Cost saving
Financial savings associated with the adoption of OER are documented – to date, for example, in the context of textbooks, BCcampus has reported over $20 million in student savings (BCCampus, 2020).
A large benefit to students who are often short of funds and cannot afford to purchase expensive texts.
Remove barriers to access
The main purpose of Open Education is to remove access barriers to Higher Education (HE) so that everyone has an equitable chance to complete a HE credential.
Barriers to HE access include cost, entry requirements, flexibility (to accommodate diversity), content, courses, support, assessment, and accreditation.
OER open up access to information, knowledge, and learning resources. As such, they are enablers of continuous professional development (CPD) and lifelong learning. They can reduce the costs of learning resources for students and institutions.
Nevertheless, engaging with openness in higher education directly links to the UN Sustainable Development goal 4 - based on its key pillars of access: equity, equality, quality, and inclusion (UNESCO, 2019). A holistic strategy combining different open elements may ‘have the potential to reconfigure the way higher education is realised’ (Dos Santos, Punie, Castaño-Muñoz, 2016, p. 30).
Facilitation of wider world view
A recognition that knowledge is inevitably marked by power relations and an attempt to readjust these dynamics.
Contributes to the decolonisation movement within higher education by providing opportunities to decolonise and diversify curriculum resources (Arday, Belluigi & Thomas, 2020; Costello, 2020; Farley, 2019).
Increase student agency and engagement
By opening up assessment and student learning opportunities to real-world contexts through open education practices, students gain agency over their learning. This could be done through co-producing content with your students and creating a shared OER.
A large study was done in 2018 within the University of Georgia, assessing the impact of OER on 21,000 students over a multi-year period. Results found that, on average, student grades improved, and this was partly attributed to continual textbook access from day one (Colvard, Watson & Park, 2018)
Altruism
In the case of public universities, they are established to provide public good – higher education – and are a public good themselves. Therefore, equipping students with the means to improve society is its highest goal. OER facilitate this process.
The Impact of OER Initiatives on Faculty Selection of Classroom Materials
An in-depth study to address new questions about OER awareness and use. This report examines activities at the state and regional level in the U.S., with a focus on regional higher education compacts.
SPARC Open Education Research Studies Bibliography
A comprehensive summary of all known empirical research on the impacts of OER adoption.
Multi-institutional Study of the Impact of Open Textbooks
Study of 16,000 students across 10 institutions, compares several measures of student academic success between those using open textbooks and those using traditional textbooks.
