totalling a hefty $600 for a three-week stay. How it could be possible that a student who is probably unable to afford a trip to go home to begin with, be able to afford to pay $600 - for such poor living conditions - is beyond me. This also comes as a huge slap to the international community, who, just last year, fought to be placed in a more livable building because the present condition of Coady MacNeil Hall is dilapidated and unbearable, suitable only for its current use as a storage facility for janitors’ cleaning supplies. Thus, after begrudgingly moving internationals into Power Hall for the December 2017 holiday, the university administration turned around and decided to not only revert back to Coady MacNeil as the building allocation for Christmas this year, but to hike the cost of stay by over $400 without any warning or any explanation for the increased rate. 

Amazingly, one of the universities strategic goals is “Increased enrolment by under-represented students, including international students,” a statement bleeding with irony, contradiction, and deception. What the university really wants is more students to manipulate and deceive as they demand double the tuition for half of the deserved services. 

The message here is clear: we, the international students, are unwanted and useless, and our comfort/sanity while we are halfway across the world from home, is not a priority. While many other universities place their international population at the forefront of every decision, acknowledging the fact that they are so far from their homes and their families, StFX treats their international students as inconveniences whom they are doing a favor by inviting onto this campus. You can count on the fact that we as international students will not make any recommendations to our peers in our home countries for Saint Francis Xavier University as a choice for higher education. 

I wish StFX all the best as they try to achieve their strategic goals in future years, because for as long as they continue to treat international students like the butt of the joke and some good-for-nothing cash cows, the reputation of this university and how it really treats its international students will spread and always stand to reflect the truth which their recruitment team fails to speak.