Open Educational Resources (OER): More resources

The research and evaluation of ATD’s OER Degree Initiative provided encouraging evidence regarding the academic outcomes of students who enrolled in multiple OER courses, the economic impacts for both students and institutions, and the experiences of key stakeholders. Students benefitted from unrestricted access to course content and improved course experiences, in addition to saving money that could be used towards other educational or personal expenses.

This article reports the results of a large-scale study (21,822 students) regarding the impact of course-level faculty adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER).
Results indicate that OER adoption does much more than simply save students money and address student debt concerns.

This is by far the largest study of its kind conducted to date—nearly 5000 post-secondary students using OER and over 11,000 control students using commercial textbooks, distributed among ten institutions across the United States, enrolled in 15 different undergraduate courses. In three key measures of student success—course completion, final grade of C- or higher, course grade– students whose faculty chose OER generally performed as well or better than students whose faculty assigned commercial textbooks.

The purpose of this study is to meta-analyze the findings of studies of postsecondary students comparing learning performance and course withdrawal rates between open and commercial textbooks. Based on a systematic search of research findings, there were no differences in learning efficacy between open textbooks and commercial textbooks (k = 22, g = 0.01, p = .87, N = 100,012). However, the withdrawal rate for postsecondary courses with open textbooks was significantly lower than that for commercial textbooks (k = 11, OR (odds ratio) = 0.71, p = .005, N = 78,593).

An extensive summary of empirical research on the impacts of OER adoption.