New Mexico OER Consortium
Officially funded by the Department of Education in 2024 with a $2.125 million grant, the New Mexico OER Consortium builds on the state of New Mexico’s investments in equitable education, including the NM Opportunity Scholarship, the NM Lottery Scholarship, and State Bill 192, which appropriated $100,000 to establish an open education resources pilot program at UNM.
Central New Mexico Community College
In 2015, Central New Mexico Community College, or CNM, began its journey into creating affordable materials for students. The college has been supporting faculty creators with support and technical assistance through its Academic Technologies department, and it joined the NM OER Consortium in 2023 as one of its founding members.
Santa Fe Community College
While work had been done on OER at Santa Fe Community College as early as 2018, the campus saw an organized effort to bring together staff and faculty when an OER committee was formed in 2020. Through its work, the committee has provided and continues to provide campus-wide training opportunities to faculty to learn about OER and to understand the benefits to students. In 2022 the committee began working with Achieving the Dream (ATD) to provide training and consultation services for OER initiatives on the SFCC campus. This work with ATD will continue through 2024.
In 2022 the OER Committee’s work began to focus on supporting faculty with grant funds to transition classes from traditional textbooks to OER. These grants were funded through Title V and supported the transition of more than 20 classes from traditional textbooks to OER or no-cost text options.
Beginning in Spring 2024 with the beginning of the partnership with UNM and CNM, SFCC has seen growing interest and ideas for creative projects across the disciplines. Through the NM OER consortium grant funding, is primarily supporting faculty grants allowing faculty to re-design courses with OER and create completely new content that will be used to create textbooks and create material for new courses.
University of New Mexico
In 2022, the OER initiative at UNM began with small steps toward assessing the perceptions of students about the cost of textbooks. The OER Working Group at UNM also began increasing awareness of OER at the university, while developing the programming to support faculty. You can learn more about UNM’s OER initiative at UNM, and to find out more about OER in general, consult the following library guide.