Understanding students' satisfaction with Open Educational Resources as course materials

In order to ameliorate rising textbook costs, The Ohio State University Libraries and colleagues in the Office of Distance Education and E-Learning have launched a program to offer grants that support faculty in replacing... [ view full abstract ]

In order to ameliorate rising textbook costs, The Ohio State University Libraries and colleagues in the Office of Distance Education and E-Learning have launched a program to offer grants that support faculty in replacing their traditional textbooks with high-quality digital open educational resources (OER) or library materials. Under the first cohort, faculty adopted affordable digital materials for 12 courses in Fall 2016, and a second cohort is working on a similar number this year. The projects in the first two cohorts are projected to save students nearly $1.3 million annually.

In this paper, we introduce a new survey instrument, which assesses the quality of OER designed under our program. Existing surveys of OER quality and satisfaction rely on a few holistic satisfaction items, which are not designed to identify specific areas for improvement; or include only items on general textbook quality, which are not attentive to the unique qualities of OER. In this paper, we will present the new survey instrument and its results from the Fall 2016 cohort, including reliability and validity metrics, and discuss how the survey can be usefully applied to other OER programs’ improvement efforts.