OER Authors & Champions

Bio

Christopher Mruk, Ph.D. is a Professor of Psychology (Emeritus) at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He has received the university-wide Professorship of Teaching Excellence Award along with his college’s Distinguished Teaching and Distinguished Scholarship awards. His publications generally focus on self-esteem and include four books (one of which is in its 4th edition), along with a good number of refereed articles and chapters. Dr. Mruk is an Associate Editor of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) journal The Humanistic Psychologist and is a Fellow of the APA. His clinical background before coming to BGSU includes supervising a methadone treatment program, working as a crisis intervention specialist, serving as a community mental health center psychologist, directing the counseling center at St. Francis College in Pennsylvania, and consulting as a psychologist for a local hospital and its community mental health centers. He may be reached at cmruk@bgsu.edu.

Why I Chose OER

There are many reasons to take the publishing pathway offered by OER. Three of them stood out to me and the first is cost. If it is the goal of a public university to serve the public good, then faculty can help fulfill that mission by using our expertise to create free high-quality texts to help reduce the costs of higher education. Second, sometimes standard textbooks do not quite reach an instructor’s teaching and learning goals, especially if the class is specialized. In this case, an open-source text can plug a gap, fill a need, or in some other way augment regular book offerings. Finally, OER offers an almost unobstructed path to take and instructor’s (and BGSU’s) voice beyond the walls of the university. For instance, the text my co-editor, John Moor, and I authored has already been downloaded some 10,000 times around the world, according to the OER provides, in a little over 3 years.

Cost, purpose, and reach are only three of the reasons to consider this format. The fact the BGSU’s library staff facilitates this approach makes this path even easier.