By: Gracie McDonough, Reference and Instruction Librarian at the College of Southern Nevada, Vice President of Communications for CCCOER
On Wednesday, March 1st, OpenStax held its Academic Innovation and Technology Summit at the College of Southern Nevada. CSN has been an institutional partner of OpenStax for two consecutive years and was chosen as the site of the first-ever summit event. Since the 2019 spring semester, the number of instructors using OER materials at CSN has grown to 13.4%, with our largest increase happening in 2021 when CSN began its partnership with OpenStax.
We are glad CSN was chosen for this partnership. This project ties in with the goal of our institution to help our students complete their courses by lowering barriers, such as the cost of textbooks.
-James McCoy, CSN Vice President of Academic Affairs
The technology summit was focused around introducing instructional faculty to resources offered by OpenStax and its technology partners, such as the printing service XanEdu and the homework platform Lrnr. For years, traditional textbook publishers have tried to sway faculty into purchasing expensive materials by making them think that they could not access items such as test banks, interactive infographics, recorded lectures, quizzes, and PowerPoints when using OER – but that is not the case. As OpenStax and its partners showed during the summit, those materials and more are available and have Creative Commons licenses, so they can be modified by the instructor using them to better suit their courses. High-quality OER tools can now be employed to teach the vast majority of general education courses.
The event, held in CSN’s student union, also featured a variety of student activities. Students were able to grab free OpenStax shirts and backpacks by signing up for OpenStax emails to learn more, and many students entered a raffle to win a pair of AirPods. Students were also encouraged to ask their instructors not using OER in their classes about the benefits of using a traditional textbook (which may cost hundreds of dollars) over an affordable OER option.
Many faculty and students gained valuable information about OpenStax during the event, and the College of Southern Nevada is looking forward to doing another partner event next year to educate even more people about the benefits of using OpenStax and OER.
