At SLCC we have one of the larger OER initiatives nationally. In fall 2016, we will be running close to 500 OER-based sections. We have flipped entire courses open, including courses in Biology, Math, and History. We also have larger numbers of sections in Education, Sociology, History, and Business. Finally, we have emerging OER projects in Geology, Economics, and Psychology. While we haven't yet built an open degree, we have scaled OER laterally so that we're now poised to save a majority of SLCC students significant money with the initiative.
Now that we have achieved scale, we're turning our attention to researching the efficacy of the OER initiative. Our study utilizes a mixed methods approach, combining survey and institutional data, to evaluate student success outcomes. We are interested in understanding if easing the textbook cost burden leads to higher retention, persistence, transfer, and completion rates.
We have three waves of survey data on student attitudes toward textbooks--both traditional and OER. In addition, the scale of our OER initiative allows us to mine a rich institutional data source and draw firm conclusions about the effectiveness of open educational resources. Taken together, these qualitative and quantitative methodologies allow us to make an important contribution to the study of the impact of OER.
