This post was contributed by Ralf Youtz, Mathematics Instructor, Portland Community College, and Amy Hofer, Open Oregon Educational Resources.
Ralf Youtz is the project lead on an Open Oregon Educational Resources grant to adopt an open textbook for statistics courses, MTH 243 and MTH 244, at Portland Community College.
The initial grant award of $9,000 has already resulted in $90,000 in student savings over three terms. The grant pilot period is still under way and students have already seen a tenfold savings come from the initial one-time investment of program dollars.
On February 10, 2017, the PCC Math Subject Area Committee (SAC) voted to adopt OpenIntro’s Advanced High School Statistics for use Division-wide in face-to-face statistics courses. The text is available for $0 as a downloadable PDF. Softcover and hardcover texts cost $7.93 and $29.99, respectively. MTH 243 will begin using this no- or low-cost text this coming Fall 2017. MTH 244 will follow in Winter 2018. PCC statistics students will save hundreds of thousands per year in text costs!
This is the first SAC-wide adoption of an open text at PCC. We’re hopeful that this will inspire other SACs and demonstrate the impact of using open texts more broadly.
As a result of the grant, Ralf Youtz and Emiliano Vega also created supplementary resources for OpenStax Statistics: MTH 243 Supplement to OpenStax Statistics and MTH 244 Supplement to OpenStax Statistics.
