Increasing the Open Education Resources Capacity of Precalculus Courses at York College and Queensborough Community College

Abstract

This paper presents a case study conducted by two universities seeking to explore Open Education Resources (OER) in their precalculus course. Students not only gained access to their textbook for free on the first day of class, but also Lumen OHM, an online mathematics assessment platform. The majority of students involved in the study were satisfied with the textbook, characterizing it as useful, accessible, and affordable, and agreeing that they would be very likely to register for a future course with an online text like that used in the course. This study also found that when comparing OER to non-OER settings using the final exam scores, for the most part, there was no significant difference observed in the learning outcomes. Based on these findings, the researchers believe that there is no need to continue teaching with costly physical textbooks when students can achieve the same academic level results with OER.