1.
Free Resources for Better
Student Retention
Greg Hardin
Information Literacy Coordinator
University of North Texas

2.
Why
“Open Education Fact Sheet” by SPARC is licensed under CC BY 3.0

3.
Benefits
Student Benefits
● Creative use of OERs offer tangible benefits in student success
and retention, resulting in measurable performance increases.
● Students who used open textbooks tended to have higher grades
and lower withdrawal rates.
● Cost Savings.
Faculty Benefits
● Re-professionalizing teaching.
● Pedagogical Freedom.

4.
OPEN

5.
High Impact Practices
● First-Year Experiences
● Common Intellectual Experiences
● Learning Communities
● Writing-Intensive Courses
● Collaborative Assignments and Projects
● Undergraduate Research
● Diversity/Global Learning
● Service Learning, Community-Based Learning
● Internships
● Capstone Courses and Projects
https://www.aacu.org/resources/high-impact-practices

6.
Library Resources

7.
Textbooks
● Open Textbook Library
● OER Commons
● Open Stax

8.
Open
● MERLOT
● CORA
● PRIMO
● OER Commons
● ACRL Sandbox

9.
Books
● Mainly digitized from print
○ HathiTrust Digital Library
○ Project Gutenberg
● New OA books
○ Directory of Open Access
Books (scholarly)
■ OAPEN Library
● Open Library (popular; mix of
new & old books)
● Open Access journals -- DOAJ
● Repositories
○ OpenDOAR
● OA academic databases like
PubMed Central
● Google Scholar
Articles

10.
Evaluation
● Discoverability
● Accessibility
● Authority
● Quality
● Appropriateness
● Usability
● Currency

11.
Thank You!
Greg Hardin, M.L.S.
Associate Librarian
Information Literacy Coordinator
University of North Texas Libraries
Greg.Hardin@unt.edu
@ghardin