At our first meeting this fall on Sept 26, we continued to work on the goals developed last semester:
- Identify and evaluate resources and initiatives at KCC that support student success in STEM
- Identify opportunities for research projects assessing the effectiveness of these resources and initiatives
- Produce a report summarizing our findings (and figure out to whom we can present it)
During the meeting we discussed a summary of the following report, which may be interesting to all undergraduate STEM educators:
2018 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report: “Indicators for Monitoring Undergraduate STEM Education.” Read online or download for free at: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24943/indicators-for-monitoring-undergraduate-stem-education
In addition, we distributed the following information about an online homework manager, which may be a helpful tool for STEM faculty.
Online Homework Manager or OHM is a technology platform designed to support auto-graded assessments for students which are aligned and integrated with peer-reviewed Open Educational Resource (OER) based textbooks in use by thousands of math instructors. While OHM’s capabilities are similar to more traditional publisher platforms, such as MyMathLab, it use of OER content and open-source software results in dramatically lower cost ($25 per student). A partial list of mathematics courses currently supported in OHM can be found on our public course catalog which include links to the full textbooks. You can get a brief overview of OHM using this short demonstration video or reading about it.
OHM is now in wide scale use at both LaGuardia Community College and Hunter College in the CUNY system as both institutions have moved all of their introductory math courses over to OER using it. Through this work both institutions will save CUNY students over $1 million this year in textbook costs.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
