As public funding for higher education decreases and the cost to students to attend college increases, universities are searching for strategies that save students money while also increasing their chances for success. Using free online textbooks is one such strategy, and the OpenStax College initiative at Rice University is one of the most widely ...
This paper presents the results of collaborative research between OpenStax College, who have published 16 open textbooks to date, and the OER Research Hub, a Hewlett funded open research project examining the impact of open educational resources (OER) on learning and teaching. The paper focuses primarily on the results of two surveys that were con...
This is a review of Openstax: Microbiology, a textbook that has been put together by a collaborative effort between Openstax College and the American Society for Microbiology. The text will be offered in a variety of formats including web-based, PDF, and hardcopy, and is set for publication Spring 2016.Review of: OpenStax: Microbiology. Nina Parke...
The high cost of tuition and textbooks can have a negative impact on potential students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Open Educational Resources (OER) offers students a way to save educational costs while utilizing high-quality open textbooks. Up until now, there have been few studies focused on a specific provider of open textbooks. This s...
About This BookWelcome to Introduction to Sociology, an OpenStax College resource created with several goals inmind: accessibility, affordability, customization, and student engagement—all while encouraginglearners toward high levels of learning. Instructors and students alike will find that this textbook offersa strong foundation in sociology. It ...
This paper outlines the feasibility of replacing a midterm assessment with a student-created digital media project. We examine the benefits of a peer review process for student-created pedagogy, the effectiveness of the student-generated digital media, and self-evaluations as a replacement for accepted forms of assessment in terms of: learning, ass...
Published in Publishing Research Quarterly
About 20 million students are currently enrolled in colleges and universities across the country taking courses that, the majority of the time, require some sort of publisher-provided print and/or digital course materials.’ Historically, these have been provided by traditional publishing companies such as Pearson, Cengage, and McGraw-Hill, but with...
Published in Physics Education
This project produced an online astronomy course based on the free, online OpenStax textbook. When this project was conceived, about a year before the Covid-19 pandemic, the authors had no idea that in a short period of time, most college and university classes would be online. This abrupt change in modalities of courses, from traditional, face-to-...
Conducted in conjunction with an institute on open textbook adaptation, this study compares textbook evaluations from practicing K-12 classroom teachers (n = 30) on three different types of textbooks utilized in their contexts: copyright-restricted, open, and open/adapted. Copyright-restricted textbooks consisted of those textbooks already in use b...
