Free textbooks, when fully embraced by administrators and faculty, lead to better student outcomes, a new American Association of Colleges and Universities report finds.
Open educational resources, or OER, emerged at the turn of the century to make college less expensive. A two-year study examining 700,000 student records and featuring 240 faculty interviews across 15 institutions contends that free learning materials accomplish much more.
Courses that offered students free course materials lowered course withdrawals, increased the number of A’s earned and decreased, by a year, the time to graduation for community college students.
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Open educational resources created the best outcomes when tailored to a specific course and its students. However, customizing OER can be labor intensive for faculty.
“OER adoption is not a neutral substitution of materials,” the study reads. “It is often accompanied by shifts in teaching practice, course design, and professional identity.”
Successful implementation also depended highly on the institution type. For community colleges and regional public four-year institutions, customized content was associated with lower predicted withdrawal rates than default open educational resources. Student success rates at HBCUs and doctoral institutions were less impacted by OER.
Access, equity and student success will not improve substantially at institutions that don’t provide faculty with guidance in adapting OER.
Here’s how institutions can add open educational resources successfully:
- Instructor participation: Faculty should help select, develop and review OER.
- Financial support: Faculty should be compensated for creating, remixing or revising free course materials.
- Time support: Provide adequate timelines for faculty to design courses with tailored course materials. (Time was the least commonly reported form of support among interviewed faculty.)
- Personnel support: Faculty will need help aligning materials with learning objectives and meeting accessibility standards. Librarians, teaching and learning staff and accessibility offices can assist.
