A new study conducted by researchers at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia, Canada examines the performance of students using open education resources (OER) in both print and digital formats compared to a traditional textbook from a commercial publisher. The study found that students using OER spent less time overall studying for the class while scoring comparably with those who used a commercially published textbook.

The news is encouraging considering the cost of educational materials has drastically increased in the past decade. As reported recently by Student PIRGs, it has risen nearly four times the rate of inflation in the U.S. What’s more, as many as 65% of students don’t purchase all of the educational materials assigned by professors because of their high cost.

It’s no secret that students using OER generally perform similarly to those using traditional textbooks. A growing body of academic research supports that conclusion. But medium matters. Without budgets for a layout and design team, one might implicitly believe that students would prefer a commercial textbook or at least be able to use it more easily.

OER vs. A Commercial Textbook

The Kwantlen team led by Professor Rajiv Jhangiani tested for study habits and how efficiently students were able to complete the course. They split their sample into three groups. The first used the commercial textbook, the second read a text version of the OER, while the third used the digital version. “Students across the three conditions did not differ in the number of hours per week they reported spending studying the textbook or in the proportion of their weekly assigned readings that they typically completed,” the authors write. “These results suggest that there were no meaningful differences in how often and how effectively students engaged with their assigned textbook. Given that students’ exam performance was gauged solely by their answers to multiple-choice questions that could have been answered by reading any of the textbooks, it appears that students’ textbook studying habits do not explain the differences in exam performance.”

But in terms of overall time spent studying for the course, the researchers did note an interesting outlier: “The students assigned the commercial textbook reported spending a significantly greater number of hours per week studying for the course than students in either of the open textbook conditions, a difference that might be traced to the greater amount of time per week that students assigned the commercial textbook also reported spending reviewing lecture material.”

The Potential of OER

In other words, students using the openly licensed material were able to more efficiently internalize and remember the information conveyed. Students also rated the quality of the print version of the OER higher than the commercial equivalent, although the digital version received a lower ranking. The authors acknowledge that “the open textbook (in its first edition) and the commercial textbook (in its tenth) are written by different authors with differences in the breadth and depth of content coverage, organization, and writing style” and that a text’s quality leans on several other factors besides the nature of its copyright.

Still, it reinforces the point that OER can meet or exceed the standards of commercial texts. Jhangiani’s students were also asked to estimate the price of each of the course materials used. All three groups estimated the cost of each course material at roughly $50 CAD. The commercial textbook cost over $100 in reality, while the digital version of the OER was free. The text OER more or less constituted the price of printing the book, and is significantly less than the estimated $50.

For another notable point, the authors noted no significant variation in performance comparing digital to print. The lack of difference, the authors write, “is encouraging given the general preference students express for print textbooks. This finding also carries great practical significance as open textbooks in digital format can be distributed to students entirely free of cost, evidently with no negative impact on exam performance.”

Use of OER is on the rise. As Inside Higher Ed reported in December, OER in the classroom nearly doubled since the previous school year. Still, it has yet to see broad use. The survey cited by the publication found that only 9% of professors use OER.

The post A New Study Found OER to Match and Even Outperform a Commercial Textbook appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Top Hat, a Canadian edtech startup, hosts open educational resources (OER) on their platform. Today, the company has made their OER Marketplace freely available for use by any instructor and their students.

When open educational resources (OER) began appearing in digital media, many treated them like the promise of the early internet. They were the stuff of libertarian educators’ daydreams. They promised to bring about a sea change in the K-12+ publishing industry and the dissemination of educational material in general. But dreams soon gave way to reality, and educators realized that incorporating OER into their curricula was easier said than done.

“We think the promise of OER has fallen down,” said Nina Bilimoria Angelo, VP of product and customer marketing at Top Hat. The Toronto-based company has created a platform to house, customize, and share OER and other educational resources. It has been used by over 2.8 million students to date.

“The promise was there’s a community that continues to build on open materials,” Angelo said. “But when those materials are trapped behind static PDFs, and then people are making changes to it on their own without a mechanism to share it back, that’s where things fall flat. We really wanted to create a system where things can be improved in real time, not over a 3 or 4 year cycle like with traditional publishers.”

That’s Where Top Hat Comes In

“Discoverability is a challenge with OER,” Angelo said. “Quality can be perceived as uneven which is probably why OER adoption has stalled at the 5-10% level for instructors. There’s a lot of skepticism amongst higher educators. We’re trying to make sure all the high quality material is available in the Marketplace. Once it’s adopted, it’s really customizable. But then those customizations – this is the magic – those customizations can be shared back with the author and the team so that they can improve upon what they’ve created.”

“The way we like to think of ourselves is as an end-to-end teaching platform designed to help educators promote student success inside and outside the classroom. Our platform has evolved to address four key teaching challenges: 1) student engagement in the classroom (with Top Hat Classroom); 2) textbook affordability and customizability (with Top Hat Textbook); 3) student comprehension and gauging for mastery (with our Assignment product); 4) and the administration of tests in a secure environment (Test).”

“In the Top Hat Marketplace you can find over 20,000 course materials, ranging from textbooks all the way to individual question packs. 90% of the content is free. The rest is available at a fraction of traditional publishers’ costs. This allows us to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing students today, which is the affordability of higher education. With any of our products, you can either choose to adopt material from the marketplace to use with your students or you can create your own. We’ve externalized our offering tool which allows instructors to create bespoke material for their classes as well. The big selling point is that this is all in one application, one platform, which becomes a one stop shop for instructors at the higher education level.”

Sourcing and Customizing OER

Top Hat has curated some of the open content on their platform, and they’ve also partnered with other OER-focused groups to share what they’ve created. For example, OpenStax.org has put together a few dozen textbooks for introductory university courses entirely comprised of OER. These, along with resources from others, are available on the platform.

All open content is viewable online. If it costs money, you can preview a few chapters before you buy. With many resources, such as tests and assignments, only educators can access them. This blocks students from being able to access answers that could help them bypass the learning process when it comes to end of semester assessments.

For educators who create material with the Top Hat platform, they are required to release it with a Creative Commons license. While they’ll receive the credit, others will be able to freely use and repurpose what they’ve created.

It’s true that, for many professors, saving their students money isn’t a priority. They’d rather focus on their research. When it comes to designing a course, picking a textbook off a shelf is much easier than really digging into OER.

“We think about professors on a spectrum,” Angelo said. “You’ve got one end of the spectrum who can’t find anything for their course. Maybe it’s a very niche subject or highly advanced. There’s no good textbook out there for them. They’ve had to cull things together from disparate places, and they’re really happy about what they’ve put together.”

“It’s a small but important part of the Marketplace. At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got the instructor who just wants to do research, etc. They can go to the Marketplace, adopt existing materials and use them straight out of the gate. The majority of instructors, we find, want to be able to adopt something off the shelf but then tweak it a bit, add in a couple notes or videos. We enable that too.”

“We think this is a really positive change to OER. Traditionally, you pay a subscription fee and get a static PDF at best. Our platform is much more interactive and it’s free.”

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