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/