Tonight I watched the Open Ed 2021 session entitled “Undergraduate Student Experience With A Campus-Wide Transition To Free Resources” and presented by Eric Werth, Katherine Williams, and Bang Huang from the University of Pikeville. I have watched sessions by Werth and Williams before, and I was curious about their initiative at the University of Pikeville. Their study objectives were to learn about how students were impacted by the transition to free resources. The University of Pikeville is a four-year liberal arts institution with approximately 1,200 undergraduate and graduate students, according to Williams. In the fall of 2020, the institution shifted to 8-week terms. They matched student responses from points throughout the year (after one term, one semester, and one year) to address the question “does student impression of engagement or performance change over time?” The respondent demographics were predominantly female and white with ~60-70% and ~80%, respectively. Students responded on an 11-point scale, with 11 being the highest rating. Responses did vary over time. For example, student impressions of free-to-student resources changed during the year with a mean of 6.8, though the difference in scores was not statistically significant. They shared a lot of data, and I wish I could view their plots to understand the trends better. Werth mentioned that they did analyze student GPA. Prior to the use of free materials, the GPA of respondents was about 3.43 and there was little difference in GPA. Huang mentioned that they could conclude that students “generally had high expectations for the impact of free materials on their engagement with those materials and overall course performance.” There was not much difference in GPA, for example. Nevertheless, Huang noted that most studies analyze the student experience in one class or academic degree. The study at the University of Pikeville was an example of a larger scale implementation and its impact on students. Huang explained that the high expectations of students for free materials were generally met. Werth shared some of the “pitfalls to implementation” that included lack of awareness of available resources, some classes did not have relevant OER at the time, some were not sure how to distribute OER. Williams discussed how the institution mitigated instructor concerns through training and funding for ebooks and support. Werth concluded by explaining that this work has been submitted for peer review, and I am curious about the details of their survey and how they were able to do longitudinal studies.
