Lori Ann Simmons, a mathematics instructor at Chippewa Valley Technical College, noticed some regular comments that would appear on the course evaluations that students filled out each semester at the end of her Statistics class.“They mentioned the cost of the textbooks,” she said. Simmons, on her own initiative, decided to do something about it. She wrote an Open Education Resource (OER) textbook on the subject, which will be adopted in all the CVTC Statistics classes in the fall 2021 semester. “With an open Statistics textbook, I would get rid of the cost of the textbooks, and the calculator cost, which amount to about $200 a student,” Simmons said. “In OER, we can use an online calculator.”
