New York State doubles down with another $8 million for open educational resources

"State's initial $8 million investment significantly increased number of students in courses taught with OER. With new round of funding for 2018-19, CUNY and SUNY will focus on strategy and sustainability.

Officials at the City University and State University of New York had a pretty narrow focus for how to spend the more or less out-of-the-blue $8 million investment that New York State's politicians decided to make last year in open educational resources: get more professors to create more OER-driven courses serving more students. "We essentially sent money out to campuses with the goal of spending it wisely to grow enrollments in OER courses," says Carey Hatch, associate provost for academic technologies and information services at the SUNY system. CUNY's primary goal was "delivering the numbers we thought the state would scrutinize," says Greg Gosselin, its interim university dean for libraries and information systems. Deliver they did: SUNY and CUNY, respectively, re-engineered roughly 3,700 and 1,500 course sections that served roughly 56,000 and 40,000 students. By using OER instead of traditional textbooks, officials say, students in the sections were estimated to have saved about $12 million. They were rewarded last week in the form of another $8 million from Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state legislators to split in the 2018-19 academic year. The two university systems have no intention of taking their foot off the pedal in terms of growth, as together they aim to more than double, to 260,000, the number of enrollments in OER-driven courses.  But officials at CUNY and SUNY fully recognize that they can't be sure that the government dollars will continue to flow. So while continuing to pursue growth, much of their plan for the second year of funding involves finding ways to be more strategic about the funds' impact and building what Gosselin calls a "sustainable infrastructure for the future." "The money’s not going to be there forever," says Hatch. "We want to be sure we can make this work when the state money goes away. Er, if the state money goes away," he quickly (and hopefully) corrected himself...."