Often referred to as the “iron triangle challenge” in higher education, attempts to simultaneously reduce cost while also improving student learning are often unsuccessful, particularly when implemented at scale. Combining Open Educational Resources (OERs) with next generation courseware holds the potential to break this iron triangle, allowing the impact of OER to go beyond just cost savings.

This diverse multi-institutional faculty panel will present on their work to reduce the cost of education while also helping their students succeed academically through the use of Lumen’s Waymaker platform. Waymaker, which combines enriched OER with personalized learning tools that improve faculty-student connections, was originally developed under a Bill and Melinda Gates Next Generation Courseware Challenge (NGCC) grant and is now in use by thousands of students across the country.

Each panelist, who will range from those new to Waymaker to others who have been using it for the past 2 years, will provide a brief overview of how they are using Waymaker with their students and share lessons learned regarding effective implementation. They will also provide results of local research on both cost savings and impact on student success factors such as final course grades. They will then discuss how the local findings relate to national research on Waymaker conducted through the NGCC grant. Time will also be provided for audience Q&A