Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Freely available, open education resources provide opportunities for college students to strengthen their critical thinking and quantitative literacy skills using sophisticated active-learning strategies.

In a 2017 Wakefield market research survey, investigators found 85 percent of college students elected not to buy one or more required hard copy course textbooks. Students also are turning more frequently to their mobile devices to complete their coursework. 

Their reasons included the high price of textbooks and the fact that they did not value textbooks as learning tools. Instead, students are enticed by online course content, which can be accessed anywhere on campuses equipped with modern network infrastructures.

More and more instructors are choosing open educational resources over traditional textbooks, a survey of more than 2,700 faculty members reveals.

The "Opening the Textbook" survey, published by the Babson Survey Research Group today, reports that the number of faculty members at two- and four-year institutions using OER as textbooks has nearly doubled in the last year -- from 5 percent in 2015-16 to 9 percent in 2016-17.

Awareness of OER -- openly licensed and freely accessible teaching and learning materials -- has also increased. Twenty-nine percent of faculty described themselves as "aware" or "very aware" of OER this year, up from 25 percent last year and 20 percent the year before. The proportion that reported they had never heard of OER fell from 66 percent in 2014-15 to 56 percent this year.