Improving Access, Affordability, and Achievement in Maryland with Open Educational Resources
Abstract
Replacing costly textbooks with open educational resources (OER) shows promise to reduce students' cost of college attendance significantly while maintaining, or perhaps even improving, learning outcomes. The Maryland Open Source Textbook (M.O.S.T) initiative began in 2013 to support faculty across 2- and 4-year Maryland public higher education institutions in adopting freely available, openly licensed instructional materials for their courses. While M.O.S.T. is being led out of the University System of Maryland's William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation, faculty and staff at both 2-year and 4-year institutions across Maryland have participated in M.O.S.T.'s programs.
Since its launch, M.O.S.T. has encouraged faculty to evaluate available OER and consider adopting them for use in a course. The Kirwan Center has been working with Lumen Learning (lumenlearning.com) to provide participating faculty with the support they need to locate materials and incorporate them effectively into their classes. Since Spring 2014, 89 courses at 19 institutions across Maryland switched to OER, saving students 141 per course on average or approximately 3.4 million cumulatively. In addition to those direct benefits, indirect benefits of OER adoption have included: - Student Access: Ensuring all students have full access to all learning materials from day 1 of class to help them be successful. - Faculty Control of Learning Materials: Giving faculty full control over the amount, order, and content of learning materials. - Faculty Collaboration: Collaboration with like-minded faculty also working with OER. Over half of faculty have reported that they have spent, on average, about the same amount of time preparing to teach their course and another 44% reported that they have spent more time, but once that work was done, faculty were generally positive about their experiences working with the open materials, with 91% of faculty somewhat to very likely to use OER materials in future courses. But while the M.O.S.T. initiative have seen impressive results, with Maryland 2-year and 4-year students spending over $223 million annually on textbooks, the savings realized to date is just a drop in the bucket when compared to the potential OERs have for reducing the cost of education. It is time to move to large-scale implementation.- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMED51I0733B
- Keywords:
-
- 0810 Post-secondary education;
- EDUCATIONDE: 0820 Curriculum and laboratory design;
- EDUCATIONDE: 0845 Instructional tools;
- EDUCATIONDE: 0850 Geoscience education research;
- EDUCATION