ILP #2

For my ILP #2, I had the pleasure of hearing David Wiley the keynote speaker talk about the research of OER technology, and it was eye-opening. It turns out that the rising textbook prices in college courses actually keeps more than 45% of students from registering for a specific class because the textbook costs too much. Not only that but only 21% of students said that financial aid covers all their textbook costs. Because of this lack of funding, 67% of students who take a course don't buy the textbook, 48% take fewer courses if they do buy the textbooks, 26% drop the course, and 21% withdraw from the course. Of the students that take a course without buying the textbook 38% of students earning a poor grade, and 20% of these students fail the course. In light of all of this when the students do buy their textbooks on average 2.6 of those textbooks they never use!

To combat this detrimental influence of costly textbooks blocking access of knowledge to potential learners, OER technology (Open Educational Resources) is here to remedy this. OER is a free database of open documents, modules, powerpoints, and papers that are available for download for educational purposes for free. Now it is free but the person who made the OER still is given credit for the document, but what separates OER from merely replacing textbooks is that it allows one to modify the content of the OER to make it more applicable to the students their teaching. In fact, research shows that student's equipped with OER textbooks earned higher grades in classes where the student's still used traditional textbooks.

 to browse OER content:
https://www.oercommons.org/
https://www.floridashines.org/orange-grove

to look at the research that supports OER:
https://lumenlearning.com/research/