Opening the Textbook: #OER in U.S. Higher Education, 2015-16 Babson Survey Research Group

[Cable Green]

Hot off the press:

http://onlinelearningsurvey.com/oer.html

http://onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/openingthetextbook2016.pdf

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Cable Green, PhD
Director of Open Education
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[Cable Green]

More detail from our friend, Nicole:


From: Nicole Allen <nic...@sparcopen.org>
Date: Tue, Jul 26, 2016 at 7:15 AM
Subject: [OER-advocacy] New OER report released by Babson

Dear all,

Today the Babson Survey Research Group has released a new report on OER in U.S. higher education. The report is based on a survey of 3,000 faculty and follows Babson’s 2014 national report. 

Overall the report shows that OER awareness among faculty is improving, but is still below a majority. It also finds that open textbooks have gained a small but measurable foothold in the market, but challenges toward greater adoption remain. These results are heartening that OER is on the rise in U.S. higher education, though they also underscores that there’s much more work to do — and the importance of efforts by projects like OpenStax, Open Textbook Network, Lumen, librarians, and so many others to continue raise awareness and support faculty. 

Links:

• Report: http://onlinelearningsurvey.com/oer.html
• Press Release: http://www.babson.edu/news-events/babson-news/Pages/faculty-survey-open-education-resources-low-but-improving.aspx

First stories:

• Chronicle: http://chronicle.com/article/More-Professors-Know-About/237252
• IHE: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/26/study-finds-use-open-educational-resources-rise-introductory-courses

Major findings:

• Faculty awareness of OER has increased, with 25% of faculty reporting that they were “Aware” or “Very Aware” of open educational resources, up from 20% last year. About a third (34%) claimed some level of awareness.
• 5.3% of courses are using open textbooks.
• OpenStax textbooks are adopted at a rate of 10% among large enrollment undergraduate introductory courses.
• The most common factor cited by faculty when selecting educational resources was the cost to the students. After cost, the next most common was the comprehensiveness of the resource, followed by how easy it was to find.
• The barriers to adopting OER most often cited by faculty are that “there are not enough resources for my subject” (49%), it is “too hard to find what I need” (48%) and “there is no comprehensive catalog of resources” (45%).