Research Article
“Impact of OER Material during COVID-19: Survey of Students Enrolled in City University of New York (CUNY) Kingsborough Community College”
Author(s): Dorina Tila*
Business Department, CUNY Kingsborough Community College
Dorina Tila*
City University of New York (CUNY), Kingsborough Community College, Department of Business, 2001 Oriental Boulevard, Brooklyn, New York 11235. Email: Dorina.Tila@kbcc.cuny.edu
Citation: Tila D (2023) Impact of OER Material during COVID-19: Survey of Students Enrolled in City University of New York (CUNY) Kingsborough Community College. American J Sci Edu Re: AJSER-128.
Copyright: © 2023 Tila D. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Received Date: August 20, 2023
Accepted Date: September 01, 2023
Published Date: September 08, 2023
Abstract
What role did COVID-19 play in the students’ benefits and challenges of open educational resources (OER)? Motivated by decades of research in helping students to access and use course materials to improve their learning by offering substitutes to the highly priced and exponentially increasing costs of commercially printed textbooks, this paper takes another dive to understand students’ challenges and benefits of OERs during the pandemic. Based on an anonymous survey distributed to students enrolled in CUNY Kingsborough Community College (N=1,175 participants) during Fall 2020, the two top benefits reported were cost savings and access. Some challenges identified in the open and closed ended questions include the organization of the material to fit the course design of the faculty. Unlike prior surveys, students reported difficulty with accessing the OER material, but they continue recommending OER material at similar rates as prior to the pandemic.
Keywords: Open Educational Resources, zero textbook cost, ZTC