Photo by Caleb Jones on Unsplash
Prior to becoming a MALAT student, I never heard of open pedagogy or open educational resources (OER). However, by watching the virtual symposium lectures of Paul Stacey, Dave Cormier and Catherine Cronin and reading literature by David Wiley and Tony Bates, my curiosity was sparked.
According to Bates (2015), [o]pen educational resources (OER) are another recent development in open education. These are digital educational materials freely available over the Internet that can be downloaded by instructors (or students) without charge, and if necessary adapted or amended, under a Creative Commons license that provides protections for the creators of the material (p. 34). As we found, OER come in a variety of online formats which are accessible on laptops, tablets and phones. One of the formats that I’m very interested in exploring is open textbooks.
“College textbook prices have skyrocketed in recent years, threatening the affordability and accessibility of higher education” (Allen, 2010, p. 4). Will open textbooks be the solution to this issue? Allen (2010) suggests that open textbooks come in a variety of affordable and accessible formats that can be a cost savings to students. Some of the questions that I would like to answer are:
- Do students prefer open textbooks to e-textbooks and to traditional printed textbooks?
- Are the learning outcomes better with open textbooks than printed textbooks?
- Do open textbooks engage students more than printed?
- Are there limitations to open textbooks?
- Are there barriers in using open textbooks in education?
The use of open textbooks has not been implemented in the dental hygiene program at our college. I’m uncertain if my questions have focused my inquiry. Therefore, I request your feedback and advice.
Thank you!
References:
Allen, N. (2010). A Cover to Cover Solution: How Open Textbooks are the Path to Textbook Affordability. In Wiley, D. (2014). An open education reader. Retrieved from https://openedreader.org/
Bates, A.W. (2015). Teaching in a digital age: Guidelines for designing teaching and learning. Vancouver BC: Tony Bates Associates Ltd. ISBN: 978-0-9952692-1-7
These are all good questions, and in particular the first two questions are increasingly the focus of OER – open textbook research. Such research resources as the OER Hub http://oerhub.net/ and UNESCO’s OER Knowledge Cloud https://oerknowledgecloud.org/lang_page/welcome are good starting places. Also some good research can be found in open access journals such as Open Praxis and the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. There should be enough to support a good dive into one of these questions.
Hi Irwin,
Thank you so much for the links! From our one-on-one discussion as well as some discussions with colleagues, I have decided to focus my inquiry on the first 2 questions (open textbook vs. print and e-textbook and learning outcomes using open textbook vs. print). I have started exploring the OER Knowledge Cloud and have uncovered some good articles there. I have noticed that some of the studies have focused on both topics of my inquiry simultaneously. Particularly, in one article by Jhangiani, Dastur, Le Grand, & Penner. (2018), one of their findings was “students assigned the open textbook, in either print or digital formats, performed either no differently or better on their course exams than students assigned the commercial textbook” (p. 14). Another significant finding from Jhangiani et. al (2018) was due to the “effectiveness of the research examples and the clarity of the writing”, students found the print format of open textbooks better than the commercial textbooks (p. 15). I am really looking forward into diving deeper into this! 🙂
Cheers!
Joyce
Reference:
Jhangiani, R. S., Dastur, F. N., Le Grand, R., & Penner, K. (2018). As Good or Better than Commercial Textbooks: Students’ Perceptions and Outcomes from Using Open Digital and Open Print Textbooks. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 9 (1). https://doi.org/10.5206/cjsotl-rcacea.2018.1.5.
Hi Joyce, your blog sparked my interest because I share the concern you raised about the rising costs of textbooks for students. Our faculty has had conversations about this issue many times and we have explored the open text route for our program. The difficulties we have encountered is the unavailability of open texts for our academic field. We could find next to no open texts suitable for the subject areas we are teaching. Our search to find cheaper solutions for textbooks offered brought us to textbooks that are available electronically. However, we have discovered students prefer the printed version over the electronic one. This brought us to the possible creation of our own course packages, which is time consuming but makes the text provided for each course much cheaper than the purchase of several textbooks. I am interested to see what your research uncovers.
Hi Anita,
Thank you for sharing your experiences with this topic!
I have noticed that for the dental hygiene field, there is only one open textbook available. However, I did notice that there are open textbooks for certain courses that could be adapted to our program. But the big issue would be having the time to do it.
You made a very good point about how students prefer printed version over the electronic one. I came across an article which discussed the use of e-textbooks in a dental hygiene program. Pratt, Green, Rasmussen, Lai and Compton (2019) found that students relied on PowerPoint handouts for studying and did not use the e-textbook for more than a month due to eyestrain, technical issues and the inability to use the e-textbooks as they would with print textbooks (highlight and make notes in the margins). But, I did find that open textbooks could be printed. I’m looking forward to finding out more in my inquiry!
Cheers!
Joyce
Reference:
Pratt, R.S., Green, J.L., Rasmussen, K., Lai, H., & Compton, S.M. (2019). Dental hygiene students and faculty attitudes and utilization of a single source electronic textbook platform. International Journal of Dental Hygiene. 00:1-12.