Festival of Learning 2018

The adoption of open textbooks and other open educational resources (OER) affords pedagogical innovation and ensures equitable access to required course materials while yielding significant cost savings to students. In British Columbia, open textbook adoptions by over 400 faculty across 41 post-secondary institutions have yielded cost savings to students of over $5.5 million. Of course, this is only part of the estimated $227 million in cost savings to students worldwide by the end of the 2015-16 academic year (Creative Commons, 2015). Moreover, in addition to these significant cost savings, a review of 17 peer-reviewed studies of OER efficacy shows that in practically every instance, students assigned OER perform the same as or better than those assigned expensive commercial resources (Hilton & Mason, 2017), a result that has been replicated in British Columbia (e.g., Hendricks et al., 2017; Jhangiani et al., 2015).

However, beyond the economic and educational gains to students, questions remain concerning the institutional impact of OER adoption. Research at Tidewater Community College, for example, has shown that OER adoption in the context of their Z degree program enhances the course “throughput rate” (an aggregate of drop rates, withdrawal rates, and C or better rates; Hilton et al., 2016) which, together with increased course enrolments, results in gains in tuition revenue to the institution (Wiley et al., 2016). However, it remains to be seen whether OER adoption outside of an identified Z degree/Zed Cred program carries similar benefits and whether the findings at Tidewater can be replicated within a Canadian post-secondary context.

Over the 2017-18 academic year, the BCcampus Open Education Research and Advocacy fellows investigated this question, in partnership with the faculty and institutional research offices at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU), Douglas College (DC), and the British Columbia Institute of Technology. In this presentation, the fellows will describe their approach, some of the challenges they encountered, and share some preliminary results from their analyses.