Large scale Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative in mathematics

A team of LaGuardia Community College math faculty designed and launched the OER (Open Educational Resources) project in Spring 2017 to allow to take mathematics courses at zero or low textbook cost. Our first pilot phase started with 10 sections in Fall 2017 using three different OER platforms: Myopenmath, Webwork and Khanacademy. One out of the three platforms, Myopenmath used in phase 1 was selected to pilot 34 sections in Spring 2018. In Fall 2018, the OER team moved to a full-scale implementation on all remedial and gateway courses of 164 sections including Fundamentals of Algebra, Intro to Algebra, Elementary Algebra Co-req STEM, College Algebra and Elementary Statistics. From Fall 2017 to Spring 2018, a total of $477,182 was saved by 5,560 LaGuardia students. By Fall 2019, the project had saved a total of $1,184,329.25 on textbook costs. In addition, the pass rates for OER courses were either better or the same when compared to non-OER courses. Furthermore, the pass rate for OER Co-req STEM was almost two times higher than the one for non- OER Co-req STEM sections