Open education (OE) lowers the cost of education by providing free resources to instructors and students. OE is currently being utilized across tribal colleges and universities (TCUs), but its rate of adoption could be improved to make education even more affordable. Currently, OE has a stronger orientation to STEM content than the arts and humanities and OE authors rarely write from a Native perspective. Therefore, TCUs have a pivotal role to play in the future of the OE movement.

The OE movement promotes using cost-free, copyright-free content instead of commercial, copyrighted content. OE began in 1998, when David Wiley, then of Brigham Young University, imagined how the concept of open code could be applied to education. Open code was code anyone could access and amend. Open code promoted transparency, because anyone could see the content; rigor, because more people could comment and/or revise; and efficiency, because technology allowed multiple individuals to edit and read the material simultaneously while paper required multiple copies and individual reviews. OE permitted pedagogical materials to be shared, lowering the costs associated with education and facilitating iterative expansions and improvements to the content.

OE quickly caught on over the next decade. Richard Baraniuk created an open textbook platform called OpenStax at Rice University in 1998. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology founded MIT Open Courseware in 2001 to allow anyone to take MIT courses. In 2007, OER (Open Educational Resources) Commons provided a place for people from a variety of institutions to deposit their pedagogical materials. The following year, OER Global sought to include even more voices.

The Hewlett Foundation has provided grants to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) since 2022 to support the development of OE initiatives across the TCUs. AIHEC’s OE program built upon earlier efforts. For example, many TCUs had faculty who already utilized and/or adapted OE content for their classrooms, and Nebraska Indian Community College and Tohono O’odham Community College had presidential mandates to encourage a more systemic switch away from commercial options.

In the fall of 2024, an AIHEC study of OE textbook adoption found that the average TCU textbook cost was $62.92. The average textbook cost for the arts and humanities is even better at $32.63 and $34.81, respectively. But this low cost is not due to high OE adoption rates; the arts had a 1% and the humanities a 5% OE adoption rate. The OE textbooks currently utilized in the arts and humanities largely come from OpenStax and Project Gutenberg. OpenStax has a composition textbook titled Writing Guide with Handbook while Project Gutenberg has literary classics that have become public domain (texts published prior to 1944). TCUs have already begun using these resources. Yet much more OE arts and humanities content is available than is currently utilized. The AIHEC OE program website (visit aihec.org/initiatives/open-education) lists the range of places OE materials can be found. If faculty were to adopt more OE textbooks or resources available from those platforms, the average textbook costs at TCUs would drop even lower.

OE does have content gaps. The OE community often prioritizes creating STEM content over the material for arts and humanities, just as higher education overall is more focused on STEM. The utilization rate of OE textbooks in mathematics classes at TCUs highlights this emphasis. OE also has few Native perspectives represented; those available are often from the First Nations in Canada.

TCU administrators, faculty, and students, as well as the communities they are a part of, can write and share pedagogical materials that foreground Native culture and history. AIHEC is currently looking into a platform that would allow TCUs to share OE content among themselves, with a permissions feature to restrict access based on content-creator preference in acknowledgement of traditional knowledge protocols. If OE creators wished to share their work more broadly on available content platforms, the Creative Commons licenses used for OE have the option to limit what type of use is acceptable.