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.
Northern New Mexico College
Joining the New Mexico Open Educational Resources (NMOER) Consortium marks a significant step for Northern New Mexico College (NNMC) in enhancing student equity and academic flexibility. By aligning its 50+ diverse programs, from STEM and Nursing to the Arts and Film, with this statewide initiative, Northern can replace traditional, high-cost textbooks with free, high-quality open-access materials. This shift directly supports the college’s “Northern Proud” mission of affordability, ensuring that students in vocational certificates and bachelor’s programs alike face fewer financial barriers to completion.
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.
Eastern New Mexico University
In 2022, Eastern New Mexico University Golden Library joined the Open Textbook Network and began offering basic OER workshops for faculty. Since the Fall of 2022, ENMU has trained 84 faculty and staff in OER basics, nearly half of the total full-time faculty at the institution. In 2023 ENMU administered a Student Textbook survey to examine the effect of the cost of textbooks on students. Survey data verified that ENMU students are struggling to afford expenses, including textbook costs. Joining the NM OER will allow ENMU to provide additional training and support to faculty. NMOER consortium grant funding supports the university in addressing the high cost of traditional course materials by providing a second tier of OER training and support for faculty beyond the basics. This project supports faculty in the development of textbook alternatives through the adoption, adaptation or creation of OER. The purpose is to support Eastern New Mexico University faculty to author and publish high-quality, open-access course ancillary materials or textbooks for their courses, thereby reducing or eliminating the course material cost burden to students. Managed by the Library Director, the Eastern New Mexico University Faculty OER Publishing Project leverages OER training and support provided to faculty in order to eliminate or reduce financial barriers for students. It ensures free, immediate digital access to course texts and ancillary materials, while enabling faculty to customize materials to match their specific teaching objectives.
Southeast New Mexico College
Southeast New Mexico College (SENMC) is committed to providing accessible, affordable, and high-quality educational opportunities to the diverse students and communities it serves. SENMC offers a number of degree and certificate programs, with a strong focus on student success, workforce development, and community engagement. As part of its commitment to college affordability, SENMC is embarking on its first OER initiative, piloting its First-Year Experience course with instructors developing an OER specifically to support students as they begin their college journey. This journey will also include faculty training, in collaboration with the NMOER consortium, in developing OER resources. This initiative marks an important first step in building a sustainable OER culture at SENMC.
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.