For announcement October 29, 2021 meet the winner in another category of the Open Practices Awards.
Open Practices are collective behaviors and techniques that open up access to educational opportunities. These practices promote and support the use of open educational resources, technologies, and social networks to facilitate collaborative and flexible teaching and learning.
Open Research
A research study or initiative about open education and/or related areas. A study or initiative that helps advance our understanding and demonstrate effectiveness related to challenges of the Open Education movement.
The winner is…
Textbook Broke: Textbook Affordability as a Social Justice Issue
https://jime.open.ac.uk/articles/10.5334/jime.549/
CSU Channel Islands, United States
This research study shows the disproportionately negative impact of textbook costs on historically underserved college students, thus, confirming textbook affordability as a social justice issue.
In light of rising textbook prices, open education resources (OER) have been shown to decrease non-tuition costs, while simultaneously increasing academic access, student performance, and time-to-graduation rates. Yet very little research to date has explored OER’s specific impact on those who are presumed to benefit most from this potential: historically underserved students. This reality has left a significant gap of understanding in the current body of literature, resulting in calls for more empirically based examinations of OER through a social justice lens. For each of these reasons, this study explored the impact of OER and textbook pricing among racial/ethnic minority students, low-income students, and first-generation college students at a four-year Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in Southern California.
Drawing upon more than 700 undergraduate surveys, our univariate, bivariate and multivariate results revealed textbook costs to be a substantial barrier for most students. However, those barriers were even more significant among historically underserved college students; thus, confirming textbook affordability as a redistributive justice issue, and positing OER as a potential avenue for realizing a more socially just college experience.
Congratulations!
Please reply and extend your congratulations to the winner or ask them any questions about their award winning efforts.