Growth of OER in NM Higher Ed

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.

OER Initiatives in NM Higher Education Schools

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 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 NMOER Consortium marked 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 would like to 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 provides 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 continued 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 for textbooks and material in 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, and to find out more about OER in general, consult the following library guide.

Resources

• NMOER Linktree 

• UNM's OER Initiative 

• UNM's OER Libguide 

• UNM’s Digital Repository 

• Office of Digital Initiatives and Scholarly Communication (DISC) 

• New Mexico Public Education Department (NMPED)'s K-12 Resources 

• Eastern New Mexico University OER Library Guide