"A collaboration between Information Technology Services and University Libraries, at the University at Albany, will initiate and facilitate a redesign process for existing fully-online courses. This redesign process will focus on faculty adoption of Open Educational Resources (OERs), in lieu of costly textbooks, since OERs can significantly improve student accessibility, retention, and completion rates (Fischer, Hilton, Robinson & Wiley, 2015). Although the redesign process will be offered to all faculty, the collaborators are partnering with the Intensive English Language Program (IELP) to include courses that target a specific population – displaced Syrian refugees. This initiative is designed to build upon existing open access efforts, such as the Libraries Open Access Day, that increases awareness of Open SUNY Textbooks and other open content. Working together, the Libraries and ITS envision creating an OER course redesign model that can be scaffolded and made available to every SUNY institution.   

Fischer, L., Hilton, J., Robinson, T. J., & Wiley, D. A. (2015). A multi-institutional study of the impact of open textbook adoption on the learning outcomes of post-secondary students. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 27(3), 159-172.  "

Our program allowed for the adoption and remixing of OERs across 8 courses. Through the adoption process, instructors dropped costly textbooks, saving each student an average of $124 per course. This resulted in a preliminary potential savings of $30,320 for the Fall 2018 semester. The project supported course access, affordability, and choice. For example the OERs allow for immediate access to the content, cost savings for the students, and choice for students (they can decide if they want a printed version of OER at low-cost). Student achievement is to be determined, although OERs are supported by research in terms of student learning outcomes.

Project Outcome Report