Open Educational Resources Guide

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.

Open Educational Resources are generally free or low cost, making learning more accessible for everyone.

• “Students consistently reported textbook pricing to negatively impact their stress levels, purchasing habits, first-day access, academic performance, and time-to-graduation rates. The educational hardships posed by high textbook prices were even more significant, however, for historically underserved student groups.” (Jenkins et al., 2020)

Because most OER are free online, students can access them on the first day of class. Research has shown that due to limited financial resources, some students delay or completely forego purchasing required commercial textbooks.

• “Roughly 65% of students, on average, indicated they did not purchase a textbook because of the cost. More than half of those students felt that foregoing the textbook negatively influenced their grade in the course, and approximately 37% had dropped a course because they were unable to afford the textbook.” (Fischer et al., 2020)

Research shows that OER adoption leads to comparable or improved educational outcomes when compared to traditional textbooks, including course completion and grades. (Fischer et al., 2015; Hilton et al., 2016; Colvard et al., 2018).

• “OER improve end-of-course grades and decrease DFW (D, F, and Withdrawal letter grades) rates for all students. They also improve course grades at greater rates and decrease DFW rates at greater rates for Pell recipient students, part-time students, and populations historically underserved by higher education.” (Colvard et al., 2018)

Open materials can be revised and remixed to fit the way an instructor wants to teach a course.

• Unlike copyrighted content, instructors have the freedom to remove irrelevant content or add their own new content. They can also combine parts of resources together, ensuring materials are contextualized to a specific course.
• This also allows instructors to include more diverse and inclusive teaching materials that might be missing from a traditional textbook.

Because anyone can revise or remix OER, instructors can also use these resources to engage in “open pedagogy,” assignments that ask students to engage with 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/