A Survey I’d Like to See: A different question on OER. - Matt Reed, Inside Higher Ed

There’s plenty to chew on in the latest IHE poll about college faculty attitudes about technology, OER, and assessment. (Least surprising finding: skepticism about assessment remains strong.) But at least in the OER section, it strikes me that we need to ask a different question. Anecdotally, several faculty here who’ve adopted OER for their classes have reported pleasant surprise at finding that more students actually do the reading.  That tends to result in better class discussions, for obvious reasons, as well as better student performance on tests and papers. They reported that the difference stems mostly from two factors, one obvious and one surprising.  The obvious one was the elimination of cost as a barrier. The surprising one, at least for me, was that having everything in easy electronic form -- without any DRM hampering access, and sufficiently platform-agnostic that it could be read on almost any device -- made it easier for students to sneak a couple of minutes of reading at a time at work. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/survey-i%E2%80%99d-see