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More College Students Are Downloading Course Materials for Free—Or Skipping Them Entirely

Edsurge

Use of free course materials among college students is up, with 22 percent downloading at least one such resource during the spring 2019 semester, according to research published Wednesday by the National Association of College Stores. The percent of students who reported downloading free materials has increased each semester since.

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Of OER and Platforms: Five Years Later

Edsurge

This material was created by David Wiley and you can download, edit and share it for free under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Five years ago, in an essay called “ 2017: RIP OER? ” I pondered whether this year would be the end of OER. There’s certainly no one funding next gen OER.

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Seven advantages of using digital textbooks in schools

Hapara

Your school or district can also use digital textbooks that are part of open educational resource (OER) repositories. There are several high-quality OER sites that feature digital textbooks for K-12. If they are downloaded to devices to use offline, they can be quickly downloaded again with the new update.

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Can a For-Profit, Venture-Backed Company Keep OER Free—and Be Financially Sustainable?

Edsurge

New and traditional publishers are trying to offer alternatives such as open educational resources (OER), or freely downloadable and adaptable learning materials. But some providers of OER still ask for fees in return, and that has advocates concerned. In 2017, Top Hat nabbed $7.5 Edward Watson.

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Can OER improve learning outcomes?

IT Bill

The June issue of the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL) is dedicated to Open Educational Resources (OER). Several of the studies focus specifically on OER and student learning outcomes. Certainly one of the main advantages of adopting OER is lowering the costs to students.

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Are K-12 Curriculum Tools a Smart Investment? What Investors and Our Data Say

Edsurge

In conversations with edtech investors, some reported that the K-12 market has seen an influx of instructional content, particularly in the form of open educational resources (OERs). OERs are openly-licensed educational materials that can be downloaded, modified and shared with others to help support student learning.

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It’s 2020: Have Digital Learning Innovations Trends Changed?

Edsurge

In early 2017, organizations that have focused on digital learning came together to better leverage their strengths and capacities for a common goal: improving student success. The results of the environmental scan are openly licensed and made available through the Every Learner Everywhere knowledge hub (SOLVE): Click here to download.

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