Open Educational Resources for Supporting Engineering Education

Discussion of Open Educational Resources (OER)is often limited to textbook cost but it is the flexibility and customizability of OER that makes them a best choice for education. To truly succeed OER projects need to provide not only textbooks but tools and other resources needed today and they need to do so in a way that makes it simple (or as simple as possible) for instructors and students. Platforms for OER must and are becoming educational ecologies with services such as annotation, adaptive homework systems, collaboration tools and more. Engineering and STEM OER has particular demands, including LaTeX equation editing and the ability to execute programs within the textbook. They also must, and are, being extended to be accessible to all, where accessible not only supports those who have difficulty reading, but also those who do not have easy access to devices or the internet. Rather than a loose assembly of EdTech apps, OER system design requires components that support each other. We have built open textbooks for community college engineering, chemistry and physics courses for engineering students using LibreTexts. A major virtue of OER textbooks is that they can be improved formatively as instructors work with their classes. On the technical side, as new components such as a branded school OER commons, a project management app and an online homework system become available they can be integrated to work with the ongoing materials. These textbooks have supported past, current and future curriculum redesign including a new Associate of Science degree in chemistry and a planned one in physics.