About Us

The New Mexico OER (NMOER) Consortium was formed to address the rising costs of higher education by promoting the use and development of free, openly licensed educational resources.

• Mission & Vision: We aim to connect New Mexico’s educators to reduce textbook costs and make high-quality education more affordable for all students.
• History & Founding Members: Initiated by visionary institutions—University of New Mexico (UNM), Santa Fe Community College (SFCC), and Central New Mexico Community College (CNMCC)—the Consortium was founded to promote collaboration across campuses.
• Governance Structure: We operate with a representative Board of Directors and elected officers, guided by our bylaws to ensure inclusive and transparent decision-making.
• Growth: Our consortium has expanded to include 3 more institutions—Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU), Northern New Mexico College (NNMC), and Southeast New Mexico College (SENMC)—and we plan to continue growing every year.

UNM Receives $1.554 million federal grant to grow NMOER Consortium

The University of New Mexico has been selected as one of the recipients of the federal Open Textbook Grant for $1.554 million, recognizing its commitment to advancing education through Open Educational Resources (OER). With this grant funding, UNM will continue to expand the New Mexico Open Educational Resources (NMOER) Consortium, along with Central New Mexico Community College (CNM), Eastern New Mexico University (ENMU), Northern New Mexico College (NNMC), Santa Fe Community College (SFCC), and Southeast New Mexico College (SENMC), which aims to help faculty across the state adopt, adapt, and create open-access materials. UNM University Libraries OER Librarian, Jennifer Jordan, is the principal investigator for the program, and Elisha Allen, UNM director of Online Strategies and Academic Technologies, will be a co-PI.

Phase II program goals include scaling more OER adoption across the state into more rural areas and growing the consortium to seven institutions by 2028. The grant includes an educational webinar series on AI and a program to create AI-enhanced OER through the use of open pedagogy. Senior personnel and Associate Professor in the College of Education Mary Rice will guide the use of advanced technologies for teaching and teacher education as efforts to build pedagogical skills and increase subject matter knowledge.

Department of Education Grant Awarded to UNM

The University of New Mexico (UNM) has been selected as one of the recipients of the federal Open Textbook Grant for nearly $2.125 million dollars, recognizing its commitment to advancing education through Open Educational Resources (OER). With this grant funding, UNM will create the New Mexico Open Educational Resources (NMOER) Consortium to help faculty across the state to adopt open access materials.

About the grant, New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich, who has helped to secure funding to support this federal program through his role on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said, “I am pleased to now welcome this major investment to help UNM provide more cost-effective course materials to more students.”

The NMOER Consortium will allocate funding and resources to faculty at UNM, CNM, and SFCC. Read more in UNM's Newsroom.

UNM

As the flagship institution and consortium leader, UNM secured a transformative $2.125 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Open Textbooks Pilot Program in 2023, establishing the New Mexico OER (NMOER) Consortium. Through UNM’s University Libraries and OER Initiative, faculty receive comprehensive support to adopt, adapt, and create open-access teaching materials that align with academic freedom and instructional excellence.

UNM’s Pressbooks-hosted platform showcases a Faculty OER Guide and multiple OER textbooks crafted for courses across disciplines oer.unm.eduNM OER Consortium. By 2024–2025, the consortium’s efforts are projected to save students between $466,000 and $486,000, amplifying educational equity across the state.

Here is the OER at UNM video transcript.

CNM

In 2015, Central New Mexico Community College, or CNM, began its journey into creating affordable materials for students. The college has been supporting faculty creators with support and technical assistance through its Academic Technologies department, and it joined the NM OER Consortium in 2023 as one of its founding members.

ENMU

In 2022, Eastern New Mexico University Golden Library joined the Open Textbook Network and began offering basic OER workshops for faculty. Since the Fall of 2022, ENMU has trained 84 faculty and staff in OER basics, nearly half of the total full-time faculty at the institution. In 2023 ENMU administered a Student Textbook survey to examine the effect of the cost of textbooks on students. Survey data verified that ENMU students are struggling to afford expenses, including textbook costs. Joining the NM OER will allow ENMU to provide additional training and support to faculty.

NMOER consortium grant funding supports the university in addressing the high cost of traditional course materials by providing a second tier of OER training and support for faculty beyond the basics. This project supports faculty in the development of textbook alternatives through the adoption, adaptation or creation of OER. The purpose is to support Eastern New Mexico University faculty to author and publish high-quality, open-access course ancillary materials or textbooks for their courses, thereby reducing or eliminating the course material cost burden to students. Managed by the Library Director, the Eastern New Mexico University Faculty OER Publishing Project leverages OER training and support provided to faculty in order to eliminate or reduce financial barriers for students. It ensures free, immediate digital access to course texts and ancillary materials, while enabling faculty to customize materials to match their specific teaching objectives.

NNMC

Joining the New Mexico Open Educational Resources (NMOER) Consortium marks a significant step for Northern New Mexico College (NNMC) in enhancing student equity and academic flexibility. By aligning its 50+ diverse programs, from STEM and Nursing to the Arts and Film, with this statewide initiative, Northern can replace traditional, high-cost textbooks with free, high-quality open-access materials. This shift directly supports the college's "Northern Proud" mission of affordability, ensuring that students in vocational certificates and bachelor’s programs alike face fewer financial barriers to completion. 

See more info about NNMC joining the NMOER Consortium on Facebook, LinkedIn, Abiquiu News, Los Alamos Daily Post, and Newsbreak.

SFCC

While work had been done on OER at Santa Fe Community College as early as 2018, the campus saw an organized effort to bring together staff and faculty when an OER committee was formed in 2020. Through its work, the committee has provided and continues to provide campus-wide training opportunities to faculty to learn about OER and to understand the benefits to students. In 2022 the committee began working with Achieving the Dream (ATD) to provide training and consultation services for OER initiatives on the SFCC campus. This work with ATD will continue through 2024.

In 2022 the OER Committee’s work began to focus on supporting faculty with grant funds to transition classes from traditional textbooks to OER. These grants were funded through Title V and supported the transition of more than 20 classes from traditional textbooks to OER or no-cost text options. 

Beginning in Spring 2024 with the beginning of the partnership with UNM and CNM, SFCC has seen growing interest and ideas for creative projects across the disciplines. Through the NM OER consortium grant funding, is primarily supporting faculty grants allowing faculty to re-design courses with OER and create completely new content that will be used to create textbooks and create material for new courses.

SENMC

Southeast New Mexico College (SENMC) is committed to providing accessible, affordable, and high-quality educational opportunities to the diverse students and communities it serves. SENMC offers a number of degree and certificate programs, with a strong focus on student success, workforce development, and community engagement. As part of its commitment to college affordability, SENMC is embarking on its first OER initiative, piloting its First-Year Experience course with instructors developing an OER specifically to support students as they begin their college journey. This journey will also include faculty training, in collaboration with the NMOER consortium, in developing OER resources. This initiative marks an important first step in building a sustainable OER culture at SENMC.

NMOER 

The NMOER Consortium unites the University of New Mexico, Central New Mexico Community College, and Santa Fe Community College in a bold mission: making higher education more equitable, accessible, and affordable for all New Mexican learners. Backed by a generous $2.125 million federal grant, the consortium empowers faculty to adopt, adapt, and create open educational resources tailored to the needs of our diverse state.

• University of New Mexico leads the charge—sparking innovation through its OER initiative, serving as the consortium’s administrative backbone, and publishing open textbooks and guides via its Pressbooks hub.
• Central New Mexico Community College brings invaluable community-focused insights and drives OER integration across its classrooms.
• Santa Fe Community College extends our mission into regional communities, enriching instruction with culturally responsive, openly licensed materials.

In 2024 & 2025, UNM, SFCC, and CNM together saved students a total of $1,862,456.09, and we’re projected to save them even more each year.