Open Access and Open Education both stress the importance of making knowledge available for individuals around the world, regardless of wealth or status. These are not wholly separate ideas, nor are they incompatible practices.

A primary motivation for using Open Educational Resources (OERs) is to increase access by reducing students’ financial burden. While this was a motivating factor in this study, the authors also were interested in understanding OER’s impact on student learning. Therefore, this study describes the adaption process for an OER textbook used in a junior-level undergraduate electricity course and evaluates this OER’s effectiveness to increase student access and improve learning over the baseline textbook. A quasi-experimental, non-equivalent design collected exam scores, and self-reported survey responses from n=144 students in a comparison (non-adapted OER; n=83) and treatment (adapted OER; n=61) group was used. Based on Student’s t, Kolmogorov Smirnov, and Chi-square (χ2) tests, the adapted OER was effective at improving access and learning while also saving enrolled students an average of $8,000 per year, collectively. A brief background of OER databases, materials, and methods used to develop the OER and the intellectual contribution of the newly adapted OER, and lessons learned are included in the study.

Open Access and Open Education both stress the importance of making knowledge available for individuals around the world, regardless of wealth or status.

Understanding faculty perceptions about OER is a vital step for those hoping to support the growth of OER initiatives at higher education institutions. Faculty members’ perceptions of OER often influence their interest in adopting open educational practices and their willingness to seek out support from campus staff. To explore how faculty members across their four institutions feel about open education, the authors developed a survey to discover faculty members’ (1) perspectives on, (2) barriers to, and (3) beliefs about OER use. The survey corroborated past research findings that faculty often have difficulty finding time to locate and evaluate OER, and that there is a need among the academic community to better compensate educators for their work developing open content. More notably, the authors discovered that the faculty who are aware of library support services and other institutional OER initiatives are more engaged in open educational practices and willing to explore OER, regardless of their prior experience with open education.