Catalyst Celebrates OER Usage and Awareness
A recent report from Bay View Analytics highlights the growth in awareness and usage of open educational resources (OER) at higher education institutions across the United States. Our experienced team at Catalyst Education has played a significant role in OER awareness within STEM, and we’re incredibly proud to see instructors across the nation turning to these resources in order to make learning more accessible and affordable for today’s students.
In their previous roles at Sapling Learning, Catalyst Education’s founders formed the first professionalized sales force promoting OpenStax through direct sales engagement. We were a powerful driver of awareness and usage in chemistry, physics, economics, and biology. Today at Catalyst Education, we are perhaps the largest contributors of OER lab course content—and certainly the most impactful. Again, this occurs through direct sales engagement, which is so critical to the success of OER.
While many of the OER lab experiments available on our website originated as university-contributed content, our library has been refined and improved to the point where we can consider ourselves to be direct authors and contributors. We continue to evolve this content to better match the needs of the market—another important attribute of our program that is often missing in other OER initiatives.
Our library provides instructors with over 100 distinct experiments and more than 300 different versions. All experimental procedures and backgrounds are freely available on our website, and our library is organized to be sortable by course, topic, or analysis option. OER materials have increased access to high-quality content while decreasing course costs for students, making it a win-win for instructors and students alike.
I am very proud of the work we have done here, both as curators and creators, as well as direct commercial evangelists. Interested in contributing to our OER initiative? Have you written a few lab experiments you’d like to donate? Feel free to e-mail us at info@catalystedu.com.