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Introduction

The purpose of this guidebook is to provide ideas for how individual
faculty members and those who support them (e.g., librarians, instructional designers, etc.) can research the effect of their adoption of open educational resources (OER). Clearly educational research is a challenging enterprise; this guidebook is not meant to replace the substantive courses and experiences that a PhD in educational research would provide. Rather,
our hope is to provide some straightforward suggestions that could be implemented by OER adopters so as to help them identify what has happened as a result of their OER adoption.

Hilton (2016) summarizes and critiques several OER studies that have been done and may be a helpful additional resource for designing your own research study. More up-to-date summaries of OER impact research can be found at http://openedgroup.org/review. In addition, the appendix of this document provides a refresher on basic principles of educational research design.

Many questions about the impacts of OER adoption can be addressed through the COUP Framework (Bliss, Robinson, Hilton and Wiley,
2013). This framework focuses on the issues of Cost, Outcomes, Use, and Perceptions. In the following sections we discuss how you could study each of these four aspects of OER impact in your research on OER adoption. We provide varying levels of rigor so that you can determine which approach would best meet your needs.