Contributed by Amy Hofer and Phoebe Daurio

Thank you to the grant proposal development team who contributed to writing the narrative that this article is based on in Fall 2020. Special thanks to team members Gaelen McAllister and Abbey Gaterud, Chemeketa Community College; Shanell Sanchez and Alison Burke, Southern Oregon University; Sue Kunda, Western Oregon University; Yvonne Smith, Clackamas Community College; Liz Pearce, Linn-Benton Community College; Anne Nichol, Portland Community College; and Curt Sobolewski, Portland State University.

The Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) Open Textbooks Pilot Program (OTP) call for proposals in Fall 2020 included a requirement that proposed projects should promote student success. Projects were required to include plans for demonstrating impact on instruction, learning outcomes, and course outcomes, as well as student savings. Open Oregon Educational Resources is sharing our approach to this grant requirement because we believe that it will be relevant and replicable for future grant writers seeking federal OER funding. 

Access to affordable course materials is inarguably important for students. We make the case that student success also depends on the quality of course materials. We define high-quality course materials as relevant, aligned with course outcomes/workforce standards, accessible, and designed with an equity lens. In this post, we show how our higher-quality course materials will have an effect on measurable affective and academic outcomes.

In writing our grant proposal, Open Oregon Educational Resources drew on the model, documents, and advice of the Open RN project at Chippewa Valley Technical College, grantee of the Open Textbooks Pilot Program in 2018. We see sharing our work as a way to pay forward the generosity of the Open RN grant project team. Last month in OER & Beyond we also shared our data-driven approach to identifying high-enrollment degree pathways that lead to in-demand occupations, with minimal OER currently available.

Impact of Affordability on Student Success

Open Oregon Educational Resources used data from the open education field to make a case that the cost of course materials can become a barrier to student success, and can have a negative impact on retention, time to degree, and completion. 

Textbook costs have a measurable impact on students. According to the U.S. Student Public Interest Research Group, of approximately 4,000 students surveyed nationally, 63% skipped buying or renting a textbook, 17% skipped purchasing an access code, and 90% worried that not purchasing course materials would impact their grade. Similarly, a survey of approximately 21,000 students in Florida found that 64% skipped buying a textbook, 43% took fewer courses, 36% earned a poor grade, and 23% dropped a course. Data from Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission (HECC) for the 2019-20 academic year shows that statewide, books and supplies are 6% of the average total cost of attendance at an institution of higher education (IHE), an estimated $1,415 per year; meanwhile the same data source shows that 43% of public community college and university students in Oregon were unable to meet their expenses via expected resources (family contributions, student earnings, and grant aid), and 31% of Oregon students take out federal loans, which correlates with lower graduation rates. 

The cost of textbooks is a small dollar amount compared to the total cost of attendance. Yet the work of researchers such as Sara Goldrick-Rab shows that financial aid does not cover the cost of higher education, and therefore seemingly small additional expenses can create an emergency that results in students dropping out in spite of their loan obligations. In fact, according to the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, most emergency aid, in the form of campus vouchers, emergency loans, and unrestricted grants, is likely to be for dollar amounts of just $100-$500. OER are responsive to the challenge of access to learning materials because they are available for free online or in print at low cost, for an estimated savings of $100 per student, per course. OER are also responsive to the COVID-19 pandemic because they are appropriate for remote instruction, licensed so that they can be easily customized, and provide perpetual access (unlike rentals and access codes). 

The project proposed by Open Oregon Educational Resources demonstrated that use of the openly licensed course materials would result in student savings by estimating the cost of the commercial textbooks that the openly licensed materials would replace (for free online or at low cost in print). This is important, because even though the cost of textbooks is a small dollar amount compared to the total cost of attendance, lowering textbook prices can make a big difference in students’ability to complete their education. Additionally, this meets several of the grant performance measures that look at cost savings for students. 

Support for Quality

The federal OER grant program requires evidence of improved student outcomes as well as savings. Per the call for proposals, improved student outcomes are measured through improved course grades and lowered failure/withdrawal rates.

John Hilton III’s widely referenced review of the OER literature published to date suggests that use of openly licensed course materials, in and of itself, is unlikely to have a measurable impact on perceptions of the materials or on academic outcomes. A meta-analysis by Clinton and Khan concurs with Hilton, finding that OER benefit students through cost savings without any negative impact on academic outcomes. Additional research by Grimaldi et al. suggests that the reason many OER impact studies arrive at a null effect is that their design does not include a large enough sample size of students who had no access to course materials before OER was introduced. 

Therefore, Open Oregon Educational Resources does not expect that implementing OER, per se, will lead to improved student achievement. Rather, the project expects to demonstrate that students and faculty will perceive the OER to be of equal or higher quality than commercial textbooks, and that students will have the same or better learning outcomes as similar courses using commercial textbooks, because the project provides access to higher quality learning materials than those available commercially. As stated above, high-quality course materials are relevant, aligned with course outcomes/workforce standards, accessible, and designed with an equity lens. 

To achieve these standards, Open Oregon Educational Resources’ grant project includes professional development and a support team to ensure that faculty are developing high quality course materials. Research consultant and leadership team member Michaela Willi Hooper described the support structure of the project team in a recent blog post, Supporting Cross-Institutional OER Teams in Open Practices and Learning Outcomes Alignment. Support includes instructional design and equity consultation, environmental scans of existing open and commercial course materials, training on open practices, analysis of learning outcomes across the state, and more.

Faculty participating in the grant-writing stage of the project identified many reasons for wanting to change their course materials. Faculty reported errors and omissions in commercial textbooks and said that they had to do significant supplementation to align with learning objectives. They also reported that their commercial textbooks were not current, not relevant, too expensive, or too long (all of Oregon’s public community colleges and universities are on a 10-week quarter system). Others said that course outcomes could not be met by current textbooks specifically because of the lack of an EDI lens.

Measurable Outcomes Beyond Affordability 

Open Oregon Educational Resources expects that thoughtful instructional design and an EDI approach will address the quality concerns raised by the faculty and lead to improved student achievement in two ways. 

First, Open Oregon Educational Resources expects to demonstrate a positive effect on students’ affective experience of the curriculum because of the project’s EDI approach. A synthesis of approximately 40 peer-reviewed studies on culturally relevant education by Aronson and Laughter finds that a culturally responsive approach has a measurable effect on both academic achievement and on affective student outcomes, including increased motivation, increased interest in content, increased engagement, and increased academic confidence. Therefore, Open Oregon Educational Resources expects that the OER designed with an EDI lens will have similar positive impacts on students’ affective experience of the curriculum. 

Second, Open Oregon Educational Resources expects to see improved academic achievement. It stands to reason that a one-to-one swap of an all-rights-reserved copyrighted textbook with an openly licensed textbook might not improve student outcomes, given that the copyright/licensing status is unrelated to the quality or effectiveness of the content (for more on this line of thinking, see “But is it sustainable?” and On Quality and OER). However, Open Oregon Educational Resources expects that this project will lead to improved outcomes for all students, with a potential for greater benefit for traditionally underserved groups, because it provides access to higher quality materials than those available commercially by solving the problems that faculty identified with their current textbook options. 

An influential article by Colvard et al. informs our hypothesis that students identified with historically underserved groups may see improvements at a rate greater than that of all students as a result of this project. Their study breaks out OER impact for Pell eligibility, part-time status, and race/ethnicity, and finds that the transition to OER benefits all students, but is associated with a statistically significant improvement in student course outcomes for these groups. Therefore, this project will compare course grades and DFW (Drop, Fail, and Withdrawal letter grades) rates for students in redesigned courses with previous rates before OER was implemented, and also determine whether the effects vary if the data is disaggregated for Pell Grant recipients, part-time students, and non-white students. With the assistance of RMC Research, Open Oregon Educational Resources intends to collect and analyze data for the following program and project measures. 

FIPSE OTP Grant Program Measures
Measure	Data Collection
The failure rate or withdrawal rate in courses that use open textbooks and/or ancillary materials compared with equivalent courses that used commercial textbooks.	Institutional Data Request
The average grade of students who completed a course that used open textbooks and/or ancillary materials developed through the grant compared with the equivalent average grade of students that used commercial textbooks.	Institutional Data Request
Project Measure
Measure	Data Collection
For students of Implementing Faculty, end of course grades will increase by 5% overall, with increases of 10% for Pell recipients, 13% for non-white students, and 28% for part-time students.	Institutional Data Request
For students of Implementing Faculty, DFW rates will decrease by 2% overall, with decreases of 4% for Pell recipients, 5% for non-white students, and 10% for part-time students.	Institutional Data Request
30% of students self-report improvement in affective outcomes, including increased motivation, increased interest in content, increased engagement, and increased academic confidence.	Surveys and focus groups
80% of Implementing Faculty report improvements in student learning.	Surveys and focus groups

One important theme emerging among open education practitioners is the idea that access to course materials, while important, does not, itself, create an equitable curriculum; unless EDI are part of the design parameters of a project, openly licensed course materials are no more likely to be culturally responsive to, or representative of, the students in Oregon classrooms than their commercial counterparts (a few excellent resources backing this up include a blog post by Quill West, a research article by Benjamin Croft and Monica Brown, and a 2019 Open Education Conference poster session by Malina Thiede). These findings align with challenges for open educators identified by Francesca Carpenter, W. Preston Davis, and Daphnie Sicre in a Community College Consortium for OER presentation. 

Open Oregon Educational Resources is planning to investigate and disseminate evidence-based practices associated with using open textbooks that improve student outcomes, per the requirements of the federal OER grant call for proposals. Yet the evidence doesn’t support a case for OER improving student outcomes per se. Other prospective grant writers can use elements of this approach to defining high-quality course materials as specifically designed with an equity lens as a starting point for their own proposals.  

Amy Hofer

Amy Hofer, Statewide Open Education Program Director, is the OER librarian for Oregon’s colleges and universities; visit the Open Oregon Educational Resources website at openoregon.org to learn more.

Phoebe Daurio works for Open Oregon Educational Resources welcomes as a Grant Project Manager. Phoebe joins Open Oregon Educational Resources after a decade with the Intensive English Language Program (IELP) at Portland State University. In her time there, she worked as a classroom instructor and as an academic/program coordinator. Her expertise includes teaching communication skills, facilitating student engagement, and managing projects.

Phoebe loves learning, planning, analyzing, and thinking about systems. Her primary role at Open Oregon Educational Resources is to manage the federal grant awarded by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) in the U.S. Department of Education. This project supports the development of openly-licensed, targeted pathway materials with an equity lens for Criminal Justice courses. Phoebe is excited to combine her classroom instruction and program management experience in this work with Oregon instructors, OER experts, and the great team at Open Oregon Educational Resources.

Phoebe’s position is funded by a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education, and the contents of this post were developed under the grant. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

This post is by Amy Hofer and Phoebe Daurio, 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.