Abstract
This article examines the impact of Zero Cost Textbooks (ZCB) courses on two key factors of students success: pass rates and completion rates. We examine three years of data at Houston Community College, ending with the first year of their implementation of a ZCB program. Following the hypothesis, we suppose that students who would not otherwise be able to purchase traditional textbooks will have higher pass rates and completion rates in ZCB courses. We use Pell recipient status and ethnicity as proxies for socio-economically disadvantaged students, targeting those populations where the access hypothesis will have the greatest impact. We isolate faculty who taught both ZCB and non-ZCB courses during the period under review and conduct a post-hoc analysis, using mixed effects logistic regression, to identify interactions between student and course characteristics and success metrics. We find that HCC's ZCB program had a statistically significant positive effect on pass rates for all students, but no effect on completion. We find a trend to suggest the ZCB program may improve success among Black students, but only a statistically significant positive effect among Asian students, and no interaction with Pell recipient status. These results are not well explained by the access hypothesis; they suggest the need for further research.
Highlights
The adoption and promotion of open textbooks and Open Educational Resources (OER) has become one of the key tools colleges and universities deploy to reduce the cost of higher education
The present study focuses on the outcomes or efficacy of using free and open textbooks by examining student success measures, with specific focus on student populations who may have lacked access to commercial materials because of the cost
This study examined the impact of Zero Cost Books on student learning outcomes, course completion rates and pass rates
Summary
The adoption and promotion of open textbooks and Open Educational Resources (OER) has become one of the key tools colleges and universities deploy to reduce the cost of higher education. There may be pedagogical or personal reasons to pursue one type of free and open resource over another All of these strategies can broadly be classed in terms of their use of free and open instructional materials, resulting in zero additional costs to students for textbooks. We suspect that by reducing the cost of textbooks to zero, faculty using Zero Cost Books improve the access that all students have to their instructional materials, resulting in higher completion and success rates
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