Four University of Northern Colorado faculty members helped approximately 450 students enrolled in their fall 2019 classes save a combined $63,775 in textbook fees by adopting open educational resources (OER) into their curriculum after the Colorado Department of Higher Education (CDHE) awarded grants for the project.

The $2,000 grant award per faculty member was used to offset the time and expense required to adopt or adapt OER into a course and redesign an undergraduate course to align with open pedagogy principles.

The four faculty members who received and used the $2,000 OER grant and transformed their courses by using free and openly-licensed resources, such as open textbooks, videos, images, lesson plans and test banks, were: Molly Desjardins, associate professor of English; Bailie Peterson, assistant professor of Philosophy; Cassendra Bergstrom, assistant professor of Psychological Sciences; and Angela Steele, senior lecturer of Mathematical Sciences.

Student savings were calculated by multiplying the number of students in the four courses by the cost of the book the students would have had to buy if OER were not used. 

The four $2,000 award recipients will present a poster on their experiences with OER at the 2020 CETL Teaching & Assessment Fair on March 24.

As part of the grant, other UNC faculty members received a $200 award to review an open textbook. The purpose of the $200 award was to introduce faculty members to OER and encourage them to adopt or adapt the open textbook they chose to review. The faculty members chosen for this grant were Bergstrom, Aaron Henrichsen, assistant professor of Finance; Junpyo Park, assistant professor of Economics; and Chelsie Romulo, assistant professor of Geography, GIS, and Sustainability.

Jen Mayer, associate professor of University Libraries and a recent appointee to the state’s OER Council, said textbook and supporting course material costs are a real barrier to students. As more courses utilize OER, students will have a choice about their costs.

In a 2018 University Libraries student survey with 921 total responses, 51% of students reported that they received no financial-aid assistance in buying textbooks. According to a report on OER by CDHE, $550,000 of awarded grant money allowed 23,958 students in Colorado to be enrolled in courses with OER materials, with a projected $3.4 million cost-savings for students. The state report on student savings was compiled by Lobna Alsrraj, a recent UNC graduate in Political Science and an intern at CDHE’s OER Policy and Research.

“I wish students knew about the benefits of OER,” Alsrraj said. “It’s not just monetary benefits; the benefit goes beyond cost, which is really cool. At UNC, I hope students are more aware of open education and more faculty adopt open education in their classrooms. I really think it’s important for educators and faculty members to adopt it and that students are aware of and advocate for OER.”

Mayer said OER also gives faculty more freedom to enhance their curriculum, the ability to bring in more diverse voices, involve students with the creation of assignments and create more interactive assignments that are openly accessible globally for future students and faculty to build on, revise, remix and reuse.

UNC was also recently awarded a second CDHE OER grant. Mayer and Oscar Levin, associate professor of Mathematical Sciences, submitted UNC’s grant application for the second round of CDHE funding. This grant will allow UNC faculty to leverage OER for more courses, and build on the work of the first OER grant. The UNC Provost has also pledged $10,000 to support faculty, which augments the benefits of the grant.

Read the latest blog post about OER on the University Libraries website. More information about the OER Committee.

— Written by Mackenzie Eldred