Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials that are either in the public domain, or openly licensed so everyone has free and perpetual permission to engage in the 5R activities:
Textbook Costs Impact Student Retention
The cost of course materials impacts whether students drop, fail, or withdraw from a course. In 2018, Florida students reported that the cost of textbooks has led them to:1
| 64.2% | Not purchase the required textbook |
| 42.8% | Take fewer courses |
| 40.5% | Not register for a specific course |
| 35.6% | Earn a poor grade |
| 22.9% | Drop a course |
| 18.1% | Withdraw from a course |
| 17.2% | Fail a course |
ISU students, like most university students, can struggle with the cost of textbooks, which can impact both their personal and educational lives. The video below contains real textbook stories shared by ISU students.
OER Can Help!
A research study shows that when courses adopt Open Educational Resources (OER) to replace commercial course materials, the drop/fail/withdrawal rate for those courses decreases by an average of 29%.2,
Another experiment found that students in courses with OER were retained and persisted at higher levels than those without OER.3
One study found that with the same instructor, modality, and semester, one section of students with a digital OER textbook performed the same or better than students with a traditionally published textbook.4
Curious about OER? Watch this brief introductory video from Iowa State University librarian and OER expert Abbey Elder.
1. Florida Virtual Campus Office of Distance Learning & Student Services. (2019). 2018 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey.
2. Clinton, V., & Khan, S. (2019). Efficacy of open textbook adoption on learning performance and course withdrawal rates: A meta-analysis. AERA Open, 5(3), 2332858419872212. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858419872212
3. Bol, L., Esqueda, M. C., Ryan, D., & Kimmel, S. C. (2022). A comparison of academic outcomes in courses taught with open educational resources and publisher content. Educational Researcher, 51(1), 17–26. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X211052563
4. Clobes, T. A., Jenkins, J. J., Haid, H., & Allen, R. (2022). Comparison of academic performance with a traditional textbook versus a digital openly-licensed textbook. HETS Online Journal, 13(1), 52–74. https://doi.org/10.55420/2693.9193.v13.n1.63
5. Definition from Creative Commons, https://creativecommons.org/about/program-areas/education-oer/
This page of this LibGuide was created by Kristin Whitman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Note that other pages may have different attributions.
OER Graphic Image source: Markus Büsges (leomaria design) für Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. / CC BY-SA 4.0
The 5 Rs of OER was created by Ontario Tech University and is a derivative of the 5 R Permissions of OER by Lumen Learning, licensed under CC BY 4.0.