 Hi everyone, welcome. I'm Veronica Howard. I am one of the chairs of the UAA textbook affordability committee. What I want to talk to you about today are open educational resources. This presentation is going to be a primer and introduction to what OERs or open educational resources are, but we're going to place a pretty heavy emphasis on the research related to open educational resources. We're going to talk about the benefits of open educational resources beyond simply cost students. We're also going to be talking briefly about the ways in which we can be evaluating the kind of value that OER adds to our instruction. So before getting started I just want to let you know it is a little bit of a longer presentation so I'm going to put some some time tags down in the description of this video if you're watching it on YouTube or if you're watching it in another in another format I'll give you those time links as well so we can cover some of those major areas. Now I have been using open educational resources for quite a long time and I'm firmly invested in the value of open educational resources because of what they allow me to do as an instructor. When we're talking about open educational resources they have a very specific definition. Open educational resources are teaching and learning and research materials that are in any format in any medium doesn't matter if it's a video or if it's textual information what matters is their license so they're in the public domain or they're shared under a copyright license that permits their no cost access, reuse, repurposing, adaptation and redistribution. Those are called the five Rs and we'll come back to those in a second. So open educational resources have to be something that is under an open license. Open licenses respect intellectual property rights of their creators but they provide some benefits to the user or to the licensee. It means that you can do a lot of different things with them and that's I think where the value gets added compared to some other terms and I want to clarify here because often we hear the term like open we're familiar with it and it has lots of other meanings. We might even think of open resources as being these these things that you may have used in your course so when I say open you know the obvious elephant in the room is what does that mean. When I talk about open access as a broad blanket general term it just means free of cost means something I can get to. So for instance a lot of Khan Academy materials are open access I can go to a website I don't have to pay to get in there I can get to the materials. Those are not necessarily open educational resources because open educational resources are not only free to access right but they have to give you those licensing permissions. They have to give you all that remixing retention all the things we talked about before. Those are referred to as the five Rs and if your material is not licensed in a way that allows other people to download it redistribute it share it change it etc it ain't open. So we are going to come back to as a group we're going to come back and talk about licensing creative commons we're going to talk about those five hours a little bit more in our module on creative commons copyright and fair use and I'm also going to link to that in the description of this video if you're watching it on YouTube. So remember those five hours have to give you certain permissions you have to be able to retain that material meaning you can download it save it on your computer and have it forever you have to have the right to reuse that material so you're gonna you've already got it downloaded you can keep it and use it for other things you don't have to necessarily ask permission. You have to have the right to revise that content sometimes the material is flawed sometimes you want to change the way some content is worded you have to have that right if it's an OER you also have the right to remix materials so maybe I want to take one chapter from this book over here I want to bring in these images and I want to add a video right and I can remix all that content together to create something new you also have the right to redistribute that material so you can make a copy of it you can just send it to someone email attachment posted on the internet put it wherever you like but you have the right to do that that is what makes open educational resources so valuable is this flexibility and all these permissions that it gives you. Now like I said these can be materials in any domain so we could be talking about for instance specific course elements so what I have pictured here is Robin DeRosa's open anthology of early American lit this was this really wonderful book that Robin DeRosa and our students put together they curated a content collection of material to give back to future students that is a course textbook you can have videos you can have other slide decks things without sorry you can do full textbooks so institutions like open stacks are really well known for their course textbook collection. There are some other open publishers like BC Open Campus like CUNY or SUNY the City University of New York the State University of New York both have some content collections and there are a variety of other open publishers that will make you aware of and I'll post some resources for you to have a look at and then finally you have some folks who share their entire course builder their entire course shell to others MIT open course where is one of those particular repositories now the benefit here is predominantly for students and we have this kind of tongue-in-cheek joke that we make in the OER community which is this image that I'm showing you on screen it's a picture from Twitter and it says check out my $1,000 TV stand and it's this kind of flat screen television on top of something like seven or eight books the joke they're being at each of those textbooks is probably over $125 and the subtext of that being that the books are under a heavy TV they're not being used so the students really just laid down a thousand dollars for textbooks they're not even using now I don't have to tell you how expensive textbooks are you probably know that already but I think it might surprise you to see some of the data of how expensive textbooks are so for instance over the past 40 years we see that the cost of educational books or college textbooks has increased over 800 percent we know that looking just in the 20-year time span that the cost of college textbooks has increased 181 percent and this is relative to other materials other items that folks are buying we know that the student perception of course materials also matters I'm going to share with you a few studies on student perceptions for the most part when students are asked what's reasonable for you to pay for course materials we see that in a variety of different studies both nationwide and here at the University of Alaska Anchorage many students will say that about $50 or less is fair for them to pay for a textbook that's reasonable to them now of course each students can have an individual circumstance there could be some students for whom $50 is way too much and they can't even afford that but generally speaking this is the value that's often presented we also see that when students are asked directly about the how they pay for their textbook their sources for funding that many students are paying out of pocket for at least some of their instructional materials only about 20% of students report that all of their course materials are covered by financial aid we have to be mindful of this because it means that even if a student is receiving financial aid to help make higher education more affordable for them they might be getting surprised by or struck by some of these ancillary costs that they're not predicting in their tuition bill when you ask students about how they're choosing their courses we find that some students are going to choose their course based on the cost of the instructional materials and this can impact how students progress through their their course of study so for instance about 40% of students say that they're taking fewer courses about 40% of students say that they're going to take some sections of the course but not others so they're strategically choosing courses based on the cost of course material and what might be even more alarming is that about 65% of students report that they don't buy the required textbook now that's about 65% who are saying that they don't buy the textbook at least once but the number is around 40% of students who aren't who are regularly choosing not to buy course materials for the class now this is a challenge because you have students in the course who don't have the necessary course materials and if they need those course materials to be successful they don't have them we also know that once a student is in that course once they've started once they're into it about 80% of students will not withdraw from a course if they don't have the book so some report that they do less well in the course about 20% of students are saying that they actually fail the course it's really problematic going back to financial aid even when students have financial aid to afford their course materials about 48% indicate that financial aid money doesn't arrive in time to be useful for them so many of them need their course materials prior to when financially is dispersed there are of course some programs that are aligned with commercial textbooks offerings that are getting around some of these issues but for the most part remember about half of students are not ready to go on day one 44% of students like I mentioned are regularly going without their course textbooks they're just learning that you can get by without having those required materials even if it means that you're not doing quite as well as you could have otherwise and only 47% of students report that they actually have their materials and are ready to go and ready for instruction on day one now when you put all of these results together we can see that it's a little bit bleak the idea that students need to be ready for their course they need to have their course materials to be ready this is challenging for us we don't know what it means for students to be ready to go we also have not attended to a lot of the ancillary effects of textbook costs so for instance colleagues from the San Francisco State University conducted an informal survey of students in spring 2017 and found that about 80% of students reported significant stress and by the cost of their course materials only one in three students are able to or excuse me most students are having to choose between food and course materials so the cost of course materials is a significant detriment it is a significant challenge is providing these kinds of out-of-class barriers to success students might be working more students might be trying to go without students might be choosing not to buy their groceries so that they can have their course materials to be successful and of course this is really really heavily focused on the money of it but from the student perspective that is the most immediate barrier to success is money how can you afford to go to college but in a long-term kind of six success metric we know that students who don't complete college those who begin a four-year degree but don't finish a four-year degree are 50% more likely to say tax book costs were a major financial barrier for this their success this is also true at UAA so when we look at the diversity and inclusion action plan they cite that in 2016 41% of students reported that they were leaving UAA due to family and financial issues now this doesn't break down the reasons why students are leaving specifically it's kind of a vague catch-all category but that number was up 14% from 2012 so money is getting tighter and we know that cost disproportionately affects students who have the greatest unmet financial need and those tend to be first-generation students and those also tend to be non-white or historically minoritized students now these data are a little bit old but more contemporary research that we've done here at UAA reiterates and highlights a lot of these barriers for instance in the 2020 the spring 2020 risk survey this survey was conducted with a representative sample of UAA students prior to the COVID-19 outbreak in this survey 48% of students said that they could not get their course materials on time either because of shipping or because of availability now this could be that financial aid came too late then you have to order then you have to wait for shipping or the book is out of the bookstore but the point is about half of students don't have their materials on time this supports those previous studies that I was telling you about where students simply don't have their materials on day one we also see that about 25 percent of students had some difficulty accessing their textbook online so if you're for instance switching to an alternate format or have an online homework system students are having some difficulty getting in there it can be barriers related to an access code not working having to reach out to the textbook publisher to get access if it's not working successfully some difficulty with some other form of that online textbook so these can be challenging 24 percent of our students explicitly stated that they couldn't afford all of their course materials in spring 2020 and 23 percent of students said they weren't really sure what course materials were required relatedly 21 percent of students said that their professor listed a course book as required but didn't even use it so we get this kind of mixed message or poor communication between the instructional faculty and the students where either they don't know what's going on or they've got a professor who's saying it's required but it's not required so can we really trust that a required textbook is required these have been happening more and more and we're becoming aware of them I mean it can happen for a variety of reasons if an instructor changes sections if there's some confusion with the bookstore order many of these things can happen but it results in students being uncertain or unsure of what they really need to purchase to be successful in the course 16 percent of students who responded to this survey reported some confusion or difficulty with a day one digital program it's worth noting that this is a pretty rare program but it's increasing in popularity at UAA day one digital essentially is a system where the university bills students directly for the textbook and provides them access and then the university serves and has a intermediary and gives that money directly to the publisher so it ensures that students have the materials on day one it also ensures a steady stream of revenue for the textbook publisher there's been some challenges with day one digital and for the most part we don't recommend that you go with day one digital unless you are absolutely certain that you can support your students in navigating that system it's very challenging so finally only about 24 percent of students said that they had no difficulties with course materials now these are a lot of numbers and you'll notice that these numbers do not add up to 100 percent that's because students could actually select multiple challenges meaning that a student could say they didn't have their course materials on time and they couldn't afford the materials and they didn't really know what was required so we see that that 24 percent is a significantly small minority here because students are having multiple problems with their textbooks here at UAA now this is a lot about student perception but it really highlights I think the take-home message that I want you to to understand from this students can't learn from materials they can't access they can't access it due to technological barriers or financial barriers or confusion about what they mean and if students can't learn if they can't access those materials they can't learn if they can't learn how are they going to succeed in our courses this is all about student perception let's talk about actual student performance objective measures of student success there's two large-scale studies I want to share with you the first is by Fischer and colleagues and of course these were linked in the material I'll also put a link in the discussion or in the description box below if you're watching this on YouTube Fischer and colleagues performed one of the first large-scale evaluative studies of OER and they looked at over 16 000 students across 10 different colleges and universities to see how students performed before and after a course transition from a traditional commercial textbook to an OER textbook what they found was that when you're looking at four key metrics passing grades meaning the student earned a grade of C or better overall course grade course completion did the students stick it out till the end and course credit load persistence you know how many credits are students taking for the most part there didn't seem to be too many differences so when we looked specifically at overall grades we found that there were no differences in 10 courses however in four courses once the course transition to OER materials students earned better overall grades in only one course did students perform better before switching from commercial to OER when you look at the passing grades so just the proportion of students who are just passing the course grade of C or better in nine courses there was no difference in five students perform better with OER and again in only one did students perform better before the transition they performed better when the instructor was using a traditional commercial book now this is where it gets really interesting when you look at persistence within the course when using traditional commercial materials about 20 percent or one in five students will drop the course so remember before i told you 80 percent of students said they wouldn't withdraw from a course we found the 20 percent that would but when the course transition to OER only six percent of students would drew so you can see here for the most part either there's no difference or there's improved performance in terms of overall grade proportion of students earning passing grade and the number of students sticking with that course when using OER and i think most interestingly look at the results for credit load when using the OER textbook students not only took more courses right so they took an average of 13.29 credits per semester when they were using OER compared to an average of 11.14 credits when they were using traditional commercial materials but in the following semester they also took more credits an average of 10.71 compared to 9.16 when using traditional commercial materials so you have the direct benefits of using R you got that day one access you've got the fact that you don't have to worry about not having access to your materials on day one it's not a financial barrier etc but there's also these kinds of ancillary benefits that students perhaps because they had more financial resources available to them were able to take more courses or perhaps because they weren't paying for a textbook they didn't have to work as much so they could take more course credits and that's especially important because we know that students will struggle in their time to completion and the longer it takes a student to complete their degree of study the less likely they are to graduate now there are some limitations to the Fisher study for instance we don't break this down by demographics so we don't really know a lot about each of the students so Colvard and colleagues actually replicate this kind of study within the University of Georgia system and they evaluated the performance of over 21,000 students within the University of Georgia system as courses transitioned from traditional commercial materials to OER textbooks and just like with the Fisher and colleagues they're looking at overall course grade they're looking at DFW rate right so they're looking at the proportion of students who technically did not pass the class and they also added specific variables about Pell eligibility which is a kind of shorthand stand-in for student financial need they looked at enrollment density or how many courses students were taking and they also evaluated student demographics so they're looking at who is being best served by these OER transitions now there's a lot of results from the study again this is another one i'm going to link to in the description for you so if you haven't read it check it out it is amazing but let me take you through these i'm going to break them down one by one and really take our time with the data first when we're looking at student course grades on the y-axis on this graph i'm showing the overall GPA of a student per semester and the two groups of bar graphs that i'm showing you are for non Pell eligible students and Pell eligible students so we're comparing students who have a demonstrated financial need which is Pell eligibility to students who do not have or do not qualify for that additional scholarship because they don't their family makes enough their estimated family contribution is high enough that they don't need it so what you want to see is is higher is better higher indicates a better grade and what we're seeing here is that for both needy students financially needy students and for non-needy students students perform better when using OER and it's you see when you compare these to one another look watch my cursor students who are financially needy perform about as well as students who are not financially needy when using OER compared to students who are not financially needy when when they're using commercial books it really levels that playing field for those students even for students who have less financial need they perform better too so across the board it's improving student performance we also care about withdrawals so in this particular case lower is better because we're looking at the proportion of students on the y-axis who withdrew from the course and prior to the and the two groups again we're looking at financial needs so Pell eligible students or students with greater financial need students on the left the non Pell eligible students or students with less financial need or higher estimated family contributions we see that when students on the left the non Pell eligible students take courses with OER when they transition from a commercial to an open textbook the number or the proportion of students dropping the course decreases about two percent but check out these results for Pell eligible students we go from about 15 percent of students withdrawing from the University of Georgia system down to 10 so again we're leveling the playing field in terms of withdrawals for students who are financially needy let's talk about those demographics again this is average grade on the y-axis so higher is better and we have white students and non-white students remember that in higher education traditionally non-white students are a minoritized population so they don't perform as well and we can see here that when we transition from a commercial book to an open textbook the white students perform better we go from about a 3.9 GPA up to about a 3.15 GPA but for non-white historically marginalized populations we see the effect is even more dramatic and they don't quite get as high on the GPA scale as white students using commercial textbooks but they get real close so again OER is really leveling that playing field and bringing students who have the greatest need who need the most help up to the level as students who don't need any help we're using those commercial books now finally the last figure i'm going to show you is DFW grades grades of DF or W or failing grades for part-time students part-time students also struggle because you know they have to work and we know that part-time students struggle to complete their degrees their their program of study so on the left side the bar graphs are showing you full-time students on the right side we're showing part-time students and we're looking at the proportion of students who are earning a grade of DFW so you really want to bring that down we see that for full-time students the switch to OER actually slightly increased the grades of DFW but for part-time students the students who really struggle to complete their degrees switching to OER decreased grades of DFW significantly by over 10 percent so taken together we can see that there are a lot a lot of benefits for using OER and they're they're beyond simply financial right those of course are the first students are ready for class you don't have to worry about paywalls you don't have to worry about access codes the materials are there they're ready to download they're ready to use day one we see in the Fisher and in the Colvard studies that there's better student performance there's higher grades fewer drops fewer withdrawals increased credit load students will graduate faster when we use OER Colvard additionally shows us there are disproportionate benefits for students who are traditionally underrepresented in higher ed so first-generation students pal-eligible students and students from minority backgrounds now we didn't cover this as much but in the research on preference there's a ton of studies on preference for OERs and both students and faculty adopters actually report a preference for an OER textbook i'm going to show you a little bit of those data a little bit further on but once faculty switch they're very happy with their materials and the hidden benefit that we're going to also talk a little bit more about you can customize the content to your course and you can customize the content to your learners both in terms of the content and the format so i'm super excited to share some of that with you so what's the hold up are faculty going to be enthusiastic adopters of OER or are we going to be curmudgeonly are we going to resist are we going to say no not in my course well when you look at the literature when you look at the data there's been a series of surveys that are conducted with faculty over the past five years by semen and colleagues and in their most recent report they tracked a number of metrics and we see that when you compare along the y-axis we're showing you the number of years so subsequently as you get higher that's closer to where we are temporarily in time and along the x-axis along the bottom we have the number of folks who are endorsing a particular comment when you look at whether or not folks are even a little bit aware of OER the number of faculty who are aware of OER has only increased since they started collecting these data so it doesn't seem as if faculty awareness is as big a barrier as it used to be in fact notice that it's over 50 percent of faculty who have at least heard of what OER is faculty are becoming more aware of these resources we also see that adoption is slowly increasing so again this is chronologically along the y-axis it's showing you as you go higher closer in time to where we are now you see that the proportion of folks using OERs especially introductory courses has just increased in fact 26 percent is roughly equivalent to the adoption of big name commercial publisher textbooks so this would be like 26 percent of folks are using an open stacks or a NOBA compared to you know 20 percent who are using a McGraw-Hill or 17 percent who are using a Pearson so we see that the adoption of OERs especially in those big introductory courses is becoming pretty popular it's less likely to be adopted in other types of courses more niche courses and this is likely due to the availability of OERs OERs tend to be focused on large enrollment courses the the 40 or 50 or 70 biggest most popular courses with undergraduates becomes a little bit more challenging to find OERs the further you get or the more specialized you become in course materials now remember I said that we also are interested in issues of satisfaction so when surveyed OER textbook users and non-OER textbook users these are faculty users report the same level of satisfaction with their course materials so once you adopt OER people tend to be pretty happy with it if you're not using OER people tend to be pretty happy with what they're using this could be a source for why we don't have more OER adoption decisions tend to be a little bit sticky my colleague Corey says and so when we're talking about this kind of cost-sunk effect we're talking about the work it would take to transition to a new product that can be a barrier and it also doesn't tend to be some other quality issues we used to worry a lot that there was concerns about quality and what we have here on the y-axis are a number of quality metrics or variables so accuracy scope confidence in the timeliness of updates cost to the student the level or quality presentation the available supplementary materials and test banks which are still very important to folks notice that for all of these metrics they tend to be pretty tied in the accuracy scope and confidence in the timeliness of updates then we start seeing some differences when you're looking at cost to the student OER textbook users are much much more happy the faculty who are using OER are much happier with the cost that it's that's required for their students but you also see we're OERs a little weak we still do not have a ton of supplemental materials for OER textbooks which is a barrier to adoption if you have to recreate all your slide decks if you have to record new videos if you have to create new test banks for instance that's going to take time it's going to take a lot of effort that's going to take skill but not every faculty member has so we see the landscape is changing here and I would argue that at this point the biggest barrier to OER adoption is the availability of resources because as you get further along or more specialized you may not be able to find the resources you need but the biggest variable is time UAA faculty informally report that they would make a lot of changes to their courses if they had time if they had support if they had workload buyouts and I get it I respect it I'm there a hundred percent too but we have to recognize that this is value added for students OER is all about value added so let's talk a little bit about that now of course when we're talking about value we could talk about money and if I wanted to I could track you know what is it that each individual faculty member is contributing back to student success so we throw myself out here I'm going to push myself in front of the bus and I'll show you my oh god my 2014 hair so this is my 2014 hair and it was around that same time that I said you know what I'm going to do some OER and I have adopted OER and two of my large lower division GER courses in psych 111 introduction to psychology and in psych 200 introduction to behavior analysis now each of these courses I've been using a free or open textbook since 2016 and you can see that in those different courses I've saved about sixty two thousand dollars versus maybe a hundred and forty two thousand dollars so lots of money but that's an oasis that's one instructor in a sea of hundreds of instructors at UAA we're not going to move the needle and by evaluating the individual contribution of each faculty member we can't get far if we go alone if you want to go far build a community so DRC and I have also been following up with who is using OER how many students are being reached by OER every semester and we're very proud to report then in the spring of 2020 the the UAA APU consortium library offered an affordable course materials award and the initial winners the inaugural winners of that award saved over sixteen hundred students about 150 thousand dollars in a single semester so you can see when you have a community you're starting to make big impacts these folks in one semester have saved more for students at UAA than I have saved in like four years so we gotta build that community and get more people involved well how do you do that it's kind of challenging and it's not just about money we can talk about money we can talk about price price is what you pay but the value of OER is deeper than the money paid the the value of OER is in what else you get this is part of the reason that I use OER research shows that the content of a textbook greatly impacts the structure of the course which is to say that it tends to be that we teach the material that's in the textbook we don't supplement as much as we could maybe because we don't have copyright permissions maybe because students really only want to read the textbook but for the most part we teach what's in the textbook and nothing more informally some faculty have said it's because they feel guilty because the student is paying so much money for the book so you really want to get the most out of it but the textbook is just a resource the textbook is not the course and the course is not the textbook that's like putting the cart before the horse and I have informally heard some textbook publishers describe not only their textbooks but their homework systems as being systems designed to be teacher proof and I don't know about you but I am a doctor I am a specialist in my content matter area and I know more about this content than a textbook publisher representative than the folks who are designing the homework systems I know what my students need to be successful in my course I know my course student learning outcomes and I am the person who is best capable of deciding what my students need to read and how I'm going to assess them so on a very fundamental level OER adds value because it allows you to customize your course and ensure that your students are meeting their student learning outcomes it gives you the academic freedom to teach in the best way possible for your course for your context and for your students it also allows some flexibility to allow some autonomy it allows you to put in new materials so for instance I can based on student interest based on the kinds of questions that students are asking me I can put in new content just on the fly because I'm not as beholden to a textbook and what a textbook offers to me I treat my textbook as one of many curated content pieces that students can get access to so one of the best and most fun moments that I've had in the last couple years is having an informal impromptu conversation about traumatic brain injury and what that meant in my course and we did this in general psych it was a fun day we have a lot of content covered but I was like you know what let's forget about that you're interested in this right now let's do it and because I was able to supplement and add things on and and augment what I was already teaching students were not deprived of a learning opportunity it also means that I can add in some additional materials to make sure that if a student is struggling I am giving them a little bit more and I don't have to necessarily straddle multiple different systems of like here's the publisher's LMS and here's the university LMS you're going to find some of the stuff over there and you're going to find some of the stuff over here so I can I can support my students without having to worry about the LMS being as much of a barrier and if COVID-19 has taught us nothing it's that oh my goodness flexibility is key and OER provides so much flexibility once the pandemic started I must have received over a dozen emails from publishers saying hey we'll try this free homework system come on board we're going to help make sure that your students are well supported throughout the rest of the semester hey come and try our materials we're going to give you a red book challenge just try it for one semester and if you don't leave you don't love this free trial for your students don't worry about it but it's going to be free not only for spring but also for summer to get you through until we know what the pandemic you know treats us like with OER I don't have to worry about that with OER I was actually able to create a completely offline set of course materials including videos practice activities quizzes that students only had to get online once per week to involve and I've got a link here I'm a post some material in our our blackboard shell in our discussion or in the description of this video if you want to know more but the point is that I don't have to worry about cost and I don't have to worry about how my students are getting access to those materials because I can literally do anything I want in the whole world with those materials do I want to put them on the thumb drive and mail them to a student I can do that do I want to go into campus and print out 40 copies of the textbook don't tell my department director but I can do that because I as the licensee I have that right and I have that flexibility and these are some of the values that OER brings to my pedagogy to my teaching and I want that for you too now just to quickly summarize we've talked about access cost being a value that's added we haven't talked about accessibility with accessibility because you can edit because you can change you can make the material fully accessible for students who might require some additional supports some alt text if it doesn't exist you can change refine how students see it if they need to have that content in another format for instance if you need to have the the course textbook read aloud to the student you can do that with OER because you can change the format you can remix you can redistribute any way you want you know some of the benefit of no cost retention which is pretty useful when you're getting into senior level courses junior senior and beyond because now students have a zero cost reference material that they can go back to they don't have to worry about selling their course textbooks back to the university to make a little bit of money there's also value for faculty so as I mentioned greater autonomy I can make sure that I have that beautiful alignment my student learning outcomes we've seen the research shows that when you're using OERs you have improved student student learning you have decreased withdrawals you've got better support for students who are traditionally underrepresented in higher ed and then finally I can change the material if the material is wrong and sometimes the material will be wrong I can change it and my students are not impacted adversely by the error and then finally we haven't talked about the community but oh what a beautiful community of educators being surrounded by people who share your same passion for access and for student success you can collaborate with peers in the community OERs tend to be reviewed by content matter experts and those experts are really fantastic and really supportive in helping to make that change and then finally those other materials give you something to build a base on you can build all new materials all new resources to then again give back to the community so it creates this really wonderful tangential community around pedagogy improving the access of our students to a high quality education we also see that millions of students are being reached through OER textbooks now this is one publisher alone open stacks they have this really wonderful infographic I wanted to include it but at the time that they collected these data in 2018 over 6.2 million students had downloaded an open textbook and we see that if you look at other sources of data like Spark they say that they that through open textbooks students have saved over a billion dollars billion with a B like boy they saved over a billion dollars in course material fees right that's a billion dollars that goes back into the economy in other ways that student loan debt that our students don't have to carry with them into the future we are directly impacting students futures when we choose to use OER not only that but we are remodeling the economy we are remodeling the environment so notice what i'm showing you here our consumer price index data for a variety of different services we see hospital services or health care is super expensive it is the most expensive it's increased over 200 and i told you before that for the last 20 years college textbooks have increased almost 200 but notice right around 2016 there was a a sharp stagnation in the cost of course textbooks and that's because open textbooks free textbooks high quality free to access materials now creates an alternative that means that you can't keep ramping up textbooks you can't have one publisher competing against another publisher and having those prices creep up now that there is a viable legitimate alternative cost option the price of all materials has stopped increasing which is a great thing but at the end of the day i want to leave you with this it's not always about money it's about value when we use OER textbooks we're not just saving students money on textbooks we are directly impacting a student's ability to enroll in persist through and successfully complete their courses so in other words we have the power to directly impact our students abilities to attend and succeed in and graduate from college and i don't know about you but i'm there so thank you so much for your time check out some additional resources in the description box below or in the the guide that brought you to this video i look forward to hearing what you think about this presentation and i look forward to working with you in the future thank you