Ten NMC faculty will be pioneers in a new effort to bring down the cost of college by using freely available online educational resources instead of traditional textbooks for their classes in the fall. The NMC Foundation’s Innovation Grant will fund stipends in the form of a new iPad or $500.
The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has been gaining ground in community colleges and other institutions of higher learning as the cost of college continues to soar. Eliminating the cost of textbooks—an average of $1,200 per student every year—can substantially reduce the amount students must pay or borrow to attend college. OERs are defined by the Hewlett Foundation as “teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others.” They can be used to replace expensive proprietary textbooks and save students hundreds of dollars per semester.
The following NMC instructors will be teaching one of their courses using only OERs this fall. This will save NMC students approximately $60,000 in textbook costs.
- Lisa Blackford
- Tom Gordon
- Gary Howe
- Marilyn Jaquish
- Deborah Menchaca
- Susan Odgers
- Deb Pharo
- Elizabeth Sonnabend
- Brian Sweeney
- Sarah Wangler
The grant team members, Tina Ulrich and Joelle Hannert from the Osterlin Library, Mark DeLonge and Jan Oliver from Educational Media Technologies, and Kristen Salathiel and Jeff Straw, will survey students and faculty at the end of the semester to evaluate the impact of the project and make recommendations about the future of OER at NMC.