Reading: Matching Information to Paragraphs: Question 8

A Open educational resources, commonly abbreviated OER, are teaching and learning materials (textbooks, lecture notes, problem sets, even entire courses) that are made available to the public at no cost and, unlike conventionally published textbooks, can legally be copied, adapted and redistributed by anyone rather than remaining the exclusive property of a publisher.

B The financial pressure that OER is intended to relieve is well documented: as commercial textbook prices have climbed over recent decades, a significant proportion of students report skipping the purchase of an assigned textbook altogether or delaying it until after the first assessment, a decision that can leave them without the core material during the weeks when it matters most.

C The modern movement is often traced to the early 2000s, when a well-known research university's decision to publish the lecture notes and materials for its entire course catalogue online, free of charge, is widely credited with popularising the underlying idea and prompting other institutions to consider similar open-access publishing.

D What legally distinguishes an open resource from a merely free one is its licence: most OER are released under a Creative Commons licence, a family of standardised terms that explicitly permit others to copy, remix and redistribute a work, sometimes even for commercial purposes, provided that conditions such as crediting the original author are met.

E Despite the potential savings for students, adoption among teaching staff has been uneven, and surveys of faculty frequently identify the time required to locate, evaluate and adapt suitable open materials, together with lingering doubts about whether freely available resources match the editorial polish of established commercial textbooks, as the main obstacles to wider uptake.

F Where OER has been adopted at scale, particularly in large introductory courses, several institutional studies have reported modestly higher pass rates and lower withdrawal rates, an effect researchers partly attribute to every enrolled student having the core material in hand from the very first day of term, rather than only those who could immediately afford to buy it.

Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A–F, for each statement. NB You may use any letter more than once.

1. A definition of the type of licence that permits materials to be freely reused and modified.
2. An account of a common negative consequence for students unable to afford a required textbook.
3. A reference to an early institutional initiative widely credited with popularising a term.
4. An explanation of why some instructors are reluctant to switch to freely available materials.
5. A description of what distinguishes openly licensed materials from traditionally published ones.
6. A claim that removing cost barriers has been linked to improved outcomes in some courses.