In this video, students speak directly about how high textbook costs impact their learning.
"Textbook Tales: Have Textbook Costs Ever Impacted the Quality of Your Education?" by ISU Libraries is licensed under under CC BY.
One of the biggest benefits of Open Educational Resources is that they are generally free or low cost, making learning more accessible for everyone.
Because most OER are freely available online, all students can access them on day one of class. Research has shown that due to limited financial resources, some students delay or completely forego purchasing required commercial textbooks.
Courses adopting OER have been found to have as good or better educational outcomes as those using commercially available textbooks, both in terms of course completion and course grades (Fischer et al., 2015; Hilton et al., 2016; Colvard et al., 2018).
Since open materials are fully revisable and remixable, they can be customized to fit the way an instructor wants to teach a course.
Because anyone, including students, can be involved in the creation, revision, and distribution of OER, instructors can also use these resources to engage in “open pedagogy,” assignments that leverage OER to create more meaningful learning experiences.
Adapted from the BCcampus Open Education "OER Student Toolkit" by Daniel Munro; Jenna Omassi; and Brady Yano, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Colvard, N. B., Watson, C. E., & Park, H. (2018). The Impact of Open Educational Resources on Various Student Success Metrics. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 30(2), 262–276. https://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/IJTLHE3386.pdf
Connolly, T., & Svoboda, E. (2023). Open Educational Resources in Nursing Curricula: A Systematic Review. The Journal of nursing education, 62(3), 147–154. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20230109-04
Fischer, L., Belikov, O., Ikahihifo, T. K., Hilton III, J., Wiley, D., & Martin, M. T. (2020). Academic Librarians Examination of University Students’ and Faculty’s Perceptions of Open Educational Resources. Open Praxis, 12(3), 399–415. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.12.3.1081
Fischer, L., Hilton, J., Robinson, T. J., & Wiley, D. A. (2015). A multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 27(3), 159–172. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12528-015-9101-x
Hilton, J. L. I., Fischer, L., Wiley, D., & William, L. (2016). Maintaining Momentum Toward Graduation: OER and the Course Throughput Rate. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 17(6). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i6.2686
Jenkins, J.J., Sánchez, L.A., Schraedley, M.A.K., Hannans, J., Navick, N. & Young, J., 2020. Textbook Broke: Textbook Affordability as a Social Justice Issue. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1), p.3. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jime.549
Munro, D., Omassi, J., & Yano, B. (2016). OER Student Toolkit. BCcampus. https://opentextbc.ca/studenttoolkit/