ROTEL Project Background

Six Massachusetts Institutions of Higher Education along with the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education formed a consortium consisting of more than 29,000 diverse undergraduate students. Member institutions include: Fitchburg State University, Framingham State University, Holyoke Community College, Northern Essex Community College, Salem State University, Springfield Technical Community College, and the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education.

The goal of Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens (ROTEL): Culturally Relevant Open Textbooks for High Enrollment General Education Courses and Career and Professional Courses at Six Public Massachusetts Colleges was to test the hypothesis that underrepresented students will achieve higher academic outcomes if free, culturally-relevant course materials that reflect their experience are utilized, which had not been studied. The ROTEL OER authoring incentives were targeted to general education courses required by all participants for their high enrollments, along with courses in health, education and criminal justice, which are large employers in the Commonwealth.

An Open Textbook Coordinating Council (OTCC), composed of each Consortium member and hired staff experts, met monthly to provide professional development and guidance to interested faculty for the creation, adaptation, or adoption of OER content.

In addition to promoting student success, the preliminary cost savings to students was estimated as more than $1.6 Million per year.

For assessing the impact of the ROTEL Project, the OTCC tracked numerous performance measures, including numbers of courses, sections and faculty using new OER materials, student grades and satisfaction in those courses, and the average score of the new material using a rubric based on OpenStax’s framework.