Jonathan Brucks

(Not pictured) Nhassar Ghassan, Ernesto Olivares
David Fies
Cynthia McCowen

The team has replaced the former $300 textbook in all sections of MAT 1053 with College Algebra from OpenStax. OpenStax, a nonprofit affiliated with Rice University, works directly with faculty subject matter experts and funders like the Hewlett Foundation to create peer-reviewed, openly licensed textbooks that are free for students.

More from the team:

"The Math Matters program has successfully adopted/created no cost learning materials in the MAT 1073 - Algebra for Scientists & Engineers course, with the help of the UTSA Libraries OER grant. For that course, we adopted the OpenStax College Algebra text, and developed accompanying guided notes and video examples for our students. We also took advantage of UTSA's investment in the WeBWorK program, a free-to-students online assignment delivery system, to build more than 500 algorithmically generated problems, coded specifically to accompany the OpenStax text. The result is a superior user experience, with support and consistency unmatched by commercial publishers, all at zero cost to the student.

The Math Matters program is helping to bring more awareness of OER resources to the math department, though their use has definitely been encouraged by the department through other avenues in recent years. The difference now is that our program is coordinating all sections of a growing number of core math courses, so that the OER footprint is growing by leaps and bounds, to impact literally thousands of our students each semester. With such a large-scale implementation, we also have the opportunity to develop best practices that can be modeled by other courses, even in other departments, colleges, or universities."