Educators in Louisiana have embraced Open Educational Resources (OER) and the investment is paying off. New data shows students are saving money, getting higher grades, and are more likely to pass courses with access to free digital learning materials.
LOUIS: The Louisiana Library Network, a consortium of public and private college and university libraries established in 1992, has secured several grants from the state and federal government for teams of educators to develop high-quality OER.
Kim Hunter Reed, Louisiana Commissioner of Higher Education, noted that through the state’s effort in the last decade, Louisiana families have saved almost $60 million by providing more than 600,000 students with access to open education and affordable education resources.
“We’re grateful for the federal grants that supported this work and the outstanding Louisiana faculty, librarians and education leaders who used these funds to develop high-quality dual enrollment and career and technical education resources,” Reed said. “Expanding access to these tools improves not only affordability but student success as well.”
The outside OER funding has helped the Board of Regents in pursuit of its master plan target of getting 60% of Louisiana’s working age population to hold a postsecondary credential by the year 2030, said Emily Frank, affordable learning coordinator for LOUIS. “Part of that attainment goal is focused on removing barriers, making obtaining those credentials more affordable, and that includes a big push for dual enrollment,” she said.
In fiscal year 2020, LOUIS received nearly $2 million from the U.S. Department of Education for an Open Textbook Pilot grant to create OER with Pressbooks for general education courses offered in dual enrollment and traditional post-secondary higher education environments. The Interactive OER for Dual Enrollment project started in January 2021 and focused on courses that had higher rates of students with failing grades or withdrawal.
LOUIS recently released outcomes of the Open Textbook Pilot grant, and the news is encouraging. Three million users have viewed the textbook pages online. There have been 1 million textbook visitors, 126,000 textbook downloads, 27 textbooks adaptions in the Pressbooks platform and 77 self-reported adoptions, according to a dashboard developed by Elizabeth Kelly, assistant commissioner of library systems, resources, and analytics at LOUIS.
Student success with OER was evident: Pilot course average grades were 2.97, up from the historical average of 2.73. Course passing rates improved from typical rates of 72% to 78%.
The numbers have been very rewarding, Frank said, but it’s also been meaningful to hear stories of impact from educators new to using OER.
“It’s exciting to see the adoptions occur across the nation and have people reach out …especially from [faculty and librarians] who previously didn’t have any involvement with OER,” Frank said. “For some, it was their first project, but it has become a bigger part of their professional and personal identity.”
Christopher Gilson, associate professor of history at Northwestern State University of Louisiana in Natchitoches, Louisiana, was part of a five-person team for LOUIS to develop an OER World History I textbook. For students, with one semester of a digital history textbook rental running about $53, he said having an openly licensed option added up to substantial savings for students. For faculty, Gilson added, the advantages are numerous.
“You know the student will have access to the textbook on the first day and with OER, students are generally not going to have to set up an account,” he said. “The other benefit is you’re in control of the content of your class if there are different perspectives on the past you want to include.”
With the LOUIS grant, the team was able to customize the World History I textbook, remixing material, ensuring it was accessible to students with disabilities and including multiple-choice quizzes at the end of each chapter. Then the group created outlines, syllabi, sample writing assignments and tests for a class to go with the textbook.
“One of the big challenges with encouraging faculty to adopt Open Educational Resources is that you’re asking them to not just give up the pre-packaged textbook from a textbook company, but also to give up the ancillary materials that go with it,” Gilson said. “By creating chapter exams and question sets to go with those textbooks, we ensured that faculty adopting them wouldn’t feel like they were starting from scratch.”
Gilson said he was extremely pleased with the final project and has used the World History I textbook in 15 sections of History 1010 since 2022. Along with a colleague of his who used it in 11 sections, he figures students on his campus alone have saved $65,000 to date from one book – and the savings will only grow. Gilson said students write him messages and tell him they appreciate the organization of the class and links in the digital textbook. He predicts failure and drop rates likely were cut in half in the first year of the pilot.
“Seeing the project through to completion and the work recognized by other people is gratifying,” Gilson said. “There are more opportunities with OER to pursue in the future.”
LOUIS applied for more Open Textbook Pilot funding to address career technical education (CTE) skills. Frank said there was a clear gap in the digital skills that students had exiting college and those needed in the workplace to be bridged. The $2.1 million Building a Competitive Workforce grant awarded in fiscal year 2023 from the U.S. Department of Education is currently being used to develop OER for nearly 20 courses in CTE. It is designed with interactive assessment elements to give students foundational and industry-specific digital skills for in-demand CTE courses. After professional training for the OER cohort in the summer of 2024, the faculty are now developing the courses and will begin to pilot in 2026.
LOUIS also was working on an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant, Connecting the Pipeline: Libraries, OER Dual Enrollment from Secondary to Post Secondary, which was nearing its conclusion when federal cuts ended the project in early 2025. That focused on the development of 15 OER courses (with a cohort of teaching faculty, dual enrollment instructors and academic librarians), along with better understanding the high school landscape and how to involve school librarians in OER.
See the grant-funded OER-textbooks and courses here: https://louislibraries.org/az/federally-funded-dual-enrollment-oer
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