WHEN PEOPLE BEMOAN the high cost of
higher education, they pay greatest
attention to rising tuition rates. But
the cost of textbooks and other course
materials can be just as consequential,
especially to low-income students, and
some might not have factored the high
cost of textbooks into their budgets.
To make ends meet, some choose to
go without textbooks at all, which can
“negatively [affect] their understanding
of the course material, their subsequent
performance (i.e., grade) in the class,
and potentially their persistence in the
discipline,” write Nicholas B. Covard, a
lecturer and academic coach at the University
of Georgia in Atlanta; C. Edward
Watson, chief information officer of the
Association of American Colleges and
Universities; and Hyojin Park, a doctoral
graduate of the University of Georgia
now at Ewha Womans University in
Seoul, South Korea.
In a recent paper, Covard, Watson, and
Park call for higher education institutions
to adopt a greater number of open
access resources (OER) to better support
underserved students. They define OER
as “free, online learning content, software
tools, and accumulated digital curricula
that are not restricted by copyright
license and available to retain, reuse, revise,
remix, and redistribute.” While past impact on students’ finances and ability
to stay in school, the co-authors wanted
to quantify the effect OER textbooks have
on students’ academic performance.
Starting in 2013, the University
of Georgia’s Center for Teaching and
Learning (CTL) began encouraging
faculty to adopt OER, primarily free
electronic textbooks developed by Open-Stax, a nonprofit based at Rice University
in Houston, Texas. By the end of 2017,
an estimated 35,985 UGA students had
enrolled in at least one course that used
a free textbook, collectively saving an
estimated US$3,266,930.
The researchers looked at students’
academic performance between 2010
and 2016 in eight undergraduate courses,
including those in American history,
physiology, biology, psychology, and
sociology. During this time frame, 11,681
students who were enrolled in these
courses used standard commercial textbooks,
while 10,141 of their peers used
OER textbooks. The researchers found
that in courses using OER, students
achieved 5.5 percent more A grades, 7.73
percent more A- grades, and 1.14 percent
more B+ grades, compared to non-OER
courses. The use of OER decreased rates
at which students received D, F, or W
(withdrawal) grades by 2.68 percent.
The researchers also broke out data
specific to students who had received
U.S. Pell grants, as this group typically
comes from underserved communities.
Among this group, D, F, and W grades decreased
by 4.43 percent. This study did
not look at dropout rates, but the co-authors
infer that “reducing the number of
students who fail would have a positive
impact on retention.”
Covard, Watson, and Park call for
further study of the impact of OER on
student academic performance. They
plan to gather more evidence of OER’s
educational value and encourage more
institutions to adopt OER. “A new
opportunity appears to be present,”
they write, “for institutions in higher
education to consider how to leverage
OER to address completion, quality, and
affordability challenges” that underserved
students so often face.
“The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Various Student Success Metrics” appeared July 12, 2018, in the
International Journal of Teaching and
Learning in Higher Education..