Blown away by open textbook remixing for my community college class

I teach intro biology at a community college and was tired of students struggling with the $180 textbook. Last semester I found OpenStax and started remixing their chapters with local ecosystem examples from the Puget Sound area. My students actually pointed out how the salmon lifecycle section finally made sense when it used our local rivers. Has anyone else tried adapting OER materials to their own region? I'm curious if it helped engagement or if I just got lucky with this group.

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mitchell.mark18d ago

That is exactly what happened with my geology class last spring. I swapped out the generic desert examples from the standard OER chapters for our local Cascade mountain formations and the Columbia River basalts. Sure, the core concepts were the same, but the students actually started arguing about the best hiking spots to see the rock layers in person. Attendance went up, and more people showed up to office hours just to talk about the local stuff. It felt like the material clicked because it was their world, not some far away textbook world. You are not lucky, you found a way to make the science real for them.