The award was granted to recognize the 20+ RCC faculty members who completed the Belonging and Inclusive Teaching Fundamentals Fellowship, a professional development course offered through RCC’s Provost Faculty Scholars and  Lumen Learning’s Circles fellowship program that helps educators create inclusive learning environments and prioritize student voices. Over the course of nine weeks, Rockland educators collaborated virtually with other faculty peers to enhance their teaching practices with an increased focus on diversity and inclusion. 

The course had an overwhelmingly positive response from participating faculty members. For Peter Marino, lecturer of psychology at RCC, the fellowship directly impacted his approach to building inclusivity and community in the classroom. Marino highlights several strategies he implemented in his teaching practices, including assigning readings from diverse sources and voices and giving students space to consider and discuss their own identities in relation to course material. 

“I can say with confidence that my students benefited from greater personalization and caring provided by the brave and safe spaces that developed,” Marino shared. “Growing consciousness of belonging has enlightened my students as well as myself greatly.”

In addition to creating a deeper sense of belonging for RCC students, the Lumen Circles fellowship gave faculty the opportunity to build cross-disciplinary connections with one another.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Dr. Rebha Sabharwal shared that “it was extremely valuable to see how other disciplines deal with topics such as power, privilege, and intersectionality. As the world shrinks and our knowledge and empathy increase, we benefit from safe platforms where we can communicate our struggles and share successful techniques with one another.”

Rockland faculty’s participation in the Provost Faculty Scholars Program and Lumen Circles fellowships is part of an ongoing partnership between Lumen and RCC to strengthen the college’s teaching and learning center. The program evolved from Lumen’s broader partnership with SUNY to support implementation of wide-scale use of Lumen’s digital courseware, OHM, Waymaker, and professional development platform Lumen Circles.  Lumen Learning’s partnership with SUNY allows faculty to get the support they need through comprehensive faculty development experiences while also providing students and educators with access to equitable and inclusive digital courseware that will enable them to make higher education more affordable and accessible for all students.

Rockland’s HEED Award recognition comes as colleges and universities nationwide face enrollment declines in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Community colleges in particular are struggling to enroll and retain students, and administrators have been left scrambling to find answers. Lumen’s work with RCC and SUNY can serve as a template for other institutions to not only recoup pandemic losses but further advance equity for minority and underserved student groups.

If you’re interested in learning more about Lumen Circles, visit lumenlearning.com/what/circles/

In 2017, Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO) campus leaders were getting an earful from students and parents about the unreasonable cost of the online homework system required for math courses. Additionally SEMO math professors were dissatisfied with the reliability of the system they were using and frustrated that it was not set up to integrate well with the university’s learning management system, Moodle. When these problems became too painful to ignore, university leaders directed the math department to find an alternative.

SEMO math faculty began exploring online homework solutions designed with open educational resources (OER) because they promised both a much more affordable option and a tremendous amount of flexibility to shape the course materials to fit the needs of their students, courses, and programs.

12 Math Courses Move to OHM

After evaluating platform features and template courses available in Lumen Online Homework Manager (OHM), SEMO math faculty decided to move forward with this solution in 2018. Key drivers of the decision include its low cost ($25), system flexibility to support effective course and assessment design, excellent user support, and outstanding LMS integration. Their department-wide adoption uses Lumen OHM for 12 different math courses, corequisite supports for some courses, and a math placement exam.

“Our faculty are experts at teaching these courses, and we know what our students need,” said Dr. Tammy Randolph, Southeast Missouri State University’s interim dean of the College of Science, Technology and Agriculture. “Lumen tools give us the opportunity to organize instructional materials, choose homework problems, and have checks and balances to monitor student progress. Partnering with Lumen also gives us instructional support from a team that understands how mathematics classes work and what good pedagogy looks like.”

Win-Win-Win: Affordability, Reliability, AND Quality

During fall 2018, SEMO’s first term using OHM went remarkably smoothly. After years of frustration with a common publisher’s system that frequently experienced outages early in the term, SEMO faculty were delighted to find zero downtime with Lumen OHM, as well as a system they found easy to manage and intuitive to use. Students also liked OHM and especially appreciated its $25 price tag. The single biggest “wow factor” came from OHM’s seamless integration with Moodle, which provided easy access to all course materials and automatic grade return into the LMS gradebook.

“Affordability is a serious issue for many of our students, and the University is committed to addressing that problem,” said Dr. Dan Daly, interim chairperson and associate professor of mathematics at Southeast Missouri State University. “Fortunately, with Lumen OHM we don’t have to compromise on quality. Our faculty members get a simple start-up process and essential tools like machine grading, automatic grade return, and a huge question bank from which to draw. Students get unlimited practice to learn the math. We’re excited about how this change removes barriers for students progressing towards graduation.”

Hear directly from members of the SEMO math department in this recorded webinar where they share their experiences making the transition to Lumen OHM and advice for others exploring affordable online homework systems.

Photo: “SE Academic Hall” by Agathman, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 

Open educational resources (OER) play a central role in Odessa College’s relentless efforts to remove obstacles to student success. Partnering with Lumen Learning to provide state-of-the-art OER courseware designed to strengthen learning for at-risk students, Odessa College is achieving outstanding results:

• Over $1 million per semester in textbook cost savings
• Over 20,000 enrollments in OER courses since 2017
• Emporium-style Math Studio using OER courseware to transform preparedness for college level math
• All sections of core associate degree courses converted to OER

Located in rural West Texas, Odessa College is a Hispanic-serving institution in communities with historically low college attendance, many first-generation college students, and significant socioeconomic disadvantage. The College’s faculty and staff have gone to great lengths to identify and address common problems their students face, with an array of inventive student success initiatives.

Faculty teams have led course redesign initiatives to transition high-enrollment courses to open educational resources (OER). These projects have improved affordability and access to learning content, and they have given Odessa College faculty greater control over how to shape the learning experience to fit their students’ needs.  

“Our goal with OER course materials is to provide successful degree pathways for students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend college,” said Becky Musil, Dean of Teaching & Learning at Odessa College. “Textbook affordability is a huge piece of this picture, and so is the learning experience. Using Lumen’s OER courseware, our students have access to excellent OER content as well as online homework, immediate feedback, personalized nudges, and other tools to support them with the best learning possible.”

In addition to faculty-led OER course redesign projects, Odessa College has implemented other inventive student success initiatives, such as eight week terms, FAFSA workshops, Success Coaches, a Drop Rate Improvement Program to increase students’ connection to their courses, and first-class free for all students.

These student-focused interventions won Odessa College a coveted Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence Rising Star Award in 2017, and it has been named as an Aspen prize finalist in 2019. Since embarking on this path, Odessa College has seen:

• Higher enrollment
• Near doubling of three-year graduation rate
• Lower drop rates
• Improved persistence
• Improved success rates, particularly among students of color

More about Odessa’s student success initiatives:

• Read Odessa College’s Whitepaper for the 2019 Aspen Prize submission
• Download a printable PDF of this Odessa College success story

Learn more about Lumen:

Lumen Learning provides affordable course materials designed using open educational resources (OER), with a catalog focusing on high-enrollment general education courses. Our goal is to provide OER that are better for learning and simple for faculty members to adopt.

Discover OER course materials that are a great fit for you and your students: visit our public catalog or download our course list.

Finding a Smarter Solution for Math Education

In 2013, Salt Lake Community College collaborated with Lumen Learning on the Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative, a Next Generation Learning Challenges project to explore the impact of open educational resources (OER) on student success at institutions serving high proportions of disadvantaged students. SLCC math faculty members had become interested in OER after seeing many students struggle to pay the $200 average cost of the commercial materials the department required previously.

Starting with four math courses with lackluster passing rates, SLCC introduced MyOpenMath, an OER math solution supported by Lumen. It provides automatic access to course materials for every student, including instructional text, videos, and an online homework system. SLCC faculty members use community-contributed OER content to design courses, and they share new assessment items and other content improvements back to the MyOpenMath community for others to use. 

Evaluating efficacy after the 2013-2014 academic year, the impact on the 257 students in OER sections was significant. Together they saved over $47,000 in textbook costs. Students passing with a C or better increased from 59% in non-OER sections to 63% in OER sections. A quarter of students received A’s in OER sections, compared to just 15% in sections using commercial materials. Just 13% of students failed OER sections, compared to 20% in non-OER sections.

Making Success with OER Sustainable

Anxious to take a stand on textbook affordability and the benefits of OER, students lobbied campus leaders to make OER a sustainable part of the college’s curriculum strategy. Today they happily pay a low-cost materials fee to support OER courses, replacing the cost of expensive textbooks.

This OER fee helps ensure SLCC can continue to add OER courses and sections. It also ensures SLCC students and faculty can on a professionally-supported online homework system with enterprise-quality attention to security, availability, and technical support response times. In fall 2017, more than 7,500 math students used OER, saving approximately $700,000 on the cost of course materials in a single term. Year over year, this figure continues to grow. 

Achieving Systemic Improvement in Quantitative Literacy

On the strength of their early success with OER, the SLCC Math Department decided to complete an OER-based redesign of all courses in the math sequence pathways students follow to meet Utah’s state Quantitative Literacy (QL) requirement for non-STEM majors. Initially, SLCC faculty were drawn to OER to address textbook affordability and day one access. Lumen OHM gave them flexibility to design each course in the QL pathway to fit how they want to teach, with lots of practice, immediate feedback and learning by doing from the first day of class.

The SLCC team completed this systematic course redesign effort in 2017, with phenomenal results. 

According to Suzanne Mozdy, SLCC’s associate dean of mathematics, “From fall 2016 to fall 2017, we saw a 22% increase in Quantitative Literacy pathway completion, after putting OER options in place for all pathway courses. With over 6,400 students enrolled in our primary Quantitative Literacy pathway during that term, 22% represents a large number. Our students can go through the entire Quantitative Literacy path with no textbook cost, because it is open.”

This success continues: 25% more students per semester are completing the QL requirement since SLCC completed the shift to Lumen OHM. By helping many more students overcome the common stumbling block of the QL requirement, SLCC’s math department is eliminating an important barrier to college completion. Each fall, over 80% of SLCC’s 9,000+ math students enroll in OER courses. Mozdy also credits OER with improving learning. “Starting on day one, they’re using Lumen OHM to do math, and we see them carry that standard through the rest of the semester.”

Award-Winning Results

Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) received an institutional Digital Learning Innovation Award of $100,000 for its use of Lumen OHM to redesign quantitative literacy (QL) pathway courses with a focus on improving student success. They also use OHM to support a “Mulligan Project,” an initiative that offers intrusive assistance to help students who struggle early in the QL pathway to change study habits and increase their likelihood of success.

“Our arrangement with Lumen Learning is not a traditional vendor-customer relationship,” said Jason Pickavance, Director of Faculty Development and Educational Initiatives at Salt Lake Community College. “Instead, it feels like we are both part of a fundamental shift towards a future where faculty have greater control over how course materials support student learning.”

January is a natural time for reflection: How are we doing? What impact are we making? What can we do differently and better in the new year?

And what does impact mean, anyway?

Impact = Number of students?

When the curtain closed on 2017, we tallied just over 170,000 students using Lumen course materials at the institutions we support. We’re pleased to see this number of Lumen-supported students more than double every year. Millions more use Lumen’s openly-licensed content through our free public catalog (11 million users during the Fall term alone). That’s one way of measuring impact.

Impact = Textbook cost savings?

Another way to measure impact, common in the open education community, is in terms of textbook cost savings: How much did students save by using our open educational resource (OER) materials rather than expensive publishers’ textbooks?

A lot has been written about how much students actually save using OER at a time when relatively few students buy all their assigned textbooks new. Amazon, the used book and textbook rental markets all complicate this picture further. But if we calculate the difference between Lumen course support fees (standard pricing $10-25) and the average cost of a textbook ($100), we estimate Lumen-supported students saved $15 million in 2017.

That’s a tidy sum for one year. It goes far towards helping individual students buy groceries, pay for rent, childcare and transportation, and reinvest in achieving their educational goals.

Impact = Successful students?  

For many educators, the most fulfilling part of the job isn’t about dollars or numbers at all. It’s about working with individual students and seeing the transformative impact of education in their lives.

Lumen’s mission is to enable unprecedented learning for all students.

Initially we worked towards this mission by replacing expensive textbooks with OER. We found that opening access and removing cost as an obstacle helped–up to a point. Research found students performed as well or better in Lumen-supported OER courses, compared to courses using traditional textbooks. But we also came to the realization that replacing static publisher materials with static open materials doesn’t lead to unprecedented learning.  

Since 2015, our focus has shifted towards improving the learning experience around OER.

• Students learn better by doing, and so we’re building interactivity with frequent feedback into open content.
• At-risk students often struggle with whether they belong in college, and so we’ve created time-saving messaging tools that provide guidance, encouragement, and deeper faculty-student connections.
• Students become better lifelong learners as they develop metacognitive muscles, and so we’re using learning data to help them reflect on their progress and make good choices about how to develop mastery.
• By analyzing how students perform using Lumen course materials, we can pinpoint problem areas and iteratively improve content, assessments, and learning tools to strengthen learning.

Evidence of Impact

In the end, impact is a combination of these factors. In 2017, we crunched a lot of data figuring out how we might begin to quantify our impact on student success with Waymaker courses, where all these investments in OER and learning design come together.

Here’s a powerful finding: At Cerritos College during 2016, 73% of students enrolled on day one passed the course successfully in sections using Waymaker. This compares to just 55% in non-Waymaker sections. Driving this result was a huge differential in drop rates. Just 10% of students in Waymaker sections dropped the course, compared to 34% in non-Waymaker courses. The effective learning experience in Waymaker courses helped to keep more students enrolled and progressing successfully through the course.

In another analysis of student outcomes, we found that using Waymaker course materials erased the performance gap that typically exists between Pell-eligible and non-Pell eligible students. Pell eligibility is often a marker for at-risk students, and it is difficult to find learning interventions that make a measurable difference improving learning for these students on a large scale.  

Looking Ahead in 2018

What we found in 2017 about our impact on learning only scratches the surface of what’s possible. We have definitely found that better content and learning design make a difference. We have validated yet again that the faculty role is key to a successful learning experience. We continue to learn so much from the dedicated, creative faculty members who are always seeking better results for their students. We have begun to understand more about the right supports for students and faculty. We are constantly reminded that there is still much to learn about effective learning.

This year we’ll have many more data points and opportunities to discover, understand and demonstrate learning impact. Looking forward to it.

The Business Administration Department at Cerritos College began turning to open educational resources because faculty members saw many students struggling when they could not afford to buy expensive textbooks. After OER led to demonstrable improvement in retention rates, the department partnered with Lumen Learning to shift the entire curriculum to OER, including department-wide use of Waymaker courses that provide personalized coaching and encouragement to help students become better learners. By fall 2016, the Business Department’s retention rate had climbed to 87%, up from 67% before it first introduced OER.

A Business Department Goes Open

In 2008, the Business Administration Department at Cerritos College was grappling with lackluster retention rates of just 67%. As a Hispanic-serving community college located in Los Angeles County, CA, Cerritos College educates students from diverse backgrounds and varying degrees of college preparation. With the climbing cost of textbooks in their Business and Management programs, fewer students were buying books, and their academic performance suffered.

When the instructors learned about open educational resources (OER), they were determined to try open content. OER promised to help the department tackle problems with textbook affordability and access. Participating in the Lumen-led Kaleidoscope Open Course Initiative, the departmental colleagues began to redesign curriculum using OER mapped to learning outcomes developed in conjunction with industry groups. Every student had access to low- or no-cost materials from the first day of class.

Promising Results Fuel Appetite for More and Better OER

It wasn’t long before the Business Administration Department’s shift to using OER in selected classes began to manifest itself. Program passing and retention rates began to climb. The cost of course materials dropped. Students and workforce partners were delighted by the tens of thousands of dollars in textbook cost savings every term.

The faculty team saw even more possibilities: shifting the entire business curriculum to open content. They turned to Lumen Learning to provide reliable access to the best available OER course materials. Lumen’s well-designed content, LMS-friendly technology and faculty support simplified the transition to OER.

In 2014, Cerritos College began collaborating with Lumen in a Next Generation Courseware (NGC) project to develop more effective and personalized learning experiences using OER. This collaboration resulted in Lumen’s Waymaker courses. After promising results during an initial pilot, the Business Administration Department has opted to use a growing number of Waymaker courses, which offer a higher-touch learning experience for students. According to Professor Bob Livingston, “Waymaker helps me identify and help students who are in trouble, and that we’re in jeopardy of losing if we don’t react quickly.”  

Results and Recognition

By spring 2016, the Cerritos College Business Administration Department’s retention rate was hovering around 87%-89%, an increase of approximately 20 percentage points.  Using Waymaker OER course materials, the department saw more students staying enrolled and passing their courses successfully.

In November 2016, Cerritos College won the OLC Digital Learning Innovation Award for its progressive work using OER with digital courseware to strengthen affordability, access, and student success. “Every time we add more OER, our student retention continues to go up,” says Livingston. “We are really sold on open educational resources.” 

In 2013, Tidewater Community College, located in coastal Virginia, became the first accredited institution in the U.S. to offer a degree in which students pay nothing for required textbooks. Dubbed the “Z-Degree” (for zero textbook cost) and developed with courseware and support from Lumen Learning, the first-of-its-kind program awards an associate of science degree in business administration. Preliminary data show fewer students withdraw from the program’s Z courses before the drop deadline, translating into more successful students and tuition revenue.

A First-in-the-Nation OER Degree

In 2013, Tidewater Community College became the first regionally accredited institution in the United States to offer a degree in which students pay nothing for required textbooks. Dubbed the “Z-Degree” (for zero textbook cost), the first-of-its-kind program awards an associate of science degree in business administration. Lumen Learning provides courseware and support for the program’s 21 “Z courses,” which are designed using open educational resources.

With community college textbook costs averaging $1,200 per year according to The College Board, TCC leaders estimate that a student who completes the degree could save $2,000 – $3,000 over the course of the two-year program. This amounts to at least a quarter of the total cost-of-degree.

Planning for the Z-Degree, TCC leaders chose business administration as the focus because of this program’s popularity, as well as the availability of an innovative faculty member willing to lead the shift to open content. They also sought support from both instructional and administrative staff to ensure the project’s success. The combination of executive leadership, a faculty champion, an enthusiastic faculty team, and well-orchestrated support from a project advisory committee helped ensure the high profile project would be well-executed.

The project’s participating faculty members are impressed with the level of student engagement that becomes possible when every student has free access to all course materials on the first day of class. Instructors also appreciate the freedom to incorporate the best available educational materials from around the world into their courses. Linda Williams, the project’s faculty champion and professor of business administration at TCC, describes the experience this way: “In the past I only had the official adopted textbook to choose from. Now I have the whole world, using open courseware from people who are worldwide experts in the fields I teach. I’m finding incredibly creative and innovative approaches to concepts that I wouldn’t have come up with myself. That kind of freedom is amazing.”

Impact

The student response has been tremendous. By spring 2017, four years after introducing the Z-Degree, the program has served 10,200 students, with total textbook cost savings of over $1 million. As word about Z courses gets out, students are clamoring for more courses and sections to adopt the zero textbook cost approach.

Published research shows that TCC’s OER courses have lower withdrawal rates than traditional courses, and students perform as well or better in Z courses compared to traditional courses. Also students in Z courses enroll in more credits during the current term and the following term after taking an OER course. This suggests they are reinvesting textbook cost savings in education, with the goal of completing their education more quickly. Higher retention rates also mean more tuition revenue, since fewer withdrawals mean fewer dollars are refunded to students who drop courses.

Sustaining Success with OER

According to Daniel DeMarte, TCC’s vice president for academic affairs and chief academic officer, “By eliminating textbook costs, the Z-Degree makes a college degree more affordable and attainable for many of our students. Our use of OER is also changing the conversation about student success and learning outcomes as we measure results and identify what are the best resources to teach a particular outcome. That is the real power of open educational resources.”