For the first day of the new year, we watched the OpenEd 2021 session entitled “Schedule Designation and Enrollment Research” with Amy Hofer from Open Oregon Educational Resources, Shauna McNulty, faculty at Umpqua Community College, and Jennifer Lantrip, Health Sciences Student Success Librarian at Pacific University. Their slides were made available at: tinyurl.com/designationstudyopened21 Their team studied the low-cost and no-cost course designations and their effect(s) on student enrollment choices and perceptions. This study was supported by Open Oregon Educational Resources. Oregon House Bill (HB) 2871 was passed in 2015 and requires community colleges and public universities with no cost or low-cost course materials to be designated at the time of registration to make this information more transparent. The purpose of the study was to determine whether no-cost/low-cost schedule designations had an effect on student enrollment behavior. The team described the different stakeholders and audiences that are interested in the results of this study. Hofer described the methodology followed for the study: they requested data from 15 out of the 17 community colleges and 6 out of the 7 universities in Oregon prior to Fall 2019. The data requested was for the top ten transfer courses in the subjects of writing, math, economics… among other subjects. McNulty reviewed the data analysis using ANOVA analyses. On average, they learned that they had more students in the no-cost designation courses. After the ANOVA identified a difference, they used a Games-Howell post hoc test because they did not have equality of variances in their sample. I learned a new statistical test! The second set of analyses McNulty described was to analyze the load or number of credits taken by students enrolled in low and no-cost courses. Students in the low-cost or no-cost designation had fewer credits per term according to their analyses. McNulty mentioned that for future studies it will be important to consider course costs and other factors. For the third research question, they aimed to evaluate if there are statistically significant differences among Pell grant eligibility, age, sex/gender groups in relation to course enrollment, course fill rate, or enrollment intensity. For this, they used Chi-Squared analyses of observed versus expected counts to determine if the low- or no-cost options differ from the courses without the designation. They found trends but no difference in the percent enrollment across categories. For the no-cost designation, they observed fewer Hispanic or Latinx and international students, but this was “more pronounced in smaller classes.” The no-cost designation “has fewer Black and Asian students.” More females were observed in the low or no-cost designation courses. McNulty described the privacy considerations and data security procedures they used: they used password-protected spreadsheets from institutions dropped in a digital drop-box. Passwords were shared by phone but not by email. This is worth keeping in mind for future studies. McNulty encouraged others to replicate this research in other states and mentioned using SPSS. I had not thought about open-related studies based on registration data! While I don’t know about SPSS and lack the statistical and research methodology expertise McNulty and the team had, I can appreciate the importance of this type of study and how replicating it at other institutions would be helpful. I hope tho learn more about this and other initiatives to evaluate low and no-cost course designations.
