Less than a year after UA Cossatot announced that it saved students a total of $3.2 million through its textbook rental program and open educational resources (OER) initiative, it has been selected as one of only sixteen institutions in the U.S. for the 2023-24 OpenStax OER Institutional Partner Program.
UA Cossatot leads Arkansas in OER usage, with 71 percent of courses using open resources, and was selected to participate in this national strategic partnership after a rigorous application process that demonstrated a willingness to continue its commitment to lowering student costs through the state’s first internal textbook rental and OER program. UA Cossatot will receive individualized consulting and support from experts in institutional change management and strategic initiatives designed to increase campus use of free, openly licensed OpenStax textbooks and other open educational resources.
“Being selected to participate in OpenStax’s Institutional Partner Program is quite an honor and just one more way in which we strengthen our role as the state’s OER leader and expand our OER initiative to promote an even wider and richer stage for open education,” said OER Specialist and Director of Educational Resources Relinda Ruth.
UA Cossatot Chancellor Dr. Steve Cole commented,” We decided over six years ago to commit our college to saving our students money, and one of the best ways to do this was to provide Open Educational Resources. During this time, with the help of our OER Director and our faculty, we have converted almost 70% percent of all of our courses to OER, saving our students over three million dollars on textbook costs. We are proud of those efforts and will continue to lead the way in developing more OER opportunities.”
OpenStax is a nonprofit charitable corporation based out of Rice University that publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are freely available online and low-cost in print. Their textbooks are used in 60 percent of colleges and universities in the U.S. and over 140 countries. Institutional partners typically increase the number of students using OER by over 150 percent after completing the first year of the program. During the last two years, partner institutions have saved students $19.6 million.
Director Ruth also leads the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) Arkansas State OER Action Team and serves on the SREB’s Educational Technology Cooperative. Having just completed an intensive online year-long professional program in open education through Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia, she will be traveling to Edmonton, Canada, and Washington D.C. during October to learn more about ways in which to support open education. The Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education invited Ruth to speak at the 2023 Oklahoma OER Summit in Midwest City in November.