The results of this Babson Research Group survey Freeing the Textbook: Educational Resources in U.S. Higher Education, 2018 (48 page PDF) are not entirely consistent (professors claim to be deeply concerned about the price of textbooks, but most of them use commercial textbooks, with 98 percent of the texts used 'copyrighted' (ie., all rights reserved). But the suggestion that the survey finds 'problems' and 'issues with quality' in OER is a misrepresentation of what the study actually says; neither of these show up in the results at all (with the exception of one short comment on page 31).
The more serious result of this survey that should have been reported are these (quoted):
- Faculty are clearly already making extensive use of Revise and Remix, even with the current copyrighted textbooks.
- Given the sometimes vague understanding of the OER... we have to assume that there is some level of over-reporting in these figures of OER use.
I think these results underline a view I have expressed in the past: faculty don't care about open educational resources, and even if they say they have concerns about textbook prices, they don't care enough to do anything about them.
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