Over the last five years, some OER providers and traditional textbook publishers have begun offering paid ancillary content intended to pair with OER.^[3] If you aren’t certain about using only open materials in your course, this option might be a good place to start, since it lets you test out open textbooks along with advanced, paid ancillary content. However, we recommend that you discuss your options with an instructional designer, OER expert, and the campus bookstore before choosing one of these platforms for your course.

Lumen Learning Online Homework Manager

Lumen Learning has been a major partner in the open education movement since the early 2000s. In fact, David Wiley, the author of the 5 Rs of open content, is also one of the founders for Lumen Learning. Besides offering comprehensive open textbooks, Lumen also offers 3 paid platforms that supplement their open content: Candela, Waymaker, and Online Homework Manager (OHM). For this section, we will focus on OHM.

Lumen OHM is a customizable, interactive homework manager for mathematics courses. It provides support for courses in Prealgebra, Algebra, Precalculus, Calculus, Chemistry, Finite Math, Math for Liberal Arts, Statistics, and Trigonometry. Lumen Ohm costs $25 per student per course.

Rover by OpenStax

OpenStax is a provider of both open and paid content. One of their newer content platforms is Rover by OpenStax, a tool that provides mathematics homework to supplement the OpenStax textbooks for Algebra and Trigonometry, Precalculus, and College Algebra.

Rover is designed to help students master mathematical problems in an interactive interface. The tool automatically grades assignments and provides feedback to students as they complete problems. Rover costs $22 per student per course.

Intellus Open Courses

Managed by Macmillan, Intellus Open Courses is a commercial tool that brings together open content and publisher-produced content into a curated set of course materials.^[4] These curated courses include OER (usually OpenStax textbooks), primary source content, assessments, and interactive content such as quizzes and videos. Intellus Open Courses cost $15 per student per course.^[5]

In this chapter, we looked into a few options for accessing ancillary content you can pair with OER online, including both open and commercial materials. In the next chapter, we’ll look into how your students can access your course’s OER in print, and why you might want to consider that option as well.