- Reasons for Adoption
- Benefits for Students
- Benefits for Faculty
- OER and Equity
- Knowledge Check
- Learn More
- Attributions
Learning Objectives:
By the end of this module, you should be able to:
- Articulate motivations for using OER
- Describe the benefits of OER for faculty
- Describe the benefits of OER for students
- Explore further benefits of OER, such as equity and openness
Reasons for Adoption
OER support a future where students and instructors have free access to a wide variety of high-quality educational resources that have been collaboratively developed, reviewed, revised, and shared across institutions. This is a future where educational resources can be easily adapted to fit within the context of specific courses, and to meet the needs of specific students. It’s a future where the cost of creation, use, and maintenance is much lower than the current rising costs of textbooks and other classroom resources. It’s also a future where students do not bear the financial burden of their educational materials.
SPARC summarizes the why behind using OER with these four points:
- Textbook costs should not be a barrier to education
- Students learn more when they have access to quality materials
- Technology holds boundless potential to improve teaching and learning
- Better education means a better future
Benefits for Students
Using OER can both provide tremendous cost savings for students and positively impact student success and completion rates. The cost of textbooks can be a huge financial burden on students. This data compiled by Virginia Commonwealth University shows that students often spend over $300 per semester on textbooks, and one survey of students on 150 college campuses found that 65% of students had chosen not to purchase a textbook because of their high costs.
This not only affects student success but can also delay graduation for students who are taking fewer classes per term because of that cost, further increasing financial costs for students over time. OER provide students with day-one access to free course materials, and research reviewed by the Open Education Network shows that most students perform as well or better using OER course materials compared with students using traditional textbooks.
Benefits for Faculty
Imagine being able to edit, modify, update, and improve your course materials so the learning outcomes are met and the course material’s content is exactly the way you want it. OER allow for this!
Faculty using OER enjoy great freedom in selecting course materials that they customize to fit the specific needs of their students and the goals of their classes. Since most OER permit adaptation, educators are free to edit, reorder, delete from, or remix OER. They also provide clearly defined rights to users, so educators are not faced with interpreting fair use and TEACH Act guidelines. (See Module 3 for more information on fair use).
Other key benefits to faculty include:
- Use, Improve, and Share
- Save time and energy by adapting or revising resources that have already been created
- Tailor resources to fit specific context within your courses and research
- Expand interdisciplinary teaching by integrating resources from multiple disciplines
- Network and Collaborate with Peers
- Access educational resources that have been created and peer reviewed by other experts in your field
- Explore reviews and annotations that provide more in-depth knowledge of the resource
- Collaborate on creating new resources that can be used within or across disciplines
- Save time and energy by adapting or revising resources that have already been created
- Tailor resources to fit specific context within your courses and research
- Expand interdisciplinary teaching by integrating resources from multiple disciplines
- Lower Costs and Improve Access to Information
- Eliminate the cost of course materials for students
- Enable all students to have equal access to course materials
- Provide students with the opportunity to explore course content fully before enrolling
OER and Equity
As you learn more about OER, consider how open education practices and the use of OER can enhance your own teaching practices and learning materials to become (more) equitable, diverse, and inclusive. This is because they allow for adaptation to your specific context – your students, their needs, their experiences.
As Prescott, Muñiz, and Ishmael explain:
“OER provid[e] a unique opportunity for educators to access learning materials, and then tailor them to the specific needs of their classroom. This is particularly important for teaching diverse groups of students. Where culturally-responsive curriculum redesign must include funding to print textbooks that often fail to reflect student diversity and quickly become outdated, OER could instead be used to give students access to high-quality learning materials that educators could then continue to adapt as understandings of student needs and identities change.”
The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) has collected resources and articles exploring OER through the lens of equity, diversity, and inclusion. These resources are included (and continue to expand) on their Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion blog.
When thinking about OER and equity, however, it is important to remember that access and equity are not the same. The videos on this page, from the Open Education Conference, 2020, explore how equity intersects with open education.
Additionally, in May 2021 the collaborative, Driving OER Sustainability for Student Success (DOERS3) released an equity rubric for institutions. The Equity Through OER Rubric is a valuable tool for faculty, students, academic practitioners, and administrators. By guiding users through the various equity dimensions of OER, the rubric is designed to help individuals integrate OER across an institution in ways that are holistic and comprehensive.
Ultimately, OER offer opportunities for instructors to adapt learning materials to the needs of their specific group of students with their specific needs and is one reason OER are so valuable as learning tools.
Knowledge Check
- Reflect on the following: how might OER benefit students, faculty, and/or administrators at your institution?
Learn More
Additional research and videos discussing the impact and benefits of OER for faculty and students are linked below.
Bali, M., Cronin, C., Czerniewicz, L., DeRosa, R., and Jhangiani, R. (2020, August 17) Open at the Margins. Rebus Community.
Carpenter, F., Davis, W.P. & Sicre, D. (2017, November 15) How OER can Support Student Equity and Diversity. CCCOER Webinar.
Colvard, N., Watson, C. & Park, H. (2018) The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Student Success Metrics. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 30 (2), 262-276.
Garth-McCullough, R. & Sebastian, R. (2020, November 9) Using Open Content to Create a Culturally Relevant Classroom. OpenEdu20 Conference Presentation.
Grimaldi, P., Basu Mallick D., Waters A., Baraniuk, R. (2019, March 6) Do open educational resources improve student learning? Implications of the access hypothesis. PLOS|One
Hilton, J. (2016) Open educational resources and college textbook choices: a review of research on efficacy and perceptions. Education Tech Research and Development, 64(4), 573 – 590.This video synthesizes the research results discussed in John Hilton’s article above, A Review of the Effectiveness & Perceptions of Open Educational Resources As Compared to Textbooks
Attributions
Information for this module was consulted and adapted from
“An Introduction to Open Educational Resources” by Abbey Elder is licensed under CC BY 4.0
“Leveraging the Benefits of OER” in Welcome to Understanding OER by SUNY OER Services is licensed under CC BY 4.0
“Open Education” by SPARC is licensed under CC BY 4.0
“Why Open Education?” by CCCOER is licensed under CC BY 4.0
“OER at ACC: Faculty Testimonials” by ACC Teaching & Learning Excellence is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0