FCT Cohorts

The benefits of using OER resources would be felt by my department and program in addition to my course. A culture of open education that supports equality and access to education for all students can be created by adopting OER materials, which may inspire other teachers in my field to do the same.

By promoting equity and access to education and resources, offering a student-centered approach to teaching, and enhancing the quality of teaching materials and practices, adopting an OER textbook in my course will support several pedagogical goals and have a significant impact on my students, department, and program.

Rather than assigning two or more textbooks, OER will allow me to provide brief introductions or deeper study materials depending on the exact topics we are focusing upon in class. Indeed, I believe the use of OER will assist me in my desire to backwards design my course towards specific learning objectives and student outcomes.

Using OER texts with their associated problem sets and assessments would assist the student in multiple ways. Providing easily accessed links and materials that meet different styles of learning should enhance student’s use of study strategies and review. The idea is that this should lead to less stress and more learning. In addition, I would like to include data sets and examples that are less ethnocentric and alienating than some of the ones from my current assigned texts. Adapting examples to research questions and data of interest to each class would help them better engage with the material and feel greater autonomy and efficacy regarding their statistical knowledge.

Honors Environmental Science and Sustainability (HSEV 101) has historically been taught by a faculty in the chemistry department but as of Fall 2025, the course will be taught by two engineering faculty - Dr. Rebecca Kiriazes and Dr. Jason Davison in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

When starting to develop and update curriculum Environmental Science and Sustainability, the team came across a number of OERs that were preferred over the "original" textbook. In addition to providing excellent content, an OER would reduce the student financial burden and provide further access to content.

My pedagogical goal is to support student learning and to build students' knowledge and skills in geography in a manner that is relevant to their lives and to enrich their understanding of the world in which they live. I hope to have meaningful exchanges with my students and also have them interact with one another to promote collective learning.

I know that the high cost of textbooks places a huge burden on students. I hope that by eliminating the affordability barrier, students will be freed from financial worries and be able to focus on gaining knowledge not just from textbooks but also through experiential learning. I know that my department and George Washington University is concerned about the high costs of textbooks and would welcome having open source materials made freely available to students.

My OER project is driven by and inspired by my passion for public interest technology, open pedagogies, and social justice in terms of equal access to education. My interactive modules will teach students how to analyze films, particularly the themes of race and gender in Shakespeare films.

Adaptations, by virtue of their intertextuality, can help students develop radical listening skills. Adaptations invite multiple, sometimes conflicting, perspectives on the same stories. Radical listening is a set of proactive communication strategies to listen for the roots of stories that give voice to the tale. Instead of looking for the what in the plot of Shakespeare, students, using this strategy, can examine the why in characters’ motivation and behaviors.

My interest in Open Educational Resources (OER) is driven by a deep commitment to making education accessible, equitable, and engaging for all students. The traditional cost barriers associated with higher education—specifically the high cost of textbooks—significantly impede student access to required materials, affecting their ability to succeed in their studies.

The OER movement represents a transformative shift towards inclusivity and equity in education, aligning with my personal and professional values. It is the opportunity to directly impact students’ academic success and retention that has inspired me to pursue the integration of OER into my teaching practices.”

Contract casebooks are ridiculously expensive. The list price for my casebook is $335… But the law doesn't change very quickly. As such, I've long used an older edition of this book. But the 7th edition books have begun to become hard to find. As a result, I was faced with a choice. I could adopt the newest book (or maybe a more recent but still not new edition), in which case I'd likely have the same problem again in a few years. Or I could find a better solution.

Open access seems like a better solution because the book will always be free and always be available. Besides, as my course evolves, it will be easy to update the material to reflect changes in the law without forcing students to buy updated editions of the book.

The main pedagogical goal of this project is providing our Calc1 students with the most modern possible format for a textbook (notice that, if this works well, we will go on and do the same with Calc2, Calc3 and Precalculus). The free, online and open source ActiveCalculus textbook we chose is written in 'pretext' (https://pretextbook.org/), a format that allows to be modified easily and allows to include in its pages all kind of multimedia and 'alive code', namely code able to run within the page and create on the fly pictures and animations. No 'old style' textbook can achieve this. Moreover, 'pretext' books support interfacing with WebWork (https://openwebwork.org/), allowing an easy interface for the lecturer and the student to the most advanced, free and open source math homework platform.

On top of this, the textbook will be free of charge. Notice also that the book will be accessible online anytime from all kinds of devices (PCs, tablets, smartphones). If needed, the textbook will be tailored to our needs, making even more visible the efforts of our Department to provide the best service possible to our students. From the Department point of view, it will mean to have full control over the contents and the format of the textbook.

Given the dynamic nature of drug information, traditional textbooks often become outdated upon publication, posing challenges for students and instructors alike. Moreover, the course objectives emphasize the importance of interpreting and evaluating pharmaceutical data from various sources, including primary literature, to address medication-related problems effectively. This underscores the need for readily accessible and up-to-date resources, which OER can provide.

Furthermore, the instructional methodology of the course emphasizes active learning through lectures, discussions, demonstrations, and group assignments. OER materials offer flexibility and adaptability, allowing students to engage with diverse learning resources that align with their learning styles and the course objectives. By adopting OER for this course, we aim to enhance student learning experiences, promote critical thinking skills, and foster collaboration among students and faculty members.

I attended a workshop and was immediately impressed by how well OER fit the needs of the radiation therapy program. There are limited academic textbooks and educational resources covering the fundamentals of radiation therapy. Commercial textbooks focus on radiologic sciences as they primarily relate to diagnostic imaging. The Open Textbook Library has textbooks in the field of radiology licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted.

My interest in OER materials started when I was in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. As a PhD student, I was an instructor in the Portuguese Language Program. The director of the program developed an OER site titled ClicaBrasil, which I and the other instructors were then trained to incorporate into the program courses. That experience with ClicaBrasil demonstrated to me the effectiveness of using OERs in the university classroom, in particular with developing pedagogical materials that are tailored to the needs of a specific course or program.

The course will focus on the historical role Black people played in shaping our current higher education system and the policies that govern this system, as well as how the enduring role of slavery and race shapes the structures, processes, and practices of higher education and its leaders.

This course will yield several meaningful impacts. First OER materials will replace costly print textbooks formerly utilized for this course. Most textbooks on higher education administration and governance cost between $45-$90. Second, this course redesign will not offer new insight into an understudied but very significant area that needs to be addressed if educational equity is to be achieved, while also utilizing OER learning tools and resources to increase awareness and engagement for improved digital learning for the students enrolled as well as reduce their cost burden. Finally, this course redesign will increase awareness of subject matter knowledge related to the role of Black Americans, slavery, and racism in the development of American history, policy, and higher education practice.

Teaching at an HBCU after having taught at PWI's, I see a stark difference in the ability of students to afford textbook materials. I was deeply impacted by the large number of students for whom book purchase is a significant financial barrier. I believe that OER will be a game changer in providing equity to students from underserved communities.

As an introductory comparative politics class, I want to ensure that the students are able to walk-away with certain key concepts (state, democracy, political violence inter alia) in mind. These concepts structure different and similar political behaviors across the world and as such they are important for understanding the different country cases assigned to them. With that being said, the proposed OER adoption has the potential to convey this message while also providing good evaluation measures which I will combine with other existing ones that are embedded in the course.

In terms of the students, I want them to not be limited by the sometimes prohibitive costs of college textbooks which they might only use for one course. At the departmental level I hope that this successful adoption will persuade other professors to make their courses more accessible with OER materials in order to improve academic performance and general learning outcomes related to political science broadly understood. Ultimately, this move is a small step in the right direction to ensure that education is an equitable platform for all parties involved, especially struggling students (a background that I can certainly relate to).

There is a shortage of mental health care professionals in the United States. While this leads to difficulty with care access across the country, some populations have critically-low access to care. Medically-underserved populations (MUPs) are defined as populations with a lack of access to primary care services, including mental health care. These populations include, but are not limited to: rural, homeless, low income, indigenous populations, and others. Sadly, the populations with the least amount of access to care are often the ones that need it the most.

Medically-underserved populations are at an increased risk for trauma and interpersonal/domestic violence across the lifespan. Many counselors and other allied mental health professionals are not adequately trained to work with these high-risk populations. The Mental Health Treatment of Trauma and Violence course will provide social, developmental, and mental health treatment implications for trauma and interpersonal violence in children, adolescents, adults. The course will integrate information about cultural implications for high-risk populations (i.e. LGBT, youth, homeless, low SES, and cultural/racial disparities) and common mental health issues (i.e. homelessness, substance use, psychiatric issues).

The goal of this project is to reduce the cost of textbooks for students and to enhance the learning experience of strategy with quality material and free access.

The team reviewing and implementing the OER textbook reviewed and piloted the textbook with the intention to 1. save students money on textbook purchases, and 2. maintain a high level of rigor in our materials. As discussed earlier, our review of the three textbooks found that the OER textbook did not lack any critical information or lose any substantial depth. Students have been responding positively to the textbook and there hasn't been any negative feedback on the book.

As for the financial impact, this has been especially well received by our students. Marymount University caters to many underserved students and is a HSU in particular. As such, student dropouts and disengagement for financial reasons is a very real challenge. Offering a freely available textbook in this course has been very appreciated by students and I am comfortable that all my students have the most current version of the proper class textbook.

Aspiring to serve students who are experiencing financial challenge is admirable but creating sustainable, no-cost learning resources for these students moves good intentions to actions that will have predictable and tangible benefit not only for these students but also for the community of learning at large. Our project intended to do just this while at the same time streamlining content and permitting ease of updates to support student engagement, inquiry and success.

OER provided a venue for compiling the vast amount of information about Maternal Newborn Nursing to our students. Understanding there are many different learning styles, we were able to bring in images, videos, and graphics with succinct text. The online format was a tool that most students are familiar with; instead of spending hours searching for information that may not be useful or clinically based, we could lead them in a direction that was clinically sound and evidence-based.