 Welcome to the open ed lightning talk, what do students think student perceptions of OER at private institutions. I'm Amanda herford scholarly communications director for pounding and presenting with me is Aaron millenies poundies affordable learning project coordinator. Today we're going to share highlights from our student perception survey, which you can adapt to collect data in your own institution or consortium. So just a little bit of background, the private academic library network of Indiana or pounding is a library consortium of 23 small private institutions across Indiana. And together with a team of librarians across pounding Aaron and I lead the pal save program and pal save is pounding affordable learning our consortium program which started in 2017. In 2019 we were awarded a half million dollar grant from the lily endowment to fund the pal save program until 2024. And in our program, we do lots of things we offer educational workshops about OER to faculty from across the consortium. And with funding from Lily, we provide faculty $200 stipends to review open textbooks in the open textbook library. And we also provide $500 grants to faculty to redesign their courses. These faculty use mostly open textbooks and some library materials that are free to students, or a combination of both. Lastly, we do a whole bunch of data collection and analysis to show the impact of our programs. We've built a data plan to answer research questions about the impact of textbook prices, the impact of using open and other zero cost materials, and both faculty and student perceptions about quality. The course redesign grants are billed are built to build upon the basic OER workshop that we give to faculty, and to help faculty learn about how to adopt zero cost texts. And through these grants we've supported the redesign of 131 courses so far. And our program as a whole has impacted over 7000 students and saved over $433,000 since 2019. So one of the requirements of the course redesign grants is the faculty distribute our student perceptions survey to their students at the end of the semester. Our survey uses the tool lib wizard, and responses are collected and added to the data set each semester. Faculty members also get a report of their students responses. The survey questions ask about the perception of quality impact on grades and studies and access method and preferences. So far we've collected over 1300 responses from 102 zero cost courses, the vast majority of which use a we are this data comes from 17 of our small private institutions across Indiana. And now I'm going to hand it over to Aaron to give you some of our results. So like Amanda said, the survey focused on overall perceptions of quality impact on studies grades and studying behavior and overall experience that the students had with the text. For our course redesign program professors can use open library licensed or compiled selection of articles and chapters as long as the class is zero cost to students. And I'm going to in these next few slides briefly go over some of our findings. Let's take a look at the slide perceptions of quality. Overall, almost all county students who took the survey were satisfied with the quality of the zero cost text with 91.2% saying yes they are satisfied with the quality and an additional 6.65% not sure, only 2.14% said no. So comparing the quality just under 50% said the zero cost book was the same quality as a traditionally published text with 37% saying it was better 12.7% we're not sure and about 3% said the book was not as good. So overall, county students are satisfied with the quality and see zero cost alternatives as the same or better than traditionally published text. Students were asked to rate some specific elements of the zero cost text on a scale of one to four with one being strongly disagree and for being strongly agree. There was also a not applicable option. For all of the rated book characteristics, the county students rated the books between agree and strongly agree on the four point scale with the highest rating for the writing in the text is clear and understandable, and the lowest rating for the textbook is visually appealing. We asked several questions about the impact on studying study habits and grades. When asked if the text made a difference to their studies, only 1.7% said it made a negative difference with two thirds of students 66% saying it made a positive difference. About 20% of students said the book did not make a difference in studies with the final 12.5% not sure. So comparing reading in the class with the zero cost text other courses, 54% of students reported completing the same amount of readings as they do for other classes with 31.6% saying they read more in the class with the zero cost text and 14% saying they read less. For the question, did using a zero cost text make a difference to your grades 45% of pounding students said yes it made a positive difference with less than 2% saying it made a negative difference. 45% reported no impact on grades and the final 18.5% said they aren't sure. Throughout the survey we had a few open ended comment box boxes, and one was focused on comments related to the impact of the zero cost text on studies and grades. The comments that are represented by these quotes were, one, the importance of having the text on the first day of class, quote, I was able to start reading my book sooner because I didn't have to wait until I could afford to buy it, which helped my grades. And two, the impact of stress on studies and grades, quote, I believe stress is an important factor when studying and being worried about pain for something in order to pass a class is pretty stressful. I think not having that worry improved my studying and academic performance. While we have a lot more data and quotes we could share. I will end with this slide on overall experience 99% of pounding students taking the survey had either a positive or neutral experience with the zero cost text with 1.0% reporting and negative one 1.07% reporting and negative one. Basically, cost savings was named by many students as a reason for their experience, but other reasons were mentioned as well. Here are two quotes from students. This first quote comes from a class for the professor compiled selections of materials rather than using a textbook at all. Quote, I loved not having a textbook it saved me so much money and the variety of resources kept me more engaged and quote, I enjoyed using the book because one, it was free to had information and diagrams that I found helpful and three, the digital format was easy to navigate and use. I also want to briefly address the limitations of the survey. First, the lack of demographic data. In order to keep our survey short and because many pony classes are very small. It was difficult to collect much demographic data without compromising anonymity. We opted instead to collect very little data or very little demographic information on survey participants. We have an age range and preferred language but nothing more. This limits our ability to drill down into the data to determine if some groups of students are impacted differently than others to our distribution method. We relied on faculty to send out surveys to their students which resulted in some uneven distribution. Some professors really encouraged the survey and got close to 100% response rates while others didn't send it at all or had only a handful of students complete the survey. Three self reporting bias in particular the questions related to studying grades and reading habits. And finally the impact of COVID-19. It's unclear if and how the pandemic impacted our findings but it seems important to mention that much of this data was collected during the COVID-19 pandemic which has been a time of high stress and change for many students taking the survey. This could have impacted which students chose to take the survey and how they responded. This is Erin. So to sum up and offer a conclusion from our student perception survey. We found that almost all students are happy to use OER and other zero cost materials in their courses. Students we surveyed largely found that materials are of sufficient quality. And according to those students zero cost materials either help their studies and grades or made no difference at all in that area. And in their overall experience with free textbooks, it was good or neutral. One student even commented a request that professors quote make every class have a zero cost textbook please. So thank you for attending our session please do feel free to contact us. If you have any questions and do check out our data plan. If you'd like to adapt this survey for your own context. Thank you.