By Judith Sebesta, Executive Director, Digital Higher Education Consortium of Texas (DigiTex), and President, Executive Council, Community College Consortium for OER
Texas higher education institutions, agencies, and organizations across Texas have steadily been building an Open Education ecosystem. Over the past few years, statewide initiatives to support this ecosystem include, but are not limited to,
- OERTX, a digital repository of open educational resources for Texas students and educational institutions;
- Texas Learn OER, a series of ten openly-licensed self-paced online learning modules;
- Annual Open Texas Conference; and
- Biennial Texas OER Survey & Landscape Analysis (2019, 2021).
In 2019, the organization that I lead, DigiTex, rebranded and expanded its initiatives beyond its original mission, as the Virtual College of Texas, of facilitating course sharing at Texas community colleges. Among other activities, we now support OER policy and practice across the state and beyond, although a priority remains serving all fifty public community college districts in the state. We are proud to partner on and participate in all of the aforementioned initiatives.
Recognizing the value of participating in the broader Open Education community, that same year we joined Open Education Global and the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. Both quickly became go-to organizations for networking, professional development, and other resources for me and DigiTex’s Associate Director Ursula Pike. In fact, in 2020 Ursula became Co-Chair, wth Dr. Tonja Conerly of San Jacinto College, of the Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Committee, and last year I began serving as the President of CCCOER’s Executive Council. Ursula and I have been honored to be able to serve this organization that has been so effective in helping us further our work in Texas.
We became eager to assist Texas community colleges in taking advantage of all that CCCOER (and OE Global) has to offer as well. So in 2020, we upgraded to a consortium organizational membership for the state of Texas, providing member colleges a 40% discount on membership. But this year, we decided to go big (since, as they say, everything is bigger in Texas!) and allocate funds to fully subsidize as many memberships as possible for community colleges in the state. I am so pleased to announce that Texas membership in CCCOER is now TWENTY strong!
“Open Texas Flag” is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by Judith Sebesta.
These include:
- Alamo Colleges District
- Angelina College
- Austin Community College District
- Brazosport College
- College of the Mainland
- Del Mar College
- Grayson College
- Houston Community College District.
- Laredo College
- Lee College
- Lone Star College
- Midland College
- Paris Junior College
- San Jacinto College
- South Plains College
- Southwest Texas Junior College
- Tarrant County College District
- Temple College
- Trinity Valley Community College
We hope to continue to expand the Texas CCCOER Consortium to further a state Open Education Ecosystem and ensure that Texas remains wide open!