Affordable Learning $olutions

ECE480: A combination of cost-saving strategies!

The project Professor Ruting Jia implemented AL$ was for ECE480 Fundamentals of Control Systems. Her previous textbook is “Modern Control Systems”, Richard Dorf and Robert Bishop, 12th ed, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13- 602458-0. Her current material--Theories are from OER, design examples covered by the instructor's note, HW assignments are still from the previous textbook but under 10% which is free for students to access. Students save 100% on textbooks for this course. According to the bookstore's most recent quote, the textbook is $296.47 per copy including tax. With 30 students enrolled in the session that she usually teaches, the total amount of saving is $8597.63. ECE480 is one of the core course required for Electrical Engineering major students offered once per semester sometimes even in Summer. The students usually take the class in their senior year. Most of them will graduate the same semester or the following semester after taking the class. 

Theories covered in this course are the fundamentals of control systems, which are very well covered by open education resources (OER). Design is a major component in this course, thus real world application is a good demonstration for how to apply the theories in the actual design. The instructor carefully selected examples cover a broad range of applications. She is still use the previous selected textbook for under 10% for the HW assignments. Therefore the textbooks shouldn't be mandatory for this course.

When asked about students feedbacks regarding OERs, Professor Jia shared: "The students like how diverse the OERs are, and they even explore more on their own for the same subject that we are on. Some students prefer the different perspectives of explaining things from OERs."

She also gave reflected on this AL$ experience and shared the following two valuable pieces of advice

• When using the same textbooks over and over again, the instructor often is less motivated to change the course materials and tends to stay with the old examples, notes, HW assignments etc. Majority of the contents-- the good ones still stay while when using OER, some new perspectives are merged in as well. This new version of the course design turns out to be more efficient and updated. 
• Plus with the carefully designed and picked applications added on top of the updated fundamentals, the course bridges the gap in between theories from the text and real world applications which is essential for the students who plan to go to industries right after graduation and stay within the same area. 
• The initial amount of work to convert from the previous text to the OERs could be a lot, and 100% of saving may not work for all the disciplines. And it might take couple of semesters' students' performance assessment to finalize the ratio. However, once the conversion is done and implemented for couple of times, it wouldn't be hard to maintain it as well as keep it updated.