OER Seminar – Final reflection

  1. The textbooks can bring challenges to students by a mismatch between target students’ affordability and the price of the textbooks. Besides, entry-level students may find a textbook challenging and hard to navigate if the textbook uses sophisticated language to explain terms and concepts.
  2. By lowering the price of printed textbooks and providing free e-textbook and other online instructional resources, OER makes textbooks affordable. Also, students could have a free rein to choose the textbook that matches their levels and most effectively facilitates their understanding when they go through the OER textbook pool – and they can do it free of change.
  3. Although it is good to encourage students to evaluate the textbooks they use, and authors and publishers working on improving the quality of their textbooks could never acquire the readers and users’ point of view without asking students opinion, I don’t think students would have the time and motive to evaluate their textbook systematically. If the evaluation process is mandatory, the evaluation will be burdensome for students and it becomes less possible to expect thoughtfulness from students.
  4. If I were a professor choosing a textbook for students, the quality of its review questions, the examples it uses (whether they are updated and related to our daily life), and its clarity would be three of my major concerns.
  5. One of the most important things I learned during the OER seminar was the importance of a textbook’s visual design. If there are two books containing the same contents, most students would prefer the one with larger font size and more figures and tables.

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