3 Chapter 3 – Background and Environmental Scan

 

U.S. Higher Education Environment

 

The cost of higher education is driving increased interest from state and federal government officials who are investigating ways to reduce the cost of education. College and university administrators have responded by considering the areas in which the cost of higher education has been increasing faster than the pace of inflation. One area that has gained attention from higher education administration, faculty, and students is the rising cost of textbooks. SPARC was one of the U.S. organizations that worked for the Affordable College Textbooks Act, October 2015.¹⁶ The cost of textbooks has risen over 1000% in the past four decades (three times the general rate of inflation).¹⁷ A recent survey by the United States Public Interest Research Group found that 65% of students have not purchased a textbook because of the high cost.¹⁸ Another study found that 31% of students chose not to enroll in a course because of the prohibitive impact of textbooks costs.¹⁹

 

It has been estimated that the total cost students spend on textbooks is around $1,200.²⁰ While relatively low when compared to high tuition schools like Penn State, the amount is significant in that it’s an additional cost students often haven’t budgeted for. The cost savings of Open Educational Resources (OER) (including Open Textbooks) can be significant for students.²¹ In terms of specific cost savings per student, in studies replacing traditional materials with OER, it has been estimated that the average textbook cost savings is anywhere from $90 to $126.²²

 

There is also a growing body of evidence suggesting that use of OER can positively impact student success.²³ For instance, in a study of nearly 5000 United States higher education

16 SPARC, “The Affordable College Textbook Act – S. 2176/H.R. 3721.” http://sparcopen.org/our- work/2016-act-bill.

17 Ben Popken, “College Textbook Prices Have Risen 1,041 Percent Since 1977,” (August 6, 2015).

http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/freshman-year/college-textbook-prices-have-risen-812-percent-1978- n399926.

18 Ethan Senack, “Survey Shows Students Opting Out of Buying High-Cost Textbooks,” (January 27, 2014). http://www.uspirg.org/news/usp/survey-shows-students-opting-out-buying-high-cost-textbooks.

19 Florida Virtual Campus, 2012 Florida Student Textbook and OER Survey.

http://florida.theorangegrove.org/og/items/10c0c9f5-fa58-2869-4fd9-af67fec26387/1.

20 Dan Kopf. “Which Major Has the Most Expensive Textbooks?” Priceonomics (August 24, 2015). http://priceonomics.com/which-major-has-the-most-expensive-textbooks.

21John Hilton III, Jared Robinson, David A. Wiley, & Dale Ackerman, “Cost-Savings Achieved in Two Semesters through the Adoption of Open Educational Resources.” International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 15, no. 2 (2014): 67-84; SPARC, “The Affordable College Textbook Act – S. 2176/H.R. 3721.” http://sparcopen.org/our-work/2016-act-bill.

22 Lane Fischer, John Hilton III, Jared Robinson, & David A. Wiley. “A Multi-Institutional Study of the

Impact of Open Textbook Adoption on the Learning Outcomes of Post-secondary Students,” Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 27, no. 3 (2015): 159-172; Ethan Senack,Open Textbooks: The Billion Dollar Solution, (2015). http://studentpirgs.org/sites/student/files/reports/The%20Billion%20Dollar%20Solution.pdf.

23 Jared Robinson, Lane Fischer, David A. Wiley, & John Hilton III, “The Impact of Open Textbooks on Secondary Science Learning Outcomes.” Educational Researcher, 43, no. 7 (2014): 341-351.

 

students at a total of 10 institutions (including both 2-year and 4-year), when the control group of students using traditional textbook materials was compared to the experimental group of students using OER materials, it was found that in “three key measures of student success— course completion, final grade of C- or higher, course grade—students whose faculty chose OER generally performed as well or better than students whose faculty assigned commercial textbooks.”²⁴ In general, research shows that moving from traditional materials to OER materials, in addition to saving students money, does not result in a negative impact on student learning.²⁵

 

While much of the research emphasizes cost savings for students and potential learning impacts of the use of OER, another key area is faculty perceptions of OER and potential barriers for adopting OER. Faculty members are arguably one of, if not the, key stakeholders in shifting to OER and affordable textbooks as they are typically the ones setting the assigned materials in their courses. There is a documented lack of awareness of OER among faculty members, but at the same time, when faculty members are exposed to OER, they rate it to be of similar quality levels to traditional course materials. As the Babson survey group suggested:

 

Awareness and adoption of open educational resources (OER) has yet to enter the mainstream of higher education. Most faculty remain unaware of OER, and OER is not a driving force for faculty decisions about which educational materials to adopt. The picture does include some promising signals, as results show that faculty find the concept attractive: those who are aware of OER rate it roughly on par with traditional resources, and those who have not yet used it are very willing to give it a try.²⁶

 

In terms of OER quality, a synthesis of existing OER literature found that “a comprehensive way to assure quality for OER is to specify a series of standards for peer review instruments in order to evaluate the resources.”²⁷ In a study of 127 educators who have used OER materials, it was also found that recommendations by trusted colleagues were a primary way in which the educators found out about the materials and that “the role of educators in promoting and giving credibility to OER, such as open textbooks, cannot be underestimated.”²⁸

 

In working with OER, from both a content creation and content consumption perspective, a key consideration is understanding the meaning of, and how to use, Creative Commons licensing, as it is fairly ubiquitous when it comes to the use of OER. The Creative Commons framework was initially developed in 2002 and “aims to facilitate the transfer, sharing, use and adaptation of academic and creative content, while protecting the intellectual property rights of the

24 Lane Fischer, John Hilton III, Jared Robinson, & David A. Wiley. “A Multi-Institutional Study of the Impact of Open Textbook Adoption on the Learning Outcomes of Post-secondary Students.” Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 27, no. 3 (2015): 159-172.

25 John Hilton III, Jared Robinson, David A. Wiley, & Dale Ackerman, “Cost-Savings Achieved in Two

Semesters through the Adoption of Open Educational Resources.” International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 15, no. 2 (2014): 67-84.

26 I. Elaine Allen Jeff & Seaman, Opening the Curriculum: Opening Educational Resources in US Higher Education, (2014). http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/openingthecurriculum2014.pdf.

27Javiera Atenas & Leo Havemann, “Questions of Quality in Repositories of Open Educational Resources: A Literature Review.” Research in Learning Technology, 22, no. 13 (2014).

28 Rebecca Pitt, “Mainstreaming Open Textbooks: Educator Perspectives on the Impact of OpenStax College Open Textbooks.” International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 16, no. 4 (2015): 133-155.

 

authors.”²⁹ Creative Commons Licensing is the industry standard for copyright and licensing OER materials. Penn State libraries are fully equipped to help faculty both find materials to use as OER in their courses as well as to share their own materials to be used by others.

 

In spite of all these benefits to students, the adoption and use of OER remains quite low. To bridge this gap Penn State University is exploring ways to speed up faculty adoption of OER in order to meaningfully decrease student course costs while simultaneously increasing student course success. Several key barriers will have to be overcome in order to achieve this goal.

These barriers are awareness, discoverability, usability, and incentives (both extrinsic and intrinsic).

 

OER Examples: This Task Force has identified key resources and instructional designers who can partner with faculty to help identify OER materials that might replace for-cost curriculum materials. Additionally, a Penn State OER website has been created: http://oer.psu.edu.

 

OER-related/involved Organizations:

• SPARC
• UNESCO
• OER Research HUB: a research project funded by the Hewlett Foundation which examines the impact of OER through collaborative, comparative, international research: http://oerhub.net
• Open Education Group: Collection of peer-reviewed studies on OER pertaining to efficacy and/or perception: http://openedgroup.org/review

 

Key OER Repositories:

• Open Textbook Library (U. of Minnesota): https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks
• OpenStax College (Rice University): https://openstax.org
• MERLOT: https://www.merlot.org

 

University Implementation Examples:

• BC Campus: British Columbia, Canada: http://bccampus.ca/open-textbook- project
• Tidewater Community College Z Degree: http://www.tcc.edu/academics/zdegree/index.html
• University of Maryland University College: http://www.umuc.edu
• North Dakota Open Educational Resources Initiative: http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/2015openingthepublicsnd.pdf

 

 

 

Affordable Course Content, Copyright, and Licensing

 

Creative Commons Licenses

 

Creative Commons (CC) licenses are public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of copyrighted works. Authors use CC licenses (and other open licensing schemes) to give

29 Javiera Atenas & Leo Havemann, “Questions of Quality in Repositories of Open Educational Resources: A Literature Review.” Research in Learning Technology, 22, no. 13 (2014).

 

others the right to share, use, and build upon their copyrighted works. CC licenses can be applied to any copyrighted work, including books, blog posts, webpages, journal articles, sound recordings, photographs, maps, and more.

 

By using a Creative Commons license, an author grants users the right to distribute the unmodified work worldwide for non-commercial purposes so long as proper attribution is given. Attribution requirements are specified in the CC licenses and failure to attribute amounts to a use that exceeds the bounds of the license—copyright infringement. CC licensors may adopt licenses that broaden the scope, including allowing commercial uses and the creation of derivative works, all requiring the proper attribution.

 

 

Creative Commons and OER

 

Creative Commons defines OER as “teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.”³⁰ Creative Commons provides the technical legal infrastructure to make free educational resources accessible and adaptable via the open licenses because of the standardized method to grant copyright permissions to the works.

Accordingly, the standardized copyright license also makes CC-licensed educational resources easy to use. When everyone uses the same license it becomes easier to create a body of resources with dramatic reach, impact, and usability.

 

Furthermore, CC licensing that enables the creation of derivative works allows educational resources to grow and change in response to new methods, research, and discoveries. All CC licensed OER except for BY-ND and BY-NC-ND can be adapted by peers, researchers, faculty, educational resource authors, instructional designers, or whomever might contribute to the updating of the work.

 

Finally, CC licenses are machine-readable licenses and highly discoverable. Properly using a CC license results in a software code embedded into the work that can be read by a computer, searched for, and ultimately served up in special purpose search engines.

 

The CC BY license is most often recommended for the highest impact. Works distributed under this license can be incorporated into commercial products (always with attribution), translated, and otherwise adapted.

 

While the impulse may be to restrict noncommercial uses, some people avoid using resources with this restriction because of the gray area between core commercial and noncommercial uses. Similarly, some users wish to restrict the creation of derivative works, which also restricts the ability of others to adapt, update, translate, and localize works.

 

 

30 Creative Commons. Education / OER. https://creativecommons.org/about/program-areas/education- oer.

 

CC, OER, & PSU

 

Penn State can take advantage of Creative Commons in our OER initiatives in two ways: using CC-licensed works, and creating CC-licensed works. OER published using CC licenses become part of a growing body of resources available for everyone to use;by using and contributing to this body, PSU becomes part of the OER landscape.

 

By utilizing OER and Creative Commons licensed works in and for course materials, faculty and staff can reduce the cost of courses to students both directly and indirectly. The use of Creative Commons licensed textbooks brings the textbook cost to zero. By using Creative Commons licensed resources in course materials faculty and instructional designers reduce hefty licensing fees; the cost savings is indirectly passed to students. In addition, by reusing and/or updating existing CC-licensed resources, valuable time is saved, freeing time for creation of materials where no resources exist.

 

However, being part of the OER landscape should be reciprocal. PSU cannot just be a user and consumer of CC-licensed OER. In order to become a well-integrated member of a robust OER community, faculty and staff should seek out ways to share their works via CC licenses, which the University can support via clear recommendations on the application of CC licenses on University-owned works, an improved approval workflow, as well as easier record-keeping for CC out-licenses via a centralized registry, which would also capture the impact that PSU makes in the OER community.

 

 

OER and Outcomes-Based Assessment

 

As discussed earlier in this chapter, a recent meta-analysis of studies focused on OER and student success found that in general, students in courses using OER perform at the same level or at a slightly higher level than their counterparts in courses using traditional resources.³¹ In addition to being a viable alternative to traditional textbooks based on student success, OER provides opportunities to better align course materials and resources with course learning objectives. With the ability to create and adapt OER, course materials can be selected or revised to directly support course objectives, better facilitating outcomes-based assessment.

 

This is particularly noteworthy with the implementation of Canvas as the new learning management system at Penn State University. Canvas includes a learning-outcomes module that allows faculty to embed outcomes and align course content and assignments with them. OER can be directly tied to the designated outcomes within Canvas, providing strong alignment and assessment opportunities. Course metrics, including student use of embedded resources, can help to determine the effectiveness of the OER within the course as well.

31 Lane Fischer, John Hilton III, Jared Robinson, & David A. Wiley. “A Multi-Institutional Study of the Impact of Open Textbook Adoption on the Learning Outcomes of Post-secondary Students.” Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 27, no. 3 (2015): 159-172.