SMC faculty will team up to create teaching and learning materials across multiple disciplines that are free of cost and access barriers.
Saint Mary’s College of California, along with three California Catholic Universities, has received a $1,533,300 grant from the U.S. Department of Education to lead a three-year initiative to support the creation and use of open educational resources (OER) across four California private institutions.
Librarians from LMU, Saint Mary’s College of California, Santa Clara University, and the University of San Francisco will use the funds to recruit, incentivize, and prepare up to twelve faculty teams to adapt, create, and publish OER that integrate diverse, equitable, inclusive, and anti-racist resources into high-enrollment courses across multiple disciplines. The William H. Hannon Library at LMU will administer the grant in collaboration with an inter-institutional project team of librarians from all four institutions.
Replacing commercial course materials with these new OER has the potential to save at least 6,000 students more than $500,000 in the first year of adoption alone.
Replacing commercial course materials with these new OER has the potential to save at least 6,000 students more than $500,000 in the first year of adoption alone. OER are teaching and learning materials that are free of cost and access barriers, that additionally provide legal permission for open use. For more information about OER, please view this OER guide.
Ultimately, this project will reduce costs for students enrolled in courses that use these materials, increase faculty capacity to create and promote OER in their disciplines, and add new content to the growing body of OER that can be adapted and freely used by educators to further integrate the principles of diversity, equity, justice, and inclusion into their curriculum.
The OER for Social Justice project builds upon work that St. Albert Hall Library has been implementing through the Open Access/Open Educational Resources Committee (OA/OER Committee). Since 2019, the OA/OER Committee has sought to educate SMC faculty about OER. In an effort to encourage faculty involvement with OER, the OA/OER Committee has provided 15 faculty members with grants to review open textbooks and adapt or adopt OER into their courses. Running concurrently with the OER for Social Justice grant are current OER grants that allow faculty to discover and become familiar with open textbooks in their subject areas.
For more information about the grant, please see the OER for Social Justice page. For more information about this project, contact Swetta Abeyta, Digital Initiatives librarian, at sba2@stmarys-ca.edu.
Read more here: SPARC Open Textbook Grant
The SMC Library is offering an extension of open textbook stipends to faculty in Spring 2023 to review an open textbook from the Open Textbook Library. This grant has another component: If faculty decide that they wish to adopt any open textbook into their curriculum, they will qualify for an additional stipend for adopting an OER. For more information, please view our Google slides presentation from Dec. 2022.
The grant, in partnership with Loyola Marymount University (LMU), allows for faculty from SMC and faculty from LMU to publish a review of a textbook in the Open Textbook Library in exchange for a $300 stipend.
The SMC Library offered an Open Textbook Creation Grant in Summer 2022 for faculty to create or adapt an open textbook as a Saint Mary's College course textbook.
Librarians supported faculty participants in creating or adapting open textbooks via a grant cohort workshop, meetings, and optional individual consultations. The Library was able to offer a $500 grant per faculty member, thanks to a generous donation to the Library.
Faculty attended a 2-day workshop led by an OER expert trainer and librarians. In this workshop, faculty learned where/how to find resources to adapt (modify or remix) or create an open textbook for a course they teach. At the completion of the workshop, faculty submitted a plan/outline for their OER textbook.
Registration is now closed. Deadline to register was April 15, 2022.
Jasmine Roberts-Crews has delivered numerous keynote presentations across the country on the topics of inclusion in open education, and is the author of the highly-rated, openly-licensed book Writing for Strategic Communication Industries.
The SMC Library offered open textbook stipends to faculty in Spring 2022 to review an open textbook from the Open Textbook Library.
The grant, in partnership with Loyola Marymount University (LMU), allowed for 15 faculty from SMC and 15 faculty from LMU to publish a review of a textbook in the Open Textbook Library in exchange for a $250 stipend.
Registration is now closed. Deadline to register for the grant was February 10th, 2022.
The SMC Library offered Open Textbook Grants in Spring 2021 to review, adopt, or adapt an open textbook.
Librarians supported participants in finding, adapting, and adopting open textbooks via grant cohort meetings and optional individual consultations. A total pool of $5,000 was available for these grants, thanks to a generous donation to the Library.
Share any materials you create with this grant for free and open reuse on an OER website and the SMC institutional repository
Registration is now closed. Deadline to register for the grant was February 14th, 2021.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
