Scope, Objectives, Content

The article is in scope with the journal and its section, Innovative Practices. The main topic is open and commercial textbooks. The context of the study, American Indian Higher Education Consortium-Affiliated Tribal Colleges and Universities, is important and often under-researched. The focus on minority-serving institutions will be of interest to the readers.

Organization

The paper proceeds logically, with proper usage of sections and subheadings. The paper uses two tables to guide the reader through the data. 

Approach and Conclusions

Inferences from the data are sound and based on compiled data provided by the institutions' bookstores, websites, or relevant representatives. No survey or other data collection was conducted. The author presents a good literature review on TCU, but literature on open education and open educational resources, and more specifically in the context of minority-serving institutions, could be expanded. Concepts of localization and culturally adapted resources could be suggested. 

The author uses the term “open education books” (OE books, OE textbooks), which is not the common term for open educational resources (OER). If the author agrees, I recommend using the term OER for consistency with the literature and better discoverability once the article is published. 

The conclusion does not follow a typical conclusion format. It is mostly a repetition of the abstract and introduction. I recommend rewriting the conclusion with questions and issues that the study raised, maybe suggesting future outreach explorations to grow awareness and adoption of OERs in TCUs. 

Writing Style, References

The article reads well. Some revisions are needed in the references section as it does not completely follow the APA citation style (ex. initials of first names only). But overall, no major issues with writing style or references are to be noted.

Application

The article provides a good snapshot of the current textbook cost in American Indian Higher Education Consortium-Affiliated Tribal Colleges and Universities and raises the unique missions and challenges of these institutions. As open education supports inclusive access to education and knowledge for marginalized groups, among others, it is important to note the tension between open education’s mission and the lack of OERs that focus on native studies, hence the difficulty in assigning such resources in TCUs. 

What are the stronger points/qualities of the article?

The article focuses on an important and marginalized context in higher education, Tribal Colleges and Universities, which makes an interesting contribution to the literature on open education. The author was able to make a thorough analysis of the cost of textbooks from 37 TCUs affiliated with American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), which provides robust results. The paper presents a good literature review on American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC)’s Mission and the Federal Responsibility to the TCUs, which helps to better understand the context in which those institutions evolve. In their discussion, the author uses Everett Rogers’s diffusion of innovations theory to support future OER adoption outreach efforts. 

What are the weaker points/qualities of the article? How could they be strengthened?

While the article presents itself as focusing on open education resources adoption, the data mostly relates to commercial textbooks, as adoption percentages were difficult to gather for OERs. Therefore, the results on OER are mostly assumptions. The author addresses this limitation in the paper. Nonetheless, I think it would have been worthwhile to expand the data collection to instructors and self-adoption reporting to strengthen the data and conclusions. 

The title could be reworked to better reflect the study and its results. 

Peer Review Ranking: Scope
Highly relevant

Peer Review Ranking: Clarity
clear

Peer Review Ranking: Contribution
contributes

Peer Review Ranking: Research Assessment
sound

Note:
This review refers to round of peer review and may pertain to an earlier version of the document.

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Scope, Objectives, Content

Because the article spends quite a bit more of its word volume and analytical focus on affordability and commercial textbook use in TCUs than it does on OERs or OER implementation, the relevance of the project’s future to JOERHE’s scope is clear, but this specific article’s relevance could be much better-articulated. In the submitted version of this article, the author narrates a midstream switch in the focus of the study, from open textbook adoption rates over to commercial textbook adoption rates as a proxy for affordability. To me, this has the effect of a bait-and-switch; it feels as though the article promises to tell the reader about open textbook adoption in TCUs, then the majority of the article’s analysis focuses on commercial textbook implementation and cost, and then there’s some tacked-on analyses to connect those data to forthcoming open textbook outreach, some of which is not elucidated as much as it could be. This way of narrating the midstream switch in focus makes the relevance of this specific article to the scope of JOERHE feel looser than I think it really is.

I think it’s probable that a few things would help with making the relevance to this journal’s focus more direct. 1) The author could either explain a little about why she’s chosen to narrate the full journey of the baseline analysis complete with its twists and turns, or present the article in the abstract and intro more directly as what it is: a commercial textbook adoption and open textbook match analysis. If the latter, she could perhaps explain the original intent and the switch briefly somewhere in the middle of the article rather than as the heart of the article is developing, and thus it would dictate the article’s overall structure a little less. 2) The author could reduce the word volume spent on commercial textbook adoption analysis a little, and present more explanation and analysis of how open textbooks were identified as relevant/potential fits for commonly-taught courses contributing to the 1.8M savings figure, so that more of the analysis is on OERs. This could also help with some of the issues that I’ll bring up in Approach and Conclusions below. 3) The author could incorporate articulation of the connection between these baseline data and the plan for OER-adoption-related outreach a little more throughout the article, instead of primarily near the end. I think that this would probably also help with making the article fit more into JOERHE’s Innovative Practices section, since it currently reads less like an Innovative Practices article and more like what JOERHE considers a research article.

Organization

As probably became clear in my Scope/Objectives/Content comments, I feel challenged by some aspects of how the paper proceeds in its submitted form, particularly in the arcs of the abstract and the introduction. Both the abstract and the introduction start out sounding like the article is going to be about current open textbook adoption at TCUs, which has a clear relevance to the journal’s scope, and then veer into commercial book adoption instead, which needs more articulation to connect it to the journal’s scope. Both of these foundational sections could be structured less to narrate the turns that the researcher’s journey took, and more to simply present the researcher’s analysis and its relevance to the journal as turned out, rather than in its original and abandoned intent. 

I also feel that the Special Topics section seems like it would be better placed in the Literature Review, rather than tacked on near the end of the Results section. Those are topics that seem like they inform the analysis much more than they are a result of analysis; they speak a great deal to the overall landscape of affordability at TCUs and they help to inform the baseline that the article then establishes about textbook use and cost. I also think that putting that content in a section closer to the end of the article and calling that section “Special Topics” seems to sort of tokenize the points being made about what makes TCUs unique, and incorporating them somewhere like the Literature Review would bring more of a sense that those points are digested into the analysis rather than tacked on top of it.

In the Literature Review section, I feel that although I can understand the strong contiguity and relevance of the Federal Responsibility to TCUs subsection after some thinking, I think that most readers of this journal would probably like the relevance to be more clearly explained to understand why it is placed there.

Aside from these things, the article in its submitted form seems to follow the common organization of a research article, which feels logical to readers who are used to that structure. The article also has all of the necessary components of an Innovative Practices article in JOERHE, though as a whole, its content, tilt, and length seem to fit JOERHE’s Research Articles section more.

Approach and Conclusions

The author’s focus on affordability for this early article in the overall project seems sensible, since it seems like there is still a lot of nuance and variety to dig into on how adaptation and open licensing in OERs could work in/with Indigenous communities’ practices and laws. In this early study, the author uses familiar measures and analysis to think about the baseline quantitative state of commercial textbook use and the conditions for OER adoption at AIHEC-affiliated TCUs. The author seems familiar with literature on systematic OER initiatives in higher ed. 

My primary concern is that the article doesn’t seem to engage much with Indigenous scholarship about education, even on the topics of TCUs or higher education affordability. This really seems to undermine the relevance of the analysis; it seems like transplanting PWIs’ (predominantly White institutions) logics for OER initiatives wholesale into TCUs without critically engaging with what makes TCUs unique as a potential setting for a systematic OER initiative. I certainly believe the assertion that there isn’t a lot of published research on Open Education at TCUs other than what is already cited. But both my experience as a research librarian, and my experience as a fellow settler Asian American who is trying to grow in my practice of solidarity with Indigenous communities, lead me to believe that there is other relevant literature out there to acknowledge, lean on, and foster conversation with. Moving the Special Topics section from the Results up to the Lit Review will probably help, but I think the Lit Review should also be expanded to acknowledge and engage in conversation with Indigenous scholars’ work, especially on college affordability for Indigenous students and TCU affordability.

Regarding the specific point about course standardization through unification behind open textbooks, I also think it could be worth consulting Indigenous scholarship and practice around the benefits and drawbacks of pedagogical standardization. Belarde-Lewis and Kostelecky point out in their 2021 “Tribal Critical Race Theory in Zuni Pueblo” that “standardized” practice is sometimes precisely what erases Indigenous ways of knowing, particularly when it is imposed on Indigenous communities without their input. I could be mistaken, but it seems to me that standardization could flatten out important local social context in some of the courses that a “standard” open text was identified for in the textbook match analysis (ex: Introduction to Addiction, Education Practicums, Fitness and Wellness, etc.) It seems like it would be worth engaging with Indigenous education scholars’ writing about this point of the article.

I also feel that the discussion of Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovation model as a way of thinking about OER outreach seems sort of divorced from the TCU context, and perhaps this could also benefit from engagement with Indigenous scholarship about TCUs or pedagogy in Indigenous communities. The discussion of Rogers’s model in the submitted version of the article doesn’t particularly acknowledge what kind of intricate social labor the innovators, early adopters, and early majority would need to do in order to take an educational tool (OERs) that was developed by settlers for PWIs, experiment with it to learn about what aspects of it are useful in TCU contexts, and imbue their adoption efforts with enough nuance to prevent this tool from becoming yet another colonizing force in Indigenous education. The model also generally doesn’t tend to provide much space for the “late majority” or “laggards” to have legitimate concerns that need to be worked through in good faith to align the new tool with TCUs’ foundational purposes within Indigenous communities. By glossing over these factors, the writing of that section makes it feel as though innovators and early adopters’ contributions will be undervalued and not fully understood, and “resistance” will not be engaged with in good faith. Perhaps this could be improved by simply being developed and articulated further, but it seems to me that engaging with Indigenous people’s writing about what makes TCUs and Indigenous education specific would probably help more.

I make the recommendation to consult and cite Indigenous scholars so many times because I’m concerned by the tendency of OER literature to vaguely gesture toward social justice without necessarily taking note of minoritized communities’s scholarship about themselves, particularly Indigenous communities. Additionally, in the larger context of research, and because I am also an Asian American settler scholar, what I would hate to see is a trend of Asian Americans following a research praxis in the same pattern as White settler scholars’, like what Tuck and Yang talk about in their 2014 “R-Words: Refusing Research.” When we are writing about racialized communities that are not our own, I would love to see us do things to build reciprocity in research relationships, including by coauthoring with Indigenous practitioners, engaging with Indigenous communities’ existing scholarship, and ensuring that what we’re “giving back” in the relationship is welcome as a contribution to Indigenous communities and their sovereignty and self-determination.

Writing Style, References

Generally, I find the writing style very understandable. In Table 2, I feel that the use of a verbal color code is a little confusing; it would probably make more sense to simply verbalize the open textbook status of the course instead of using color words that have to be decoded. Additionally, I personally tend to find scholarly authors’ third-person references to themselves a little off-putting, and prefer when authors simply use “I;” if this feels aligned for both the author and the journal editors, I would like to encourage this. But as a whole, I find the sentence structures, length, and flow easy to read and follow.

Application

I feel that the article is certainly an example of a baseline analysis at the beginning of an OER initiative, but there are quite a few of these running around in OER literature and conference presentations. While I think it has something new to offer, I don’t think it quite offers it in its submitted form. Part of the analysis that article talks about is to identify commonly-taught courses, the status of textbook adoption in those courses, and to identify potential open textbook matches; I feel that talking through the steps of this analysis is one new thing that the article could contribute. Personally, I think I would learn a lot from hearing about how matches are identified, especially if it’s done in conversation with instructors or administrators. By focusing primarily on commercial textbook adoption without digging into this analysis, I feel that both the relevance and the originality of the article seem a little undermined.

What are the stronger points/qualities of the article?

The article has a distinct perspective on the importance of affordability in TCU communities, which I feel can be brought out even more. Additionally, there are very few publications on Open Education in TCUs, and  there is a lot for Open Ed practitioners to learn from scholarship about what Open Education looks like or contributes to Indigenous-led education environments.

What are the weaker points/qualities of the article? How could they be strengthened?

There are two major aspects of the article that I feel need to be strengthened. First, the article’s articulation of its relevance to the journal’s focus is expressed quite loosely; I have suggested three possible ways to improve this in the Scope/Objectives/Content section of this review. Secondly, I feel that the article does not engage much with Indigenous scholarship about affordability or about TCUs, which seems rather surprising given the article’s topic, the author’s role, and the author’s positionality. I have suggested a few areas where it could potentially help to do a literature search and engage with Indigenous authors’ offerings on some topics in the Approaches and Conclusions section of the review above. Improvement in these aspects of the article would hugely improve the rankings on Scope and Research Assessment below (I must note that those rankings are not meant to discourage the author, but to highlight the areas that need improvement).

Peer Review Ranking: Scope
not relevant

Peer Review Ranking: Clarity
clear

Peer Review Ranking: Contribution
contributes

Peer Review Ranking: Research Assessment
not sound

Note:
This review refers to round of peer review and may pertain to an earlier version of the document.

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