The Interaction of OER Use and Course Difficulty on Student Course Grades in a Community College
vided by attending class and other freely available resources . This explanation is not something we are able to specifically test in our dataset but is supported by previous research findings in which students reported that not being able to afford course materials had negative academic consequences (
Florida Virtual Campus , 2018 ). The access hypothesis applies here in that the students in difficult courses who may have needed course materials , but perhaps could not afford commercial materials , benefited from access to OER ( Grimaldi et al ., 2019 ). Moreover , the findings from this study indicate that one particular context — course difficulty — may potentially explain the variability in study finding ’ s in Clinton and Kahn ’ s ( 2019 ) meta-analysis .
Finding that OER blunts the expected negative main effect of course difficulty on course grades is very hopeful . Whatever conditions exist in courses ( instructor rigor , workload , speed of instruction , concreteness or abstractness of content , match between student interest / aptitude and content , instructor experience and effectiveness , or any other predictors ) were subsumed parsimoniously , empirically , and quantitatively in the aggregated course failure rate . No causal claims are made , but prediction is powerful enough to justify gambling that OER used in historically difficult ( higher failure rate ) courses might blunt the negative trend . Certainly , the trend was not reversed . Difficult courses still tend to result in generally lower grades , but the presence of OER might make that phenomenon less so with zero cost to students .
The difficult courses are by definition are more challenging for students . In addition to OER use , other pedagogical interventions may be considered in future investigations in order to promote student learning in difficult courses , such as collaborative learning , providing more formative feedback to students , or promoting student motivations in the course .
While the zero-order correlation between OER and course grade was positive and significant ( due to the large sample size ), its beta-weight in the overall model was not significant . Controlling for gender , Pell eligibility , previous academic success and course difficulty diminished the weak positive association between OER and student outcomes . Even so , the zero-order result , as weak as it was , and the null result in the overall regression model still support the use of OER . This is not necessarily because of improved student achievement but on the grounds that student achievement using OER is on par with student achievement using traditional textbooks with zero costs to students . This null finding is the most frequently reported outcome ( see Hilton
2016 ,
2019 ). OER produces similar results at diminished financial costs to our most financially vulnerable students .
Conclusion
Previous research findings have shown that OER provide students with similar learning outcomes as commercial materials at a greatly reduced cost ( Clinton & Kahn ,
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