Concerned about the rising cost of course materials for students, Brookdale Community College biology professor Carey A. Fox decided to try something different this past spring in her Life Sciences class.
Instead of using a traditional textbook, which costs $124 in its loose-leaf format, Fox decided to search for suitable open educational resources, or OER, so that students could access the course materials for free.
She discovered Concepts of Biology, a textbook offered through OpenStax College, a nonprofit based at Rice University that seeks to make “open-source” textbooks available to students for free online. Fox decided to pilot the textbook this past spring for two online sections of the course that she teaches.
The effort evidently paid off.
Fox reports a 10 percent increase in successful completion of the course over the previous semester in both sections. “And the reason was students actually got the book,” says Matt Reed, vice president for learning at Brookdale Community College, a Lincroft, New Jersey-based institution where 40 percent of the students are Pell Grant eligible.
Low-income option
A growing number of colleges are beginning to turn to OER. This June, for example, Achieving the Dream (ATD) — a community college reform network — announced the “largest initiative of its kind” to develop degree programs using high-quality OER materials.
