A community college confronts the costs of open educational resources

ab1630's bookmarks 2018-07-25

Summary:

"The news releases regularly roll in to the email inbox these days with headlines like "College X has saved students $5 million by adopting open educational resources." Not only have these initiatives made a higher education more affordable, the colleges and universities note, but students who might have forgone buying an expensive textbook in the past are actually getting and using the OER content, ideally contributing to their academic success. Amid those successes, rarely mentioned is the reality that in many cases, the institution itself is picking up the costs that were formally borne by the students, through some combination of direct subsidies to instructors to create the content and a loss of textbook revenue to a campus store, among other costs. A session this week at the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Business Officers addressed that issue head-on, in a way that would be unusual at a conference of OER advocates. It's not that the session took a skeptical view of OER -- far from it. The featured institution, the Pierce College District in Washington State, has fully embraced the use of open resources for affordability and efficacy, among other reasons. But the enthusiasm of the community college's open education project manager, Quill West, was balanced by the even-keeled acknowledgment of Choi Halladay, the district's vice president of administrative services, that OER comes at a price to the institution -- though a price very much worth paying, he said...."

Link:

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/07/25/community-college-confronts-costs-open-educational-resources

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » ab1630's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.oer oa.education oa.textbooks oa.moocs oa.hei oa.students oa.prices oa.access oa.usa oa.costs oa.metrics oa.budgets oa.faculty oa.authors oa.books oa.courseware

Date tagged:

07/25/2018, 17:32

Date published:

07/25/2018, 13:32