Contributed by Yang Wu, 2021 Contributing Editor, & Rachel Anderson

Open Educational Resources (OER) do not only benefit instructors and students. Campus organizations that provide peer-led academic support, such as tutoring or Supplemental Instruction, to students can also take advantage of them. Dedicated to supporting student learning and academic success in foundational college courses, these services are an additional layer of instruction that faculty and teaching assistants often do not have time to offer. These support programs provide assistance to individual students or organize cooperative learning activities by having students work together in small groups under the guidance of a peer leader or tutor to review essential course content. The sessions employ strategies based on Universal Design for Learning, constructivism, peer cooperative learning and other educational theories. They aim to not only reinforce course content but to promote metacognitive awareness among students and make them active learners who can excel on their own (Arendale, 2014). Peer academic support services utilize a variety of models for organizing sessions based on these learning strategies (Arendale, 2020), and studies have noted that the sessions create positive, collaborative learning environments where students are more engaged in studying (Dion et al., 2007), foster improved learning habits and student motivation to learn difficult concepts (Grillo & Leist, 2013), allow students to gain improved study strategies, and that attendance in sessions helps to reduce course and college dropout rates (Arco-Tirado, Fernández-Martín & Fernández-Balboa, 2011; Malm et al., 2012, Wilson & Varma-Nelson, 2021). 

Closely tied to the courses that they support, peer learning programs have traditionally based their instructional activities and student support around assigned textbooks, helping students better understand the concepts in these works. However, with high textbook prices these programs are often unable to purchase assigned learning materials needed to support many courses. They can also find it difficult to understand the learning needs of the students they are supporting when many of these students also could not afford required textbooks. Furthermore, with many students not purchasing textbooks, peer learning programs are often challenged to find a common source of reference to connect with them on course content. 

Clemson University’s OER Based Peer Support Initiative

One peer learning program is expanding its learning resources to include OER. Clemson University, a public research institution in South Carolina, provides learning and course support for nearly 100 courses on campus through the Dr. Ted Westmoreland Academic Success Program at the Class of 1956 Academic Success Center. The Center offers free Peer-Assisted Learning (PAL) as well as tutoring services to students.  Both programs focus on supporting lower level, undergraduate courses that have high fail and withdraw rates, and many of these are STEM courses. They do so primarily through undergraduate student leaders, who are upper level students that have successfully completed the courses they support. Based on Peer Assisted Learning (PAL), a model for student support first developed by the University of Minnesota (Arendale, 2014), the Center’s peer academic support program’s focus is on increasing student self awareness and self-regulation of their learning habits. They accomplish this goal by providing study sessions where students can receive mentoring by someone they can relate to. Peer leaders receive training on how to facilitate group study sessions and integrate educational theories into their sessions. Much of this training takes place during CU 1110, a one-credit course offered to new peer leaders during their first semester. Activities and assignments in this training course ask peer leaders to continually reflect on how they can best support student independent learning and to implement their training in their study sessions.           

 Faced with difficulties in procuring needed textbooks for the dozens of peer leaders who assist students each semester and looking for creative ways to fulfill their mission of equipping students to be independent learners, the Center turned to Clemson University Libraries, which engages in OER outreach across campus. The two organizations, starting in Fall 2019 began encouraging peer leaders to use OER in their academic support sessions. The Libraries created a special online resource LibGuide containing links to hundreds of OER related to the courses being supported. Peer leaders are asked to find OER relating to their student support needs, integrate these into their sessions, and design an approach that incorporates OER as part of a CU1110 training course assignment. The Center and Libraries monitor the progress of the leaders in using OER by conducting a survey at the end of each semester. These two organizations are also engaged in research to understand how OER can benefit peer learning support. 

Research Project on Peer-Led Learning with OER

Students using OER or online resources for learning as a supplement to their assigned coursework is nothing new. It is common for students to search the internet for materials that provide an easier explanation for course concepts than instructors or assigned readings. Some OER, such as Khan Academy open courses, are well known to students because they provide quick and easy explanations to STEM related concepts (Kelly & Rutherford, 2017). Studies have noted that students frequently use them as a “cheat sheet”, although sometimes to the point of not completing assigned learning activities (Ruggieri, 2020). The Center and the Libraries seek to move OER beyond this role and use different types of OER together to improve student learning ability. Peer leaders are encouraged to use OER textbooks as a common resource to review course concepts with their students. They are also asked to consider how different OER materials can be used to actively engage and motivate students to learn and to think metacognitively.  

The Center and the Libraries also seek to use peer leader experiences to improve the design and implementation of OER. Through end of semester surveys the two organizations monitor which OER materials peer leaders are using and how they are utilizing the resources in their sessions. They also assess student attendance data and feedback on sessions to see if the OER encourages more students to participate and remain engaged in academic support services. By doing so they assess which OER are more suitable for student-led study sessions, what qualities that make them so, and use the findings to make recommendations on how OER can be developed to support student metacognition. Since leaders are also students, the Center and Libraries use their survey responses to analyze which features in OER students prefer. Surveys by the Center and the Libraries also ask peer leaders to reflect on whether OER has benefited their own learning and explore how they are passing new learning strategies gained through using OER to students. 

Initial Findings

Based on observations made by the Center’s instructors and the Libraries on CU1110 students, OER are in general well liked by the peer leaders. Many used a variety of resources, such as videos, interactive simulations and textbooks together in their sessions to stimulate students and appeal to different student learning styles. OER has stimulated some leaders, who are not accustomed to reading textbooks, to actively use OER textbooks not only in their sessions but also their own learning. Peer leaders are also creating activities for students that involve having them search for information in textbooks, take notes and summarize parts of the textbooks, or even to create concept maps based on their content, helping students develop reading skills and critical analysis of the relationship between concepts. Other leaders noticed that different OER textbooks have a variety of approaches to solving math and science related problems. They used explanations from different works to show students that there are alternative ways to think about solving problems, seeking to get students to think more critically about how to approach questions. 

Peer leaders also gave hints on what types of OER best support their activities, and what features these materials should have. Many preferred OER textbooks that also included videos, simulations and other interactive online activities, noting that the non-textual materials can be used in combination with the textbooks to engage students. They also liked textbooks that had simple wording, and indicated that they preferred works that are intended to be used online and organized like a website over PDF versions. Peer leaders asked for textbooks that contained many practice questions, and also noted that they preferred textbooks that can offer students detailed explanations of the questions, along with questions that tested both the student’s understanding of STEM concepts as well as their ability to solve equations. They, in addition, liked textbooks that could allow students to take notes online. This could indicate a strong preference by students for integration of different resources, interactivity in OER, web based organization and more casual writing styles. The Center and the Libraries are analyzing data from their surveys and will present the complete findings of the study in future conference presentations and publications. 

References

Arco-Tirado, J. L., Fernandez-Martin, F. D., & Fernandez-Balboa, J. (2011). The impact of a peer-tutoring program on quality standards in higher education. Higher Education, 62(6), 773-788. 10.1007/S10734-011-9419-X 

Arendale, D. (2014). Understanding the peer assisted learning model: Student study groups in challenging college courses. International Journal of Higher Education, 3(2), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.5430/ijhe.v3n2p1 

Arendale, D. (compiler/editor). (2020). Postsecondary peer cooperative learning programs: Annotated bibliography 2020. Unpublished manuscript, University of Minnesota, College of Education and Human Development, Curriculum & Instruction Department.

Dion, E., Fuchs, D., & Fuchs. L. S. (2007). Peer-mediated programs to strengthen classroom instruction: Cooperative learning, reciprocal teaching, class-wide peer tutoring, and peer-assisted learning strategies. In Handbook of special education, ed. L. Florian, 450-59. London: Sage.

Grillo, M. C., & Leist, C. W. (2013). Academic support as a predictor of retention to graduation: New insights on the role of tutoring, learning assistance, and supplemental instruction. Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice, 15(3), 387-408. https://doi.org/10.2190/CS.15.3.e 

Kelly, D. P., & Rutherford, T. (2017). Khan academy as supplemental instruction: A controlled study of a computer-based mathematics intervention. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 18(4), 70-77. 10.19173/irrodl.v18i4.2984 

Malm, J., Bryngfors, L., & Mörner. L. (2010). Supplemental instruction (SI) at the Faculty of Engineering (LTH), Lund University, Sweden. An evaluation of the SI program at five LTH engineering programs, Autumn 2008, Australian Journal of Peer Learning, 3(1), 38-50

Ruggieri, C. (2020). Students’ use and perception of textbooks and online resources in introductory physics. Physical Review. Physics Education Research, 16(2), 020123-1-21. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.16.020123 Wilson, S. B., & Varma-Nelson, P. (2021).

Implementing Peer-Led Team Learning and Cyber Peer-Led Team Learning in an Organic Chemistry Course. Journal of College Science Teaching, 51(1), 44–50. https://doi.org/10.1021/ed083p1562

Yang Wu is the Contributing Editor of the IJOER Blog.

Dr. Rachel Anderson is the coordinator of Peer-Assisted Learning at Clemson University’s Class of 1956 Academic Success Center. She is also an instructor of the CU 1110 peer leader training course. Dr. Anderson has a background in Engineering Education and her  doctoral work focused on cross-disciplinary undergraduate teamwork. 

This post is by Yang Wu and Rachel Anderson and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.