The OpenCourseWare (OCW) Consortium welcomes Ohio’s  Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C®) to its community college consortium (CCCOER). Tri-C is Ohio’s oldest and largest community college and leads in high-quality, affordable education with the lowest tuition in Northeast Ohio and among the lowest in the state.

“By joining the Open Courseware Consortium, Tri-C is signaling to our students that we are committed to working with our faculty to help them find high-quality OER content that can help our students be successful in their online, blended and on-campus courses,” said Dr. Kelvin Bentley, associate vice president of eLearning and Innovation.

On Sept. 27, Tri-C hosted the 3^rd annual Ohio Textbook Affordability Summit at its Corporate College East in collaboration with Ohio Board of Regents, bringing together stakeholders from throughout the Ohio state university system.  Tri-C President Alex Johnson encouraged faculty, administrators and students to look at affordability as a component of efficient instructional delivery and student success.  Una Daly, the OCW Consortium’s community college outreach director, delivered the keynote address.  Daly urged educators to seek high-quality open educational resources to expand student access and to improve quality through faculty creativity and collaboration.

Dr. Sandy Robinson, vice president of Academic Affairs, led a panel featuring faculty members from around Ohio who have written open math textbooks, created open calculus courses and adopted free and open digital solutions to support their students’ needs for low-cost, mobile and easy-to-use instructional materials. Tri-C English professor Kim Hill shared the free audio book site LibriVox and text-to-speech capabilities that she uses in her classroom to provide extra support for reading comprehension. Students explained how open educational resources adopted by their professors increased their success, including making these courses more affordable and giving them access to an expanded set of materials to support their learning.

Tri-C offers more than 1,000 credit courses in 140 career and technical programs and liberal arts curricula in addition to 600 non-credit professional development and workforce courses each year at its multiple campuses and through online programs in the Cleveland area. “In joining the OCWC, we are collaborating with faculty to further explore the adoption of open educational resources as one method to increase student access and completion,” said Danielle Budzick, district director of Innovative Learning Design and Quality.