Instructor and student experiences with open textbooks, from the California open online library for education (Cool4Ed)

Özdemir, Özcan; Hendricks, Christina

doi:10.1007/s12528-017-9138-0

Cited by 46 publications

(59 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Faculty from across academia argue that much free and up-to-date information from multiple perspectives is available on-line, through government websites and other reputable sources making textbooks relics of a pre-digital age (Carnevele, 2006;Talbert, 2007). Other faculty are retaining textbooks, but are choosing free or very little cost options that are open educational resources provided by non-profit organizations like OpenStax or state initiatives like the California Digital Open Source Library (Ozdemir & Hendricks, 2017;Seaman & Seaman, 2017). While none of our respondents advocated for abandoning hard-copy books altogether, they did suggest that alternative readings can reduce costs by providing free digital materials on course management systems, as well as lower-cost printed material.…”

Section: Implications For Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Text Selection and Course Design: Faculty Perspectives on Critical Reading and Critical Thinking

Collins-Dogrul¹,

Saldaña²

2019

JoSoTL

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This study of sociology faculty in twelve private colleges and universities compares teaching with textbooks and textbook alternatives in undergraduate classes. Faculty explain that textbooks provide a breadth of material that is organized and streamlined in a way that promotes consistency across instructors, facilitates content delivery to students with a range of abilities, and reduces course preparation time. Despite these benefits, faculty have a strong preference for textbook alternatives. Faculty argue that readings, like monographs and journal articles, develop students' critical reading and thinking skills. Additionally, when instructors design courses with alternative readings they engage their own critical reading and thinking, as they critique and synthesize the literature in their discipline in order to curate texts for the syllabus. We argue that teaching courses with alternative readings creates course experiences where students and faculty engage with a discipline together.Texts are essential to course design. They shape how professors organize units, structure lectures, and assess learning. Despite the importance of choosing texts, systematic research concerned with why instructors choose textbooks or choose alternative readings is scarce. We surveyed thirty-six sociology professors at twelve small and medium private institutions to bring the pedagogy of choosing texts to the fore. This research asks, why do instructors choose textbooks, monographs, or other types of readings? How do instructors understand how the choice of one form of text or another shapes teaching and learning?Our inductive qualitative analysis of open-ended survey interview questions, revealed that faculty view textbooks and their alternatives as fundamentally different. Faculty noted that textbooks had particular strengths, like providing a breadth of material that is organized and streamlined in a way that promotes consistency across instructors, ensuring that departmental learning objectives are achieved with a variety of instructors. They explained that the books facilitate content delivery to students with a range of abilities, and that textbooks reduce course preparation time for faculty. Still, the faculty in our study had a strong preference for teaching without textbooks.Instructors saw alternatives to textbooks, like monographs and articles, as time-intensive to teach, but the best way to advance students' critical reading and thinking skills, a finding congruent with the academic literacy literature. In addition, instructors viewed the task of finding textbook alternatives as a way to engage their own critical reading and thinking skills in their teaching, a benefit rarely discussed in the literature. We argue that teaching courses with alternative readings creates a course experience where both students and faculty engage in evaluative reading and creative reasoning. Unfortunately, according to our participants, the conversations regarding course design around textbook alternatives are lacking on campus. The overwh...

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Section: Implications For Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Text Selection and Course Design: Faculty Perspectives on Critical Reading and Critical Thinking

Collins-Dogrul¹,

Saldaña²

2019

JoSoTL

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…However, their design also introduced elements of blended learning for students who used OER, possibly confounding their results that both treatment and control performed equally well. Other recent studies such as Grewe and Davis (2017) and Ozdemir and Hendricks (2017) find similar or slightly better student outcomes when using OER, but lack rigorous controls. Thus, a serious issue with OER research to date is that more than half of the efficacy studies conducted do not make any attempt to control for student variables that could be influencing the difference in their performance.…”

Section: Review Of Literaturementioning

confidence: 88%

On the Efficacy of Open Educational Resources

Delgado

Hilton

2019

IRRODL

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Open educational resources (OER), which are free and openly licensed educational materials, have been a widely discussed topic in response to high textbook costs, the need for more pedagogical flexibility, and inequality in access to educational materials. In this study we examine the efficacy of OER through a quantitative analysis of the impact of OER on student final exam performance in a large calculus course. Our dataset affords us a relatively large sample size, allows us to classify students in both treatment and control groups, and includes a variety of covariates that allow us to control for multiple correlated factors. We estimate causal treatment effects using several econometric approaches. Our study adds the following insights into the research on OER efficacy: (i) OER materials do not, in general, lead to any significant change in student final exam performance; and (ii) OER materials have a significantly positive impact on both international students and Pell Grant eligible students.

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“…Open textbooks provide flexibility for both students and educators, conceptualized as the "5 R's" (Wiley, 2014), namely the ability to retain (to store, print), reuse (to share freely for use in a variety of institutions and contexts), repurpose (to change format, for example converting text to audio), remix (to add to the resource, usually by incorporating other OER), and to revise (to update, and to make changes based on local teaching and learning needs). Many universities engaged with open text production include peer-review processes, and transparently publish the reviews alongside the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science & Technology | Melbourne, Australia | 19-23 October, 2019 Author(s) retain copyright, but ASIS&T receives an exclusive publication license DOI: 10.1002/pra2.00076 text (Ozdemir & Hendricks, 2017). Open textbooks provide affordances that are increasingly important as commercial publisher business models enclose knowledge, and privilege learners who can afford rising textbook costs.…”

Section: Open Education and Open Textbooksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Facilitating Open Access to Information: A Community Approach to Open Education and Open Textbooks

Stagg

Partridge

2019

Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Tech

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Access to information as a necessary precondition for human flourishing is recognized explicitly in the UNESCO Strategic Development Goals, and mirrored by the work of universities globally to reduce barriers to information, especially research outputs. Growing international attention has turned to learning and teaching resources, particularly textbooks as a key barrier to fully engaging with, and participating in, higher education. The affordances of open texts provide an alternative to commercially published and often exclusionary access practices; and empower educators and students in co‐creation and open sharing of information and knowledge. This paper examines the design of an ongoing institutional grants program predicated on a facilitated community learning approach for academic staff seeking to adopt, or adapt open textbooks into the curriculum as one mechanism to increase access to information. The participants' experiences and personal learning were captured through a series of semi‐structured interviews that inform the iterative design of the ongoing grants program that could be transferred to other institutions seeking to support educational change.

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Instructor and student experiences with open textbooks, from the California open online library for education (Cool4Ed)

Cited by 46 publications

References 4 publications

Text Selection and Course Design: Faculty Perspectives on Critical Reading and Critical Thinking

Text Selection and Course Design: Faculty Perspectives on Critical Reading and Critical Thinking

On the Efficacy of Open Educational Resources

Facilitating Open Access to Information: A Community Approach to Open Education and Open Textbooks

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