OER’s are significant in terms of cost-savings to the student, but there are questions surrounding the quality of these resources, as well as whether students prefer OER or traditional textbooks. Many of the OER’s available today are often peer-reviewed, but some platforms allow users to alter or customize the content, like OpenStax Connexions (CNX). When open content is altered or rearranged by an instructor, then it becomes essential for the instructor to determine whether those changes are beneficial or detrimental to student learning. Using the OpenStax Connexions (CNX) OER educational content repository and content management system, two customized OER’s were developed and used as the only textbooks for two introductory chemistry courses at a community college in rural Oregon. The author of this study examined students’ cost savings, performance, use, and perception. Student scores for the OER-only courses were compared with scores from courses taught with traditional textbooks. The results of a student’s t-test suggest that there was a significant difference between scores, in favor of those taught with an OER textbook. Because of small sample sizes, Cohen’s d was also calculated and indicated that, in most cases, the effect size was not large enough to be considered significant. Although it is difficult to say that learning was improved in light of the small effect sizes, it seems reasonable to suggest that learning was not adversely affected by the adoption of customized OERs. Lastly, an analysis of clickstream data from the learning management system and data obtained from an end of course survey seem to indicate that student usage and perception of OER does not differ significantly with traditional textbooks.

Keywords

custom OER · OpenStax · OpenStax Connexions (CNX) · Student cost savings · student perception · student performance · student usage