OER Textbooks

I've written about open educational resources before (here and here), but I haven't come across a lot of research into the effectiveness of OER materials. It's an emerging field, but it's nice to see some quality research starting to come out as more and more schools adopt OER materials on a large enough scale to give us good sample sizes. This study comes from Robinson et al. (2014) and looks at a district in Utah using OER textbooks for secondary science. The authors found that students (n=3,780) did the same or better with OER textbooks as with Major Publisher textbooks.

It makes me wonder how quickly this trend might spread, with districts everywhere tightening belts and moving toward digital content delivery--why not have state DOEs develop their own materials and leave the publishing companies out of the equation?

And I love that Sage is sharing this article in an open access format. It's like they get it!