St. Clair County Community College remains committed to its open education resources (OER) efforts, which have now helped 7,655 students potentially save more than $1.1 million since 2016.
OER include freely accessible, openly licensed text, media and other digital assets that can increase student learning and success while reducing the cost of higher education.
Since SC4 began tracking in Fall 2016, faculty members teaching 393 sections of 39 different courses in biology, business, criminal justice, earth science, English, health education, history, math, philosophy, physics courses and more have adopted either open educational resources or alternatives to textbooks, accounting for the savings. Faculty members teaching 59 sections of 19 courses contributed to the savings in the fall 2019 semester alone.
Additionally, many SC4 faculty members have received pilot awards for their OER innovation, including Biology Instructor Brandis Hubbard, who was recognized for a series of videos she developed for one of her courses.
“Embracing the creation and use of OER gives us the opportunity to encourage collaboration and creativity while also addressing textbook affordability to ensure our students have access to the resources they need to be successful,” said SC4 Dean of Library Services and Academic Technology Kendra Lake. “As the support for OER continues to grow across the state and the nation, being an integral part of the larger OER community will continue to benefit our students.”
Other SC4 OER efforts include:
- Participation in the Michigan Colleges Online OER Commons hub, an OER discovery and curation tool that’s free for faculty members.
- An OER team consisting of faculty, librarians and staff which aims to encourage and support open pedagogy across the college.
- Active involvement and participation in the annual MI OER Summit. SC4 welcomed more than 200 practitioners and advocates as host to the summit in 2018. This year, Adjunct History Instructor Ryan Johnson and Lake will present their experiences at the Oct. 18 event at Delta College. Many more SC4 faculty and staff will attend.
- A permanent OER textbook display available to faculty in the college’s library.
- A custom OER Library Research Guide, featuring a curated list of OER resources by discipline, open access content search with a list of OER repositories, links to open education research and much more.
