ESCANABA, MI--Bay College in Escanaba plans to create three new degree programs using Open Educational Resources.
Joseph Mold is Director of Online Learning and Instructional Design at Bay. He says OERs are non-copyrighted learning materials—from a whole textbook to a chapter, or an entire course to a video—that have a Creative Commons license, which means students can access them for free online or buy a hard copy for how much it cost to print it.
“If we compare let’s say a biology book to a publisher’s book, a publisher’s textbook would have been $240. If you get a biology book from Open Stacks, you can get that book for about, it’s usually $40 or less,” Mold says.
Bay College received $200,000 through the Achieving the Dream degree pathway grant initiative. Some of the money will go toward faculty stipends to teach them how to use the resources and create their own. Some will be used for events to educate students on what OERs are and how they can be accessed. About half the money will be used to access program consultants.
Of 38 colleges across the nation, Bay is the only one in Michigan to be awarded the grant.
Mold says the Open Education Resources program has saved Bay students about $100,000 just since the fall semester of 2015. He says that’s increased their success.
“It reduces the withdrawal rates of a course. It increases the C or better rates in a course. And it also increases the completion rate in the course,” he says.
Mold says Bay intends to create three degree programs using OERs: a business degree, an associate of arts degree, and a mechatronics robotics systems degree.
