One missing piece to the conversation around the impact of OER on student success metrics is a discussion about implementation quality. Are instructors just substituting an OER textbook for an expensive, commercial text, or are they going through a faculty fellowship, supported by their institution that includes conversations around pedagogy? OER implementation spans a continuum with one-to-one replacement of textbooks with OER textbooks at one end and thoughtful integration of OER in ways that enhance pedagogy at the other end. We believe these differences in OER implementation quality are a primary reason for the “muddy waters” surrounding OER and student success.
Furthermore, the potential differences in the support, training, and incentives instructors receive when implementing OER in their classrooms may impact the quality of that implementation. If instructors are not provided with adequate resources and guidance on best practices for adapting, remixing, and aligning OER with learning objectives, they may struggle to implement OER into their courses in a meaningful way. Lack of incentives, such as compensation or recognition for the time and effort required to implement OER, can also be a barrier to quality implementation. Understanding effective ways in which institutions can provide support for instructors implementing OER is crucial to advancing OER initiatives.
AAC&U is embarking on a large-scale study on OER and student success to advance the conversation on the effectiveness and impact of OER beyond affordability. Our multi-institutional study brings together 17 U.S. colleges and universities spanning all six primary higher education institution categories officially recognized in the United States, and features key minority-serving designations including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges, and Hispanic-Serving Institutions. From these institutions, we are collecting historical data on student success in courses that implemented OER within the past 10 years. As part of this study, we will be conducting focus groups with faculty from these institutions about their OER implementation and what characteristics indicate higher quality OER implementation. These results will allow us to understand and codify quality, leading to the creation of a framework outlining quality OER implementations.
In this session, we will present the findings from our focus group research and share the implementation quality framework we are developing. We will discuss the process of developing the framework; characteristics that indicate quality and the impact that support, training, and incentives (or lack thereof) have on OER implementation quality; and how we intend to share this framework to enhance OER implementation quality on a broader scale. Finally, we will reveal the next stage of this research—our incorporation of this framework into an instructor survey that will be disseminated to additional faculty at each of our partner campuses. The purpose of the instructor survey is two-fold: first, to determine if higher quality is positively associated with student success and second, to examine the extent to which OER implementation differs within and across institutions. These additional pieces of the study will further extend the conversation around the impact of OER on student success.
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[Session 6A]: Practice and Policy in OEAuthor KeywordsOER Implementation Quality, Focus Groups, Instructor perceptions
