The bright future of OER

This week's reading has given me a lot of confidence in OER. From many readings, we have seen the benefits of OER for both teachers and students. I am very happy to see that most teachers and students like OER because these certainly make me see the possibility of the successful implementation of OER on a large scale in the future.

One of the main points of this week's reading is to discuss whether OER textbooks can replace traditional textbooks. We can see from the reading that most teachers are still accustomed to using traditional textbooks to teach and question the quality of OER textbooks. However, the results in this week's research literature show that the use of OER textbooks did not make a big difference in student learning outcomes. This means that traditional textbooks can be replaced by OER textbooks. At the same time, the use of OER textbooks can save students money so that students can apply for more courses with the money saved. This in turn increases the income of the school.

One of this week's readings call The Tidewater Z-Degree and the Intro Model for Sustaining Oer Adoption is interesting because it makes an interesting point. Before reading this article, I always thought that OER meant free. However, I did not realize that OER involved so many different services. These services are locating OER, reviewing OER, managing open licenses, integrating OER into teaching and learning, and integrating OER into learning management systems. All of these services need to be funded. This article also mentions an interesting recyclable system. It is a good example of how implementing OER in schools can increase school revenues and address the cost needs for these services.

Obviously, there are many benefits to OER. It can not only reduce students' spending on textbooks but also increase the income of the school. For students, OER makes teaching materials less of a barrier to learning. These free teaching resources greatly reduce students' dropout rates and improve students' success rates in school.

Watching! Here comes the readings!

The COUP Framework

The OER Research Hub Research Framework

Hilton, J., Fischer, L., Wiley, D., & Williams, L. (2016). Maintaining Momentum Toward Graduation: OER and the Course Throughput Rate. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 17(6). http://dx.doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v17i6.2686

Wiley, D., Hilton, J., Williams, L., & DeMarte, D. (2016). The Tidewater Z-Degree and the INTRO Model for Sustaining OER Adoption. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 24(41). http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.24.1828

Fischer, L., Hilton, J., Robinson T. J., & Wiley, D. (2015). A Multi-institutional Study of the Impact of Open Textbook Adoption on the Learning Outcomes of Post-secondary Students. Journal of Computing in Higher Education. 10.1007/s12528-015-9101-x