As the costs continue to rise in higher education it is important to explore new Open Education Resources to use in today’s classrooms. We have added 2 new OERs to our blog.  To view a more visit the NCCC eLearning Faculty Support Center OER page.

Boundless
Boundless improves education for millions of students and educators through educational resources powered by cloud technology. With content created by a community of educators, who work side-by-side with subject-matter experts, Boundless provides ready-to-use online content, study materials, and assessment items to make teaching more efficient and learning more effective. The company has raised nearly $10 million in venture funding and reaches more than 3 million students and educators.

OpenStax
It’s innovation in education. And the time is right. OpenStax College offers students free textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for most courses. These are peer-reviewed texts written by professional content developers. Adopt a book today for a turnkey classroom solution or modify it to suit your teaching approach. Free online and low-cost in print, OpenStax College books are built for today’s student budgets.

We are excited to share in the celebration with SUNY and increase awareness about the benefits of Open Education Resources.  With that in mind we are sharing an email and resource list they provided to us for sharing.

SUNY is excited to celebrate Open Education Week (March 9-March 13, 2015) and raise awareness about the benefits of Open Educational Resources (OERs). These open resources, which can include full courses, course materials, lesson plans, open textbooks, videos, and more, help save our students money and increase student access, completion, and success. In fact, research suggests that 60% of college students do not purchase all of their required textbooks due to cost. At Tompkins Cortland Community College from 2011-2013, 698 students saved an estimated $69,800 on textbooks costs and there was an 26.7% increase in passing grades accompanied by a 15% decrease in withdrawal rates after an open textbook and other OERs were adopted into a Psychology course.  There are many exciting OER related initiatives throughout the system, some of which are highlighted below. Please feel free to share with your colleagues and join the discussion on Twitter by tweeting to @OpenSUNY and using the hashtag #OER.

We listed all of the resources that SUNY shared with us and found some additional OER resources to add to our blog. Please view our Open Education Resources section for more information.

NCCC faculty can also join me for a hands-on workshops to explore a variety of OER that you can make use of in your courses.  See our eLearning event schedule for dates/times.

Lisa Dubuc, Coordinator of Electronic Learning