Articles

Just One Textbook?: Student Perceptions of and Preferences for Open and Affordable Educational Resources

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Abstract

In this study, we set out to assess undergraduate students’ perceptions of and preferences for open and affordable educational resources (OAER) in courses where their faculty member had recently adopted them as part of a campus library-led grant. A survey was sent to students at the completion of their semester in which the OAER were used, which yielded 223 responses over three years of surveying. Like many other studies before it, ours showed that students greatly appreciated the lack of cost associated with open and affordable materials. They also overwhelmingly perceived them as the same or better quality as commercial course materials they had used in other courses. However, student responses around their perceptions of and preferences for access and format yielded results that indicate that, when it comes to OAER, students are nearly as concerned about how they access their course materials and what format they are in as they are about how expensive their materials will be to purchase. In this article, we’ll discuss our analysis of these responses regarding students’ ranking of factors instructors should consider when assigning materials and their preferences and perceptions of how they access their course materials and what format those materials are provided in.

Keywords: Open Education Resources, course materials, assessment, user experience, perception

How to Cite:

Nelson, E. & Riehman-Murphy, C., (2022) “Just One Textbook?: Student Perceptions of and Preferences for Open and Affordable Educational Resources”, Journal of Open Educational Resources in Higher Education 1(1), 240-263. doi: https://doi.org/10.13001/joerhe.v1i1.7173

Rights: © 2022 Elizabeth Nelson and Christina Riehman-Murphy. Published under a CC-BY 4.0 license.