The OER Knowledge Cloud: Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Adopting Open Educational Resources In An Introductory American Government Course

Evaluating the effectiveness of adopting open educational resources in an introductory American government course

Lawrence, Christopher N. and Lester, Julie A.

Published	February 2018
Journal	Journal of Political Science Education Volume 14, Issue 4, Pages 555-566
Publisher	Routledge
Country	United States, North America

ABSTRACT

In this article, we present findings from a grant-funded initiative to replace traditional, proprietary textbooks with an open content textbook under a Creative Commons license in the introductory American government course (POLS 1101) at Middle Georgia State University. We find that the use of an open content textbook led to somewhat negative effects on student learning outcomes and student course satisfaction, although the associated lower textbook cost increased textbook accessibility to students. We conclude with some suggestions to those adopting textbooks in this course and to the wider discipline regarding measures that may lead to more unequivocally positive outcomes than those experienced in this study.

Keywords

American government · general education · Open Educational Resources · textbooks

ISSN	1551-2177
Refereed	Yes
Rights	Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC© 2018 Christopher N. Lawrence and Julie A. Lester This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.
DOI	10.1080/15512169.2017.1422739
Export options	BibTex · EndNote · Tagged XML · Google Scholar

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