12 Student Savings, Value, and Empowerment

There are many benefits for student learning when it comes to open pedagogy and the use of open educational resources. As an evidence-based practice, research studies correlate OER use with student success. There are many benefits to using OER beyond the cost savings.

The student benefits of using OER as a primary textbook use include that it facilitates knowledge creation, can produce industry-quality artifacts, provides long-term access to knowledge, and cost savings provide a greater level of access to a textbook. Let’s dive deeper into these. When a faculty uses open pedagogy in their course, students take hold of their learning process. Their ownership of knowledge creation facilitates their empowerment. The students often produce higher-quality results because the stakes are higher. They know their work will be used, and they want to create something worthwhile. This also allows students to use these products in their work world, whether that be in interviews for jobs, or creating their own business. Students can learn so much in the process from understanding Creative Commons licenses, to the accessibility of web publications, to writing to an audience.

Providing OER increases lifelong learning. If an OER is used in a course, this may increase the likelihood of students relying on the text in other courses and beyond graduation. The intent is to provide this ongoing access and as a result students and graduates can obtain access to knowledge long term, at point of need, and throughout their lives.

OER use in courses has led to enhanced student learning outcomes. According to a key study of analytics of over 20,000 student grades improved,  “Statistically significant and important additional benefits were discerned. Without disaggregating the data, it was first found that students tend to perform better in course settings when OER textbooks were used in place of expensive, commercial textbooks. DFW rates also decreased. “

OER ptovides students with access to educational resources that they might not have been able to afford otherwise. This means that students from a wider variety of households can access educational materials that were previously inaccessible to them, which can have a significant impact on their academic success.

OER provides increased flexibility. According to a report from Every Learner Everywhere, “If something isn’t working in an open resource — either because it is incomplete, out of date, not culturally responsive, or just not optimally aligned with the course goals and its assessments — faculty can change or add to the text instead of assigning more expensive books to fill in a gap.” Because OER is open and collaborative, educators can work together to create resources that are specifically designed to meet the needs of their students, resulting in better learning outcomes.

Using OER is empowering for all students regardless of demographic, but research supports benefits to underrepresented groups. Due to the increase in student success metrics, using OER helps benefit all learners. As a result, this increases educational access for students. According to Colvard, Watson, and Park’s study, OER use benefited students who were Pell Grant recipients more than students who were not, improving the final average grade more than non-Pell Grant recipients (p. 267).