The intersection of Open Educational Resources (OER) and Generative AI has transformed the Humanities classroom, especially online, into a what author David Epstein calls a "wicked domain"—an unstable environment where the rules for success are constantly shifting. While OER provides tremendous opportunities to move away from static textbooks toward curated, open resources, the rise of "agentic browsers" like Comet and Google Lens has made digital assessments in Canvas increasingly vulnerable to cheating. I urge faculty and librarians to join me in exploring how to leverage OER to teach essential interpretive skills while guiding students through the ethical and strategic challenges of an AI-saturated world.
The core problem is that while AI excels at pattern recognition and synthesizing academic-sounding text from OER resources, it lacks judgment—the uniquely human capacity to arbitrate among competing values and account for the human dynamics found in original sources. Drawing on Epstein’s concept of Range, this presentation argues that the most durable advantage for 21st-century students is becoming a generalist with judgment who can navigate ambiguity in this AI environment rather than simply recall information. I will demonstrate models for using AI as a "co-researcher" in Humanities classes to locate OER sources, while simultaneously training students to evaluate those outputs against curated, high-integrity human sources.
By emphasizing the human-in-the-loop, instructors can ensure that OER remains a tool for deep critical thinking, preparing graduates to be adaptable problem-solvers who own their decisions in an unpredictable workforce.
