Understanding the Impact of OER Courses in Relation to Student Socioeconomic Status and Employment
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When students cannot afford their course materials, some choose not to purchase them. According to the Student Public Interest group, 65% of students have not purchased a course textbook because it was too expensive (Senack, 2014). Almost 1 in 4 students report that they frequently do not buy textbooks because of the cost (Florida Virtual Campus, 2012). The textbook is often the primary channel for students to receive course knowledge (Robinson, Fischer, Wiley, & Hilton, 2014). Further, without purchasing textbooks, students risk lowered course performance (Florida Virtual Campus, 2016; Senack, 2014).
The openness of OER is not just in access, but the flexibility of customizing high-quality educational resources that can become an alternative to costly commercial textbooks (Hilton, Wiley, & Lutz, 2012; Hilton, Wiley, Stein, & Johnson, 2010; Hilton, Gaudet, Clark, Robinson, & Wiley, 2013). When an open license is combined with copyright, college instructors can retain and reuse existing open license resources, or if necessary, revise and remix them aligned with their course objectives, as well as redistribute the customized resources to their students (Lin & Tang, 2017)
OER provide an opportunity to marry student, faculty, and administration interests in reducing reliance on commercial textbooks. OER can dramatically reduce or entirely eliminate textbook costs for students in courses that use OER (Wiley, Green, & Soares, 2012). For administrators, OER initiatives might be used as a way to attract new students by demonstrating a commitment to reducing student costs, while also addressing key metrics like student drop and withdrawal rates which have been shown to be reduced in courses that utilize OER (Schaffert, 2010; Colvard, Watson, & Park, 2018; Hilton, Fischer, Wiley, & Williams, 2016).
Remixed from Understanding the Impact of OER Courses in Relation to Student Socioeconomic Status and Employment by Kim Read, Hengtao Tang, Amber Dhamija, and Bob Bodily published in The International Journal of Open Educational Resources (IJOER Volume 3, No. 1 Spring /Summer 2020).
