E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Christina Hendricks (of UBC) made a great overview of literature on OpenTextBooks. For the ordening she used the “COUP” framework developed by the Open Education Group: Cost, Outcomes, Use, and Perceptions:

• Cost: The adoption of Open Educational Resources can impact a range of financial and cost metrics for students and institutions.
• Outcomes: Given the folk wisdom that “you get what you pay for,” some individuals and organizations worry that student learning will necessarily suffer when students use freely available, openly licensed resources instead of $200 textbooks.
• Usage: The permissions provided by open licenses allow students to use OER in a range of novel ways – for example, updating a history textbook based on recent events. Likewise, the permissions provided by open licenses allow teachers to engage in new pedagogical practices.
• Perceptions: What do faculty and students think about, and feel toward, Open Educational Resources?

More and more research is showing the positive effects that Open Text Books has. We are starting to reach the point that an instructor has to explain why he is using a commercial textbook.

Image credit: CC-BY Opensource.com