Studying in the Saint Mary’s library: One great advantage of this project is it will reduce costs for students enrolled in courses that use the new materials./ Photo by Francis Tatem
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, visit the Open Educational Resources at Saint Mary’s College 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.
Information sessions and a call for faculty applicants across all four institutions will be announced in Spring semester 2023. For more information about this project, contact Swetta Abeyta, Digital Initiatives librarian, at sba2@stmarys-ca.edu.
About the St. Albert Hall Library
The Saint Mary’s College Library is a cornerstone of the College’s vibrant academic community. The Library supports and enables intellectual discovery, knowledge creation and dissemination, and academic learning and research. We partner with faculty to help students develop the skills to find and use information creatively and responsibly as lifelong learners.
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