The Impact of OER

So what? What’s really the impact of using OER? Is it just all about saving students money? Is it about sticking it to the textbook publishers? Is it about improving and having more control over your teaching pedagogy? Well, yes. All of this and more are why we use OER, but how do we measure the impact of it? Which pieces have more weight to them?

In one article I read, David Wiley walks us through how he came up with “S3”—the formula for calculating the impact of OER (or anything else, actually).

The three S’s stand for success, scale, and savings, and the infographic I created below defines, explains, and shows how to measure each. Once the three S's are computed, they can then be put into the S3 Impact formula to measure their impact.

If every institution used this formula to measure their impact in using OER, we could definitely get more useful data as OER continues to be implemented. It could also help institutions clearly see where they need to focus their improvement—on student success, on reaching more students with OER, or on saving students money. Finally, it prevents institutions from focusing solely on the OER’s cost benefit at the expense of the other two. All three are needed to truly make an impact.