OER Student Success Data

[Brandon Board]

Hi CCCOER Community,

I hope you’re all having a great week!  I am currently looking into how institutions track and evaluate the impact of OER on student academic outcomes.  If your institution is collecting student success data related to OER, could you share a bit about what you've found? Of course the recent AAC&U report speaks to some of this, but I'm looking for more localized data. Specifically, I am curious about:

Metrics & Data Points Collected:

• Course Success Rates: Are you seeing significant performance shifts in OER vs. non-OER sections?
• DFW Rates: Have you observed changes in Drop, Fail, or Withdrawal rates?
• Retention & Persistence: Do OER courses correlate with higher term-to-term or year-to-year persistence?
• Time to Completion & Course Load: Do textbook savings lead students to enroll in more credit hours per semester or complete programs faster?

Administrative Impact & Reception:

• How are administrators and leadership receiving this data at your institution?
• Has student success data influenced executive buy-in, sustainable funding, policy changes, or further scaling of OER initiatives?

If you have any reports, articles, or insights you’d be open to sharing, I would love to see them!

Thank you,

Brandon

Brandon Board, MLIS | Digital Services Coordinator

Waubonsee Community College Libraries

Sugar Grove, Illinois

630.466.6643

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[Laura Dunn]

Hi Brandon, 

OFAR isn't a college or university—we're a professional development program that works with faculty across California to help them make their teaching more equitable, and we collect data on the impact of OER and other open practices on equity, student success, and outcomes. You can read our year 5 research report here. 

We also track many other metrics, but hopefully you find a bit of what you're looking for in our reports. We also track administrator buy-in, but since the last five years have been yearly research reports, we don't have data on long-term impact on policy—but that's a great idea! 

Best

Laura

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Program Director | Open for Antiracism | OEglobal.org 

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[Amy Hofer]

Hi Brandon, 

These are really tricky research questions in my experience! I'm glad you're already using the new AAC&U report both for their excellent new data and for their lit review. 

Open Oregon Educational Resources generally reports on student savings but we have done some research that gets at the questions you have. 

Research with RMC on our federal OER grant found a positive student outcomes impact, with the biggest impact in courses where instructors implemented instructional design best practices with the support of an ID. More info: Strong Design, Strong Outcomes: Instructional Design Support Makes a Difference.

A study with two colleagues found that enrollment in courses with the no-cost/low-cost schedule designation in Oregon did not lead to faster completion rates, which was also found in Diaz Solodukhin et al. Note that our designation is about cost rather than open license status. More info: Students Vote with their Feet for Lower-Cost Courses.

FYI, 

Amy  

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Amy Hofer (she/her)

Statewide Open Education Program Director

Open Oregon Educational Resources

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[Corrie Bergeron]

Amy,

Spot on. I suspect that tickling out the specific contribution of OER alone would be tricky indeed.

Courses that use OER are probably more likely than others to have had a significant amount of faculty and/or instructional design attention to pacing, chunking, assessment strategy, accessibility, etc., etc., - all those things that we know have a positive impact on student engagement and learning, ergo retention and all the rest.  Versus just taking a textbook package (as good as it might be) and plugging it into an LMS with no customization or "wrapper" of the instructor's personality apparent. 

If you invested the same amount of TLC into structuring a course that used publisher-created content but subsidized the cost to students, I'd bet a dollar against a stale donut that you'd get near-identical outcomes to an OER course. 

As Clark noted decade ago, it's the bread, not the delivery truck. 

Corrie Bergeron, M.Ed.

Instructional Designer & Learning Systems Administrator

 Quality Matters Certified Peer Reviewer
Instructional Technologies Division

Lakeland Community College

cber...@lakelandcc.edu

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From: 'Amy Hofer' via CCCOER Community Email <cccoer-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2026 10:57 AM
To: Brandon Board <bbo...@waubonsee.edu>
Cc: 'Allison Brown' via CCCOER Community Email <cccoer-...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [CCCOER] OER Student Success Data

 

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