Name: OER: The Twelfth High Impact Practice
Start: 2026-10-07T16:55:00-0400
End: 2026-10-07T17:25:00-0400

All sessions are available online except round tables, special activities, and workshops.

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT

ID: 33896

At the culmination of a two-year, multi-institutional study that included almost 700,000 student records for analysis, AAC&U has added OER to its list of High Impact Practices (HIPs). HIPs are well-established practices that lead to positive student outcomes, namely for students historically underserved in higher education. It is our hope that in naming OER as a HIP, institutional leaders will pay attention to the positive impacts OER can bring to their campuses and organize to institutionalize OER in new and exciting ways. We seek to advance movement on UN Sustainability Goal 4: Quality Education to ensure all learners have access to quality learning materials.In this presentation, we will summarize the key findings of our study, focusing on course withdrawal rates, course grades, and time to completion. We found that context matters very much in predicting the rate of withdrawal in courses with OER, but in most cases, withdrawal rates were lower in courses that used OER, especially at doctoral institutions, and we note key differences in withdrawal rates when OER are merely adopted versus revised, remixed, or created. Most notably, in regards to course grades, the number of A’s increased in every context where OER were used versus not. We also noted decreases in the time to credential, especially at community colleges for students that took more than four years to finish their credential–for students that took 6 or more OER courses during their course of study, they finished their credentials on average almost a year faster than those that took zero OER courses. Additionally we will highlight findings from our instructor survey, representing the voices of over 200 individual instructors that transitioned to OER over the course of the study period. The survey captured their motivations and experiences in implementation, as well as their perceptions on how well their OER implementation went based on those motivations and support structures. We also examined how teaching practices changed after using OER.We will also provide recommendations for leveraging OER as a HIP on your campuses to advance OER initiatives and programs as an equity strategy to help all students, but especially those that have been historically underserved by higher education. AAC&U as an organization advocates to democratize higher education as a public good, and the addition of OER to the current list of HIPs is a strategic choice to support OER in higher education as not only an affordability strategy for students, but to help students persist and succeed in their education.

Speakers

C. Edward Watson

Vice President for Digital Innovation, American Association of Colleges & Universities

Dr. C. Edward Watson is the Vice President for Digital Innovation. He provides leadership for the association’s national and state-level advocacy to advance quality in undergraduate student learning. This includes programming and a scholarly agenda that focuses on general education... Read More →

Jessica Chittum

Assistant Vice President for Curricular and Pedagogical Innovation and Director of VALUE Operations, American Association of Colleges & Universities

Jessica Chittum, PhD, is the Assistant Vice President for Curricular and Pedagogical Innovation and Director of VALUE Operations in the Office of Curricular, Pedagogical, and Digital Innovation (OCPDI) at AAC&U. In this role, Jessica engages in project management, research, professional... Read More →

Heather Miceli

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, American Association of Colleges & Universities

Heather Miceli is the Assistant Director of the Institute on Open Educational Resources and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at AAC&U in the Office of Curricular, Pedagogical, and Digital Innovation. Her current work at AAC&U is focused on OER adoption as an equity strategy for student... Read More →

Beth Perkins

Assistant Director for Research and Assessment, American Association of Colleges & Universities

Beth Perkins, PhD, is the Assistant Director for Research and Assessment in the Office of Curricular, Pedagogical, and Digital Innovation at AAC&U. She provides methodological, analytical, logistical, and implementation support to the AAC&U VALUE Scoring Collaborative. In addition... Read More →

Wednesday October 7, 2026 4:55pm - 5:25pm EDT
7 DR5 MIT Samberg Conference Center, 50 Memorial Drive, Cambridge MA 02139 USA

Presentation

Speaker Modality Hybrid
Track (Re)Inventing our Shared Global Vision Together

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OEGlobal 2026

C. Edward Watson

Jessica Chittum

Heather Miceli

Beth Perkins

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Success you have shared X tickets.

OEGlobal 2026

C. Edward Watson

Jessica Chittum

Heather Miceli

Beth Perkins

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