EOR by Subject Matter

 At this point, I have enough evidence to fully support OER and want to join the efforts to contribute to the cause. Although, to be fair, I was already convinced of the value of OER and my interest in joining these efforts way before I started to read articles showing the impact of these resources on students' educational experiences and outcomes. 

I have always believed that education should be free for everyone and that there should be systems that ensured that a lack of financial resources, or lack of abundance of them, does not equate absence of access to knowledge. I know, of course, that this is a very hard thing to achieve, and that it is a complex thing to orchestrate. 

With that said, during this last week of reading many articles on OER and efficacy, I am left wanting to learn more about OER and some of the subject matters that I am more interested in. I am curious about OER in literature or and literary translation courses. Some years ago, I helped reviewing and editing a Top Hat online Spanish textbook to be used in all Spanish 321 courses at BYU (there are usually more than 70 sections every semester). This textbook could be edited as the semester progressed, but that there were a lot of things that were set and not intended to be changed. Among those texts that were not to be changed were literary pieces. Due to budget restrictions, a lot of texts were chosen from the open domain and they were literary pieces from a hundered years or longer ago. Usually not the most engaging reading, unless you are an advanced student with a great command of your second language and a nieche interest in older literature. Some of the readings were more contemporary, but there weren't many of those because it was too expensive to pay for the rights to use them. 

This is just background information for the questions that I am left with. What is the role of OER in a literature classroom, especially one that is geared towards contemporary literature? What are ways in which OER could be used in these contexts without depriving students of a rich literary experience and education?

Outputs, Outcomes, and Impact

I have been thinking about the COUP, the Open Education Group framework to measure the impact of open educational resources. COUP stands for Cost, Outcomes, Usage, Perceptions. I think these are good things to look at, but I wanted to run them through the Ballard Center for Social Impact at BYU and the model they use to make sure that we differenciate between outputs, outcomes, and impact. 

Come with me while I non-expertly break them apart and see if the COUP framework is the best way to measure actual impact in the life of learners using open educational resources.

The Ballard Center provides these differentiations: 

• Outputs are sepcifically what you do (for example, EdTech books produced, total number of courses at BYU that only use EdTech books, etc.) 
• Outcomes are the changes that people see in their lives because of the outputs mentioned above. 
• Impact refers to the degree to which the outcomes correlate to the outputs 

According to these distinctions that the BC makes, I wonder if COUP is measuring actual impact. From what I understand, Cost is just an output. What COUP describes as Outcomes seems to be in accordance with the BC's description of them. Usage seems to be another example of output. And perceptions seem to be nothing more than the opinion or attitudes that people have on the resources available, which may influence usage, but does not necessarily correlate to impact (or does it?)

I need to keep studying this and actually seeing if there are scholarly articles that use data to show the correlation between the changes cited under Outcomes and the presence of educational resources in courses/institutions. 

In the meantime, the Ballard Center has a three-module mini course that teaches about their model to do good better. The third module is the one that talks specifically about how to measure impact. 

MINICOURSE
https://www.dogoodbetter.byu.edu/