Lumen Learning Update – Saving Students $700,000 Fall 2013

This month is the one year anniversary of Lumen Learning, the “RedHat for OER” I founded with Kim Thanos in October, 2012. It’s been an incredible first year, and we’ve learned a million lessons along the way – and we continue to learn more about what it takes to support OER adoption at scale every day.

We’ve pulled together a summary of what’s happening with our post-secondary work for fall semester 2013 in a press release posted on the Lumen site, which begins:

Twenty institutions have partnered with Lumen to offer open content options for high demand, high enrollment courses that serve more than 6,000 students in total. Because these students are no longer required to purchase commercial textbooks or course materials, cost savings are estimated at approximately $700,000.

(This is our post-secondary impact for fall 2013, and doesn’t include winter term 2013 or our secondary work with the Utah open textbooks which is now statewide in math and science.)

The release also provides some details regarding the impact on student learning outcomes of the OER adoptions we’re supporting, information about a math pilot we’re running in winter semester 2014, and a description of our newly redesigned services and support model which we’ve branded “Candela.”

Thank you to everyone who is supporting our efforts to increase the quality and lower the cost of education – our institutional partners; the small but passionate Lumen team; the many of you who say and write positive things about our work; the Shuttleworth Foundation who have provided direct financial support for our work; and the broader community of OER funders and organizations who make our work possible, including the Hewlett Foundation, NGLC, the Gates Foundation, the Saylor Foundation, OpenStax, CK-12, Boundless, CMU OLI, and dozens of other individuals and orgs.

It feels like we’re really making a difference in people’s lives – we’ve saved students around $1M this year, and I firmly believe we can do 5x – 7x that next year.

Happy anniversary, Lumen!