International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 203
From Soup to Nuts: Expanding Liaison and Technical Services for OER Development
bundled resources that include digital
access codes or course-related software
packages. These bundled resources are
often time-limited or non-transferable,
reducing students’ ability to save money
through the secondary textbook market.
This, coupled with overall rising
education costs, forces students to make
tough decisions concerning course materials.
A recent survey at Virginia Tech
shows that students are opting to share
materials, increase working hours, and
reduce course loads to help pay for, or
simply go without, the course materials
they need to succeed (Walz, 2017). A
now well-known Florida study reveals
similar results, with students opting not
to take certain courses due to the cost of
course materials (Florida Virtual Campus,
2019). Such behaviors contribute
to course failure and dropout rates, and
increase students’ time to degree completion
(Martin, Belikov, Hilton, Wiley,
& Fischer, 2017).
At the same time that awareness
of student material costs has increased,
higher education stakeholders
have begun to explore OER alternatives,
beginning with the development
of Merlot, publication of PLOS, MIT’s
requirement that all course materials
carry an open courseware license, and
the development of what is now Open-
Stax by Rice University (Bliss & Smith,
2017). Through these and other efforts,
instructors and OER advocates have
shown that students can perform just
as well using open resources, and that
students rate low and no-cost materials
favorably (Hilton, 2016; Todorinova &
Wilkinson, 2019). As a result, a growing
number of institutions and university
systems have focused efforts on OER
development to manage student material
costs (Bliss, Robinson, Hilton, &
Wiley, 2013; Farrow et al., 2014). Moreover,
as OERs have become more widely
adopted, educators have discovered
benefits beyond cost management, including
equal access to materials from
the first day of class; increased student
engagement; lower drop, fail, and withdrawal
rates among at-risk populations;
and slightly higher grades among atrisk
students (Colvard, Watson, & Park,
2018).
For several years now, these
and other benefits have contributed to
broad institutional and system-level administrative
buy-in for OERs, especially
for high-enrollment core courses and
lower-division STEM courses that tend
to use expensive texts that are updated
frequently. At the same time, however,
the transition to OERs has been slow
for many institutions (Doan, 2017).
While the reasons for this are varied,
several sources indicate that locating
appropriate OER materials and setting
aside time to overhaul curricula are
significant barriers to faculty for developing
OER materials (Allen & Seaman,
2016; DeVries, 2013; Wang & Towey,
2017). Addressing these concerns has
led institutions and university systems
to develop a diverse array of awards and
funding-based incentives for faculty
to research, review, create, and adopt
OERs. These incentives exist at the state
level (e.g., Georgia, Oregon), the system
level (e.g., SUNY), and the institution
level (e.g., Temple), with varying
degrees of impact and success (Bell &
Salem, 2017).
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