Open Education 2013

The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources is a community of over 200 colleges promoting the adoption of OER to enhance teaching and learning and expand access to high-quality education. Through monthly professional development webinars and in-person workshops for faculty and staff, consortium members share best practices to find and adopt high-quality open educational resources to reduce costs to students and improve student success. In addition to measuring the savings, member colleges are surveying students and faculty to determine learning outcomes in courses and departments where OER has replaced the traditional instructional materials.

Hear from OER leaders at Bluegrass Community and Technical College, Hartnell College, Houston Community College, Scottsdale College, and Tacoma College who have developed OER faculty adopter communities on their campuses to increase student success through lower costs and expanded access.

Bluegrass Community and Technical College in Kentucky has saved students over $100, 000 in textbooks costs over the last two years through adoption of open educational resources. Primary savings have been in the Geography department but other disciplines are also active. In addition to creating web pages to help faculty find OER more easily, an OER Steering Committee is being formed to further OER adoption throughout the college.

Hartnell College in California has multiple disciplines including Criminal Justice that utilize open and affordable educational resources. The college has recently developed tools to measure student retention and outcomes by course and semester. They will share information on how the use of OER impacts student success.

The math department at Scottsdale College in Arizona started adopting OER in 2010 and within three years converted its entire math curriculum through pre-calculus to use open educational resources. This has resulted in savings to students of over $250,000 per year. Survey feedback has indicated a majority of students believe the OER-based materials are as good or better than traditional textbooks they have used.

Tacoma Community College in Washington started the two-year ?Liberate $250,000? OER Student Savings project in fall of 2012 and has already exceeded that savings in the first year. The goal of the project is to create a clearinghouse of materials that instructors can choose from so they don?t have to be dependent on the textbook for each course. Some instructors may still choose to use textbooks; it will depend on the requirements of the each course and instructor.