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High textbook costs continue to prove a barrier to college for some students, with some studies showing that many students skip textbook purchases even if they worry it’ll harm their grades because of the price tag.

These days low-cost alternatives known as Open Educational Resources, or OER, are getting a boost as a potential solution. Last week, for example, Lumen Learning, a company that sells low-cost OER textbooks and courseware, announced it received a $5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant will help Lumen bring together the company’s three separate platforms for humanities, professional development and online homework management, executives from the company say. Officials plan to make an OER Statistics 101 course available by 2023.

The company is among OER providers that argue that OER can be a tool in making higher education more equitable, by making sure that economically disadvantaged students have the materials to succeed in courses like statistics that serve as gateways to lucrative professions.

In 2020, Lumen acquired Faculty Guild, a coaching company for instructors, now called Lumen Circles. The purchase has enabled Lumen to be particularly sensitive to designing for the adjunct experience, which has an outsized impact on the student populations they’re focused on, Lumen CEO Kim Thanos says.

According to its executives, that puts the company at odds with the rest of the market, which Lumen argues is moving towards using more automation that pulls teachers out of the experience with students.

“We’re really running counter to that by trying to embed the relationship between the faculty member and the students more deeply,” says David Wiley, chief academic officer of Lumen. “A lot of the things that are happening in the platform and features are things to connect students to faculty, so that they can have different kinds of conversations.”

Meanwhile, some OER offerings have lacked bells and whistles that improve student experience, which some professors want, says Niraj Kaji, CEO of Akademos, an online bookstore platform. But if companies like Lumen can successfully provide access to additional OER content that's high quality and free or low cost it will certainly reduce inequity, Kaji indicated.