2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Development and adoption of open educational resources (OERs) have grown in recent years. Yet, we lack research on the performance of students in courses using OER. The objective of this research is to assess the impact of an OER platform for teaching building information modeling (BIM) course, taught to architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) students at {..}. This study examined the performance of AEC students in a BIM course before and after adopting the OER platform developed and also a combined OER and flipped classroom strategy. Hypothesis tests were performed to compare the averages of students’ project and overall grades in three semesters that the BIM course was offered without the OER, with the OER, and with combined OER with flipped classroom. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) tests were utilized to assess the potential main and interaction effects of the OER and control variables (i.e., GPA, major, employment status, family background, field experience, effort level, and past BIM experience) on the students’ overall or project grades. Results show the averages of project and overall grades were improved in both semesters that the OER platform was provided and students performed even better when OER was used to enable flipped classroom strategy. The results of t-tests indicate that these improvements in the average project and overall grades have been statistically significant. The results of ANOVA and ANCOVA tests show that the OER platform was a significant factor in improving average overall and project grades even after considering the effects of the control variables (i.e., GPA, major, family background, field experience, effort level, and past BIM experience). It is expected that OER is effective in helping students to learn more effectively.