Community College of Aurora Champions Equity with Innovative Open Educational Resources Initiative

AURORA, Colo. — The Community College of Aurora (CCA) is being recognized for its effort to make education more inclusive and affordable by taking a forward-thinking approach to study materials with Open Educational Resources (OER). The initiative is focused on supplementing costly traditional textbooks with free, accessible, and adaptable materials. The team working on this content calls it transformational for student success.

OER are free, open-access teaching and learning materials that can be adapted based on student needs. Educators can customize materials for their classes. Because those materials are copyrighted like traditional books, they can be shared, changed, and updated when necessary.

Robin Schofield is the Executive Director of the Dr. Linda Speier Bowman Teaching and Learning Transformation Hub at CCA. She and her team were recently invited to present at the 2025 OER Conference at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Their presentation received the highest score from the OER committee and was praised as the strongest and most compelling.

The team developed a first-of-its-kind style guide to help faculty access and assess inclusivity and educational value of their texts. Departments from various disciplines took part in the process.

“In particular, with goals around cultural relevance, student learning, and engagement, this initiative not only provides a style guide but also creates space for faculty to collaborate and engage with one another in community colleges,” Schofield said.

One standout element of CCA’s approach, Schofield says, is open pedagogy, a student-centered teaching strategy that invites learners to help review, adapt, or even create educational materials. This model increases student engagement by honoring their voices, experiences, and cultural backgrounds.

To further support this vision, CCA recently hired a national expert in culturally responsive OER pedagogy to help develop a groundbreaking style guide. The guide equips instructors with practical tools and examples for evaluating and enhancing educational materials through an equity lens. Unlike many existing resources, which often focus on K-12 education, CCA’s guide is uniquely tailored to its local community and college-level instruction.

Heather Lang, Director of the Academic Professional Development Department, said, “What we needed to create was something that was reflective of our community and responded to our students’ cultural backgrounds and cultural knowledge. There were a few things we based off of that, and some things we built from, but there was nothing as comprehensive as what we created. This is still a really unique document because it’s trying to speak directly to our community and meet our community’s needs.”