{"id":870,"date":"2018-05-04T10:59:34","date_gmt":"2018-05-04T17:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ecampus.oregonstate.edu\/news\/?p=870"},"modified":"2025-07-21T12:33:46","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T19:33:46","slug":"kc-walsh-oer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ecampus.oregonstate.edu\/news\/kc-walsh-oer\/","title":{"rendered":"The future of education is wide open"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Oregon

Oregon State senior physics instructor K.C. Walsh makes extensive use of digital learning materials, including hundreds of his dynamic video lectures. Here he is writing on a lightboard<\/a>, which is like a transparent whiteboard. The videos are flipped during post-production so the text and images are displayed correctly to student viewers. (Photos by Lucas Paris)<\/p><\/div>\n

Using free course materials and big data, OSU physics instructor eliminates textbook costs and improves student success<\/h2>\n

Fact 1:<\/strong> A college education costs money. It is arguably the most worthwhile investment a person can make in a lifetime.<\/p>\n

Fact 2:<\/strong> A college education costs too much<\/em> money. Many students cannot afford to buy certain required course materials, often to the detriment of their class performance and academic careers.<\/p>\n

K.C. Walsh, a senior instructor of physics at Oregon State University, long ago realized how burdensome the financial situation is for students. In sports terms, the textbook publishing companies are winning, and it\u2019s a blowout. Financially, the students continually come up short.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why Walsh decided to change the game, which brings us to Fact 3:<\/strong> A required physics textbook that costs $70 today can cost $0 next term.<\/p>\n

As Oregon State increasingly embraces the open educational resource (OER) movement, faculty members such as Walsh give learners widespread access to no-cost and low-cost course materials. This is achieved most commonly when OSU faculty adopt, adapt or author open textbooks \u2013 those that are freely available online \u2013 through a partnership with OSU’s Open Educational Resources Unit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dozens of open textbooks are in use or in development at OSU, and the cost savings has been substantial; faculty members who assigned an open textbook last year helped students save more than $1.5 million.<\/p>\n

Making college more affordable is central to Walsh\u2019s ongoing efforts to implement no-cost materials in his introductory physics course series. After all, the traditional publisher\u2019s textbook for introductory physics comes with a hefty price tag of $70 for the roughly 1,000 students who take the class each year.<\/p>\n

\"Oregon

K.C. Walsh holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Oregon State, and he was a double major in engineering physics and physics during his OSU undergraduate studies.<\/p><\/div>\n

Do the math: $70 x 1,000 students = yikes.<\/p>\n

But replacing a costly textbook with a free one barely scratches the surface of Walsh\u2019s OER efforts. Through two learning innovation grants and a $30,000 grant from the OER Unit, he and a team of undergraduate and graduate students have spent years creating and refining Project BoxSand<\/a> \u2013 a comprehensive, research-driven collection of online course materials for PH 201, 202 and 203.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoxSand is not just an open textbook. It\u2019s an open resource research project.\u00a0It\u2019s a whole suite of resources that actually has multiple textbooks inside of it along with other forms of media and content organization,\u201d Walsh says. \u201cHaving all of the information and modes of delivery laid out in a menu-driven system, where moving through the content is quick and seamless, really sets it apart from any of the resources currently available.\u201d<\/p>\n

The BoxSand website features thousands of videos and other OER that promote active learning in Walsh\u2019s flipped classroom model \u2013 one that requires students to watch pre-lecture videos and suggests they prepare for class by engaging with other site content. This helps students form a robust knowledge base, and in class they can work through familiar problem sets and participate in other activities with their classmates.<\/p>\n

Walsh and his assistants have cultivated such a vast trove of digital resources that one could argue a traditional publisher\u2019s textbook is no longer needed to convey the course content. Walsh, however, leaves nothing up for debate.<\/p>\n

“<\/span>We found that students didn\u2019t use the traditional textbook very much. We have evidence that we could go to an open source textbook, and it wouldn\u2019t hurt the students. In fact, students were overwhelmingly supportive when we made that decision.”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He is an educator who places immense value in the day-to-day insights from students and those around him, but he also is guided by evidence-based practices.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything we\u2019re doing is driven by IRB-approved research. We track students\u2019 interactions with these resources to try to understand what the best resources are and what the best path through those resources is instead of thinking we know the answers,\u201d Walsh says.<\/p>\n

And what did the data reveal with regard to the publisher\u2019s textbook?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found that students didn\u2019t use the traditional textbook very much,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have evidence that we could go to an open source textbook, and it wouldn\u2019t hurt the students. In fact, students were overwhelmingly supportive when we made that decision (in fall 2017).\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year Walsh and his team collected nearly three million data points from student use of BoxSand. There were more than one million clicks on homework problems and other resources on the site, thus providing a characterization of how students engage with these no-cost course materials.<\/p>\n

\n

Project BoxSand<\/h2>\n

Oregon State faculty and staff can use their ONID login credentials for complete access to BoxSand. Give it a try \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Additionally, students made it clear in a set of questionnaires that they overwhelmingly preferred BoxSand to a costly textbook. More importantly, it\u2019s also clear that the website \u2013 plus Walsh\u2019s other tweaks to course structure and content delivery \u2013 have generated substantially higher student success rates in the PH 201, 202 and 203 sequence.<\/p>\n

Since the 2013-14 academic year (when Walsh began incorporating digital resources):<\/p>\n