Tidewater CC saving costs, boosting student success with OER

"Since 2013, more than 10,000 Tidewater Community College students have completed courses with free open educational resources. Besides saving about $1 million in textbook and material costs, administrators and faculty members say that Tidewater's OER initiative has had an added benefit -- higher course retention and grades.

According to a 2016 study published in the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning that Tidewater business professor Linda Williams co-authored with David Wiley, co-founder and chief academic officer of Lumen Learning, 9.9 percent of Tidewater students withdrew from face-to-face courses that did not use OER versus 8.1 percent of students who withdrew from face-to-face courses that used OER. The study also concluded that students in OER-based classes were more likely to perform better, with 68 percent of students in face-to-face non-OER courses receiving a grade of C or higher and 73.7 percent of students in face-to-face OER-based courses receiving a grade of C or higher."