A headshot of Dr. Richard Tarpey

Thursday, April 29, 2021

As the OER Grant Steering Committee continues to raise awareness about Open Educational Resources (OER) at MTSU, we’re excited to share a second brief interview with an OER Faculty Advisory Council (FAC) member, Dr. Richard Tarpey, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management at the Jones College of Business.

Dr. Richard Tarpey, Assistant Professor in the Department of Management at the Jones College of Business

Introduce yourself to our blog readers

My name is Dr. Richard Tarpey.  I teach in the Department of Management at the Jones College of Business and teach supply chain management and health care management courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. My research focuses on analyzing complex adaptive systems in healthcare and supply chain environments concerning labor management and continuous improvement. I work a great deal with the analysis of patient experience in hospital and clinical settings.

Tell us about your choice to use OER in your discipline and/or courses

 I utilize OER resources to accomplish two specific goals. The first goal is to provide time-relevant content to students. Health care classes need to use recent material since the industry and environment evolve quickly. The standard publisher-based textbook approach is not robust enough to provide content that is up to date. The publishing cycle takes too long to incorporate continual regulatory and technological improvements. Supply chain content is also an excellent example of quickly evolving needs. There are no textbooks available yet dealing with COVID-19 impacts and responses. I use OER to capitalize on the critical learning opportunities provided in the last 12-18 months of supply chain reactions to the pandemic environment.

The second goal is to provide content to students while avoiding the costs of traditional textbooks. I find it challenging to cover all of the material in these textbooks and have not found that all of the material is relevant. I didn’t particularly appreciate having students purchase expensive books only to use 50% of the material

My first experience with OER was using an eBook textbook in my MGMT 6250 Health Care Resource Management class. Using the eBook provided the flexibility to include only the chapters relevant to the content I was teaching and offer the course materials at no cost to my students.

Tell us about your students’ experiences with OER

my students generally react positively to the use of OER in classes. The most common feedback I receive is that students like using select chapters in different OER eBooks to best support the concepts currently in discussion. The students have indicated that each chapter used maps well to the relevant activities. I also receive positive feedback on the discussion case studies I use in classes. I typically can find case studies in the Sage Case Study library, which may not necessarily be OER since I assume MTSU pays a subscription fee, but there is no cost to the student. One example of OER materials supporting student learning in my classes is using an eBook “Business Process Modeling, Simulation, and Design.” Students need to model a business process in the MBAM 6875 class and find the two chapters we use to guide their Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) efforts. The class only scratches the surface of BPMN so that an entire textbook would be overkill. 

OER Repository Recommendations

I have used the OER Commons (https://www.oercommons.org/), DeGruyter Open Access Library (https://www.degruyter.com/). Both of these repositories are extensive and cover the business topics that I need for my classes. Each repository includes the more specific topics needed for my supply chain management and healthcare management classes.

Future of OER at MTSU

I expect that the use of OER will continue to increase at MTSU. I believe it is an excellent strategy in the Jones College of Business, where many of our electives are specialized and need to cover time-relevant and current topics. The business environment evolves too quickly to wait several years for new textbooks to be published (examples provided above). I see the grant providing the necessary resources to help move more of our faculty down the OER path by providing knowledge and support. I think many faculty members would consider OER resources if the proper support mechanisms were in place.