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On the Relationship Between Adopting OER and Improving Student Outcomes

Iterating Toward Openness

This article started out with my being bothered by the fact that ‘OER adoption reliably saves students money but does not reliably improve their outcomes.’ ’ For many years OER advocates have told faculty, “When you adopt OER your students save money and get the same or better outcomes!”

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OER is Growing at Religious Colleges, But Raises Unique Challenges

Edsurge

Communications librarian Kristen Hoffman oversees much of the OER work at Seattle Pacific University, a Christian university in Washington. Pricey textbooks and access codes are a national challenge. The campus as a whole is still not behind OER,” says Michael Whitchurch, digital learning services librarian BYU.

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?A Playbook to Go Open: 5 Steps to Adopting OER

Edsurge

As momentum for digital learning builds, some districts—80 percent according to the 2017 Consortium for School Networking’s (CoSN) K12 IT Leadership Survey Report —are using open educational resources (OER), which the U.S. But while many benefits of OER are visible on the surface, we must notice the fine print.

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Adopting Open Educational Resources Can Help Students. But It Takes Time, Money and Effort.

Edsurge

Students who took multiple community college courses that used only free or low-cost OER materials earned more credits over time than their peers who took classes that used traditional course materials such as textbooks, according to a new study. Free Isn’t Free For students, OER texts are typically free, or nearly free.

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OPEN UP RESOURCES RELEASES ITS FIRST FREE OER CURRICULUM

eSchool News

It is the first curriculum made openly available by Open Up Resources, which was founded to develop new high-quality alternatives to curricula offered by traditional publishers, and to increase equity in education by distributing these materials freely, as OER.

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Improving the OpenEd Conference – Survey and Interview Highlights and Data

Iterating Toward Openness

Two months ago I invited people to respond to a survey regarding the Open Education Conference and how it can be improved. 139 people responded to the survey, meaning the response rate was (at most) 6.2%. I promised to share with the community what I learned from the surveys and interviews. Have an HBCU host OpenEd.

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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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