Breaking the Stigma: Faculty and Student Perceptions and Experiences with OER

Abstract

Over the last few years, Affordable Learning Georgia, an initiative of the University System of Georgia, has been releasing Textbook Transformation Grants to promote creation and adoption of open educational resources across USG institutions. Many of the faculty at Kennesaw State University, located just outside Atlanta, Georgia, have taken advantage of these grants to create, revise, remix, and reuse OER in their online, hybrid, and face-to-face courses in place of expensive textbooks. As of March 2018, 26 teams at KSU had been awarded Textbook Transformation Grants, and those projects have a combined estimated annual impact of $3.5 million saved among an estimated 13,467 students each year, and counting. This presentation and paper will outline the various open textbooks created, resources gathered, and classes transformed by ALG grants at KSU. It will also explore the student perceptions of these projects based on survey data; grade and withdrawal statistics in comparison to the same classes with expensive textbooks; and faculty perceptions and experiences with their created, reused, and remixed OER within their classes.