EOR by Subject Matter

 At this point, I have enough evidence to fully support OER and want to join the efforts to contribute to the cause. Although, to be fair, I was already convinced of the value of OER and my interest in joining these efforts way before I started to read articles showing the impact of these resources on students' educational experiences and outcomes. 

I have always believed that education should be free for everyone and that there should be systems that ensured that a lack of financial resources, or lack of abundance of them, does not equate absence of access to knowledge. I know, of course, that this is a very hard thing to achieve, and that it is a complex thing to orchestrate. 

With that said, during this last week of reading many articles on OER and efficacy, I am left wanting to learn more about OER and some of the subject matters that I am more interested in. I am curious about OER in literature or and literary translation courses. Some years ago, I helped reviewing and editing a Top Hat online Spanish textbook to be used in all Spanish 321 courses at BYU (there are usually more than 70 sections every semester). This textbook could be edited as the semester progressed, but that there were a lot of things that were set and not intended to be changed. Among those texts that were not to be changed were literary pieces. Due to budget restrictions, a lot of texts were chosen from the open domain and they were literary pieces from a hundered years or longer ago. Usually not the most engaging reading, unless you are an advanced student with a great command of your second language and a nieche interest in older literature. Some of the readings were more contemporary, but there weren't many of those because it was too expensive to pay for the rights to use them. 

This is just background information for the questions that I am left with. What is the role of OER in a literature classroom, especially one that is geared towards contemporary literature? What are ways in which OER could be used in these contexts without depriving students of a rich literary experience and education?