Member Spotlight: Amanda Miller
An educator and lifelong learner working toward her doctorate watched her classmates struggle with textbook costs and recognized the problem she'd been trying to solve from the other side of the room.
Amanda Miller is both educator and student, and has worked towards a doctoral degree in Public Policy and Administration. This particular perch grants her a kind of double vision: seeing the textbook affordability problem from both sides of the classroom. She has seen the graduate students in her course making the same calculations that she’s seen undergraduates run: “the cost of the textbooks still seemed to be a barrier for most of us attending.”
Amanda teaches business courses as an adjunct at Boise State University and Central Oregon Community College, and develops faculty workshops on active learning, AI, and modern approaches to teaching. She also advocates for adjunct faculty on the Boise State Faculty Senate, where she was recently elected to a two-year seat. As a traverser of many different educational spaces, she recognizes that access needs to run wider than any single classroom, campus, or country. “Open education resonates deeply with my professional values because it acknowledges a fundamental reality: every country approaches educational support differently, and those disparities can leave learners behind,” she says. “OER offers a meaningful starting point for bridging those gaps, providing freely available, high-quality materials that can reach students across many borders.”
Characteristically, her vision for the future of the field is also about dissolving barriers: between instructors and students, and between departments. “One thing in particular I would like to see happen is also more student integration into the creation process as a learning tool,” she says. Imagine this: “a group of computer science students is tasked with developing an OER simulation that can be used by the accounting department. This could be an amazing experience for both classes and would also help support multi-department communications and collaborations.”
In both learner and educator spaces, Amanda advocates for a wider view — to “step back from traditional environments in order to review what our new generation of students need in terms of support for success!” She knows what the problem feels like from the inside; as a lifelong learner, she still is on the inside.
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