Research Guides: Open Educational Resources (OERs): Why OERs?

OER Committee

The next meeting of the Faculty Senate's Ad Hoc Committee to Review Open Textbook Resources will be scheduled when the fall semester resumes.

OER Professional Learning Community

Fall 2020 - Through common readings, group discussion, and peer-to-peer presentations from faculty who have adopted or created OERs for their classrooms, attendees will learn how to identify, evaluate, and incorporate quality Open Educational Resources in their courses. Priority will be given to Open Textbook Grant awardees, but if space is available, other faculty are welcome to participate as well.

1. In this PLC, faculty will learn how and why to incorporate Open Educational Resources (OERs) into courses and will apply this knowledge to their own disciplinary context.

2. In this PLC, faculty will evaluate existing OERs for potential adoption or adaption.

3. The outcome of this PLC will be a re-designed syllabus for at least one course that utilizes OERs and library resources so that the faculty member can offer a zero cost class for students.

AFA 202 Open Textbook

Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience
- This link opens in a new window
Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience gives instructors, students, and general readers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of African Americans’ cultural and political history, economic development, artistic expressiveness, and religious and philosophical worldviews in a critical framework. It offers sound interdisciplinary analysis of selected historical and contemporary issues surrounding the origins and manifestations of White supremacy in the United States. By placing race at the center of the work, the book offers significant lessons for understanding the institutional marginalization of Blacks in contemporary America and their historical resistance and perseverance.

What is an OER?

What is the difference between OA and OER?

Open Access (OA) and Open Educational Resources (OER) are closely related. Both are freely available with no paywalls and are often found in Institutional Repositories, such as EKU's Encompass Digital Archive.

OA generally refers to scholarly articles that are freely available
OER refers to teaching and learning materials (textbooks, question sets, materials in the public domain, and other course supporting material) that are free and open with a creative commons or similar license for anyone to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute.

For a great, comprehensive introduction to OERs, please watch David Wiley's TEDxNYED Talk as well as the Introduction from the OER Starter Kit.

Textbook Costs and Your Students

Did you know that a 2016 study of students showed that 67% of them had opted out of buying (or renting) a required textbook because of the price? [1]

Did you know that faculty who have adopted open resources in their classes have seen similar or better student outcomes than print textbooks? [2]

[1] http://tinyurl.com/2016textbookstudy

[2] https://oer.psu.edu/benefits-of-using-oer/

Ways to reduce student costs

Consider using OERs
Incorporate existing library resources
Write your own OER textbook!
Follow #OER on social media
Spread the word! Tell your colleagues about affordable alternatives

Learn more:

OER Textbook Websites

Start here...

Individual University OER Repositories...

OER Instructional Websites

Merlot
Multimedia educational resources for learning and online teaching. Includes an exhaustive list of Open Access Textbooks.
Khan Academy
Khan Academy offers practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. Includes math, science, computer programming, history, art history, economics, and more.

Are OERs as rigorous as commercial textbooks?

Major Study Finds OER Students Do Just as Well — or Better
In the largest study of its kind, a group of researchers has examined the use of open educational resources (OER) and found that students who used OER in their undergraduate courses performed as well or better than those assigned commercial textbooks.
Open Textbooks and Increased Student Access and Outcomes
This study reports findings from a year-long pilot study during which 991 students in 9 core courses in the Virginia State University School of Business replaced traditional textbooks with openly licensed books and other digital content. Results: More students accessed digital open textbooks than had previously purchased hard copies of textbooks. Higher grades were correlated with courses that used open textbooks.
One college’s use of an open psychology textbook
A case study about one community college’s adoption of a free online psychology textbook. During the fall semester 2011, 690 students used this book. Compared with students using a traditional text in the spring of 2011, students who used the free online textbook scored higher on departmental final examinations, had higher grade point averages in the class and had higher retention rates.

Open Educational Resources (OERs)