Open Educational Resources (OERs) at Saint Mary's College

This guide is an introduction to Open Educational Resources and how to find, evaluate, use, and adapt OER materials to help reduce textbook costs.

OER for Social Justice - Open Textbook Pilot Grant

Saint Mary’s Partners with Loyola Marymount on $1.5 Million Department of Education Open Textbooks Pilot Grant

 

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

 

2023 Grants

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.

Requirements:

  • Saint Mary's College ranked faculty, visiting faculty, and salaried adjuncts are eligible to apply.
  • Faculty will be able to review an open textbook from the Open Textbook Library. Please reach out to Swetta Abeyta at sba2@stmarys-ca.edu to receive a link to post the review. Once the review is posted, faculty will receive a $300 stipend. 
  • In order to receive the additional $200 to adopt an open textbook, the resource does not have to be from the Open Textbook Library. 

Deadlines: 

  • To allow faculty to review within their work loads, the OA/OER Committee is allowing rolling deadlines of January 27th, March 31st and Mary 26th 2023. 

  

Past Events

Summer 2022: Open Textbook Creation Grant

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.

Meetings:

  • June 1, 2022 9:30-11:30 AM - Pedagogy workshop (Virtual meeting): Faculty attended a workshop led by OER trainer, Jasmine Roberts-Crews.
  • June 2, 2022 9:30-11:30 AM - Community of practice working session: Faculty collaborated and conducted hands-on research for their OER textbook. Sarah Vital taught an introduction to using Pressbooks, an open book creation platform.

Registration is now closed. Deadline to register was April 15, 2022.

About the Trainer

Jasmine Roberts-CrewsJasmine 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.


Spring 2022: SMC/LMU Faculty Grant

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.

Requirements:

  • Faculty attended one online workshop offered on two dates:
    • February 16th, 1-2:30 pm
    • February 17th, 3-4:40 pm
  • Faculty submitted a review of an open textbook from the Open Textbook Library by March 21st, 2022.

Registration is now closed. Deadline to register for the grant was February 10th, 2022.


Summer 2021: Open Textbook Grants

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.

Options:

  • Review an open textbook ($250 grant): find an open textbook related to the subjects you teach and post a review of at least 250 words on Open Textbook Library or related site
  • Adopt an open textbook as is ($500 grant): find an open textbook for a course you teach 
  • Adapt an open textbook for your course ($1000 grant): modify or remix an open textbook for a course you teach

Required virtual meetings:

  • 1-hour cohort training at the beginning of the program to learn about open textbooks and how to find, review, and modify them
  • 1-hour mid-semester cohort check-in
  • 1-hour end-of-semester cohort check-in to present your work

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.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.