Open Education 2016

Thanks to the success of the BC Open Textbook Project and a critical mass of early adopters, British Columbia has earned a reputation for leadership in open education. However, despite that open textbooks have now been adopted at 21 out of 25 public post-secondary institutions in the province, thus far only two empirical studies have investigated the perceptions and impact of open textbooks in this context. The first of these was a survey of faculty users of OER (Jhangiani et al., 2016) while the second was a quasi-experimental efficacy study that compared the course performance of psychology students using open and commercial textbooks in both print and digital formats (Jhangiani et al., in preparation).

In this session, three Research Fellows with the Open Education Group present results from several surveys of students, faculty, administrators and instructional designers at post-secondary institutions in British Columbia.

1. A survey of students in a very large introductory physics course (800 students) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver that started using an open textbook (embedded within the EdX platform) during the 2015-2016 academic year. This survey investigated students' use of textbooks generally, their perceptions of the open textbook used in their physics course, and the educational impact of traditional textbook costs. A comparison of student outcomes in the course during terms in which a traditional textbook was used and those in which the open textbook was used will also be reported. This study was conducted by Dr. Christina Hendricks (Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia-Vancouver). Dr. Hendricks will also present results from a survey of all undergraduate students at UBC conducted by the student government, on how much students spend on textbooks and how often they go without buying them.

2. A survey of >400 students across 12 British Columbia post-secondary institutions enrolled in a variety of courses that adopted open textbooks. This survey assessed the experiences and perceptions of students using open textbooks, the economic and educational impact of traditional textbook costs, as well as how these outcomes are relate students' educational background, study habits, personality characteristics, and instructor ratings. This study was conducted by Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani (Department of Psychology, Kwantlen Polytechnic University).

3. A survey of students, administrators, faculty, and instructional designers at Thompson Rivers University (British Columbia) during the 2015-2016 academic year. The study assessed respondents' experiences and perceptions of using BCcampus Open Textbooks in campus-based and online courses in relation to the cost savings of open textbooks, the influence of open textbooks on the attainment of learning outcomes, and how open resources are used differently from traditional textbooks. This study was conducted by Colin Madland (Centre for Student Engagement and Learning Innovation, Thompson Rivers University).