CONGRATULATIONS!

Adelaide Akers and Chad Wiley (Mathematics and Economics)

"I plan to create a set of notes (which can perhaps eventually be fleshed out into a book) to use in MA 701 Mathematical Proofs. In the past I have used a number of resources, some traditional textbooks and some resources created by faculty, to support that course. But no combinations of books or worksheets has ever covered exactly the material I want in exactly the way I want. So I’m using the CRAIG grant to support writing my own custom course materials to use this spring." ~Chad Wiley

Danielle Ami-Narh (Nimako) (Counselor Education)

Antonina Bauman (Business)

"For the project based on compilation – finding open educational resources and compiling them for a course – write an outline of all lectures first. Make sure that you start with the reference to the previous material and show how and why you move to the next topic. Once you have main points listed, start your search focusing on those main points as it helps to filter search results. Beware of quality of publications. Expand your search to sources developed in Canada and Great Britain as they lead in the field of the open educational resources (at least in my subject area). However, be prepared to face linguistic challenges of the British English language. Overall, compilation takes a lot of time and patience as you sift through a myriad of sources. Plan accordingly." ~Antonina Bauman

Rebecca Rodriguez-Carey (Sociology, Anthropology, Crime & Delinquency Studies)

Stewart Gardner (Biological Sciences)

"I adopted an OER for the Human Health Microbiology course. The previous textbook cost students about $200 each and I thought an OER would make the class less of a financial burden for the students. I have worked to update my lectures using the OER and have found that the content is more than sufficient, but I need to work to organize it into a more cohesive flow of information for my lectures. One of the biggest challenges has been deciding what information to

cover, as the OER is quite comprehensive and has too much information to cover in a single semester. I have appreciated the experience to evaluate what I would like students to learn and how to best teach that. I think the students have appreciated having a resource that is very informative but not cost prohibitive." ~Stewart Gardner

Jasmine Linabary (Communication)

"With the support of a CRAIG grant, I, along with an undergraduate student contributor, edited and compiled a free open access textbook for Small Group Communication (SP 315), a required course for communication majors. The previously used textbook cost between $80 and 100 for students to purchase. The new open access textbook, Small Group Communication: Forming and Sustaining Teams, was created using Pressbooks, an easy-to-use book publishing platform that makes the text accessible in a variety of formats for students in addition to the public e-book, including multiple e-reader options and downloadable PDF versions that can be printed and bound by the University Copy Center at cost. Content in this textbook is adapted and remixed from a variety of open educational resources including those from OpenStax, University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing, The Noba Project, and Wikibooks, among others. This textbook as a whole is made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license unless otherwise specified in the individual chapter." ~Jasmine Linabary

Thomas Mahoney (Mathematics and Economics)

"MA735 Advanced Calculus I. For this course, I found a free textbook by Jiri Lebl that is available as a PDF to download or as an HTML webpage. One of the benefits of using a free textbook is that I can use the Perusall service that integrates with Canvas. Perusall is also free and provides students with the ability to collaboratively highlight, annotate, and discuss readings that I assign from the textbook. It’s especially well-suited to mathematics because it natively supports LaTeX, which is the standard way of typesetting math notation. Perusall has been and continues to be a great success. Students highlight the text and start discussion threads. They fill in the details of the proofs, discuss solutions to unassigned homework problems, and ask about connections to material outside of the class. Perusall has been so good at encouraging careful reading of the text that each semester, my students will find typos for the author to fix for the next version.

The other major component of my OER implementation is the creation of lecture videos. I wanted accessibility to be a point of emphasis, so my goal was to create captioned videos. I discovered that captioning after the fact was more work than writing a script ahead of time. So this semester, I am writing scripts and recording videos using OBS. Youtube can automatically sync the text script to the recorded video. Students have commented on the presence of the captions and love the added clarity, especially with the math notation in the captions." ~Thomas Mahoney

Erika Martin (Biological Sciences)

"GB101 was using traditional "cookbook" style lab manuals. Each week students would follow procedures, fill out the tables and follow directions, and each week was a "new" topic. Topics were taught as isolated content. My proposal was to run the classroom as one big experiment. This can be described as an inquiry-based, CURE, storyline style, or flipped classroom approach. The students would be introduced to a phenomenon of some variety and lab time would be used to ask questions, come up with hypotheses, and design and run experiments to test their explanations. The semester would be split in half; one half covering ecology-based phenomena and the second half microbiology based phenomena. The introduced phenomena cover topics like nutrient cycling, life cycles, population and community dynamics, evolution, and more. COVID put a hold on this format, unfortunately, so I was only able to partially introduce this style in spring 2020. My hope is to refine what I was able to implement and build on it for future courses. GB101 is typically taught by graduate teaching assistants; many of whom have zero prior teaching experience. This has been the biggest hurdle. " ~Erika Martin

Jennifer Moss (Psychology)

"I have been a big supporter of open educational resources for years, and during my first semester teaching my CRAIG course, PY 211 Lifespan Development for Education Majors, I knew I wanted to switch the text to OER by the next fall. I began looking for alternative textbooks to use, combing websites and reviewing texts.

As I was not creating an entirely new textbook for my students, I sought one that was accurate, approachable, and visually appealing. I reviewed several texts and I learned that often, a text is created but not updated again, leaving behind a copy that looked dated and in some cases was out-of-date as well.

I found a text that was written by one author and adapted by another, all under the Creative Commons licensing so that I was also free to use it. I am using the web version created by the second author because the interface is clean and organized and the material is well-organized and accurate.

I am supplementing this text with a wide variety of resources that I have been creating and curating over the past year as well. I am creating study guides for the different modules, both as a handout that students can use to review from, but also in a version that they can use to quiz themselves. In later times, these will also be made into laminated handouts that we can use during class. The resources that I’m supplementing the text with include videos and accessible articles that extend the material in the text and help focus our attention on how this material is important for future teachers." ~Jennifer Moss

Emily Vardell and Andrew Smith (SLIM)

Jun Yu (Business)

"I teach a graduate-level marketing course for our MBA program. It has been a struggle for quite some time to find a suitable textbook for this course since most textbooks on the market are too basic and do not go deep enough for graduate students. However, basic information is still needed because students in this class come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some have taken marketing classes before, or have worked as a business executive, whereas others have no exposure to this subject area. This wide variety of student background adds to the difficulty in selecting a textbook.

For my OER project for this course, I try to find materials that give me the balance of providing basic coverage and giving students more in-depth knowledge. For the materials that provide the basic coverage as an introduction to marketing, I complied a set of YouTube video that nicely introduce this area to students without any prior exposure to marketing. After students go through the basic materials very quickly early in the term, I use a list of reading materials, mostly from the Harvard Business Review, for students to get into more advanced topics. The articles are not short but also not overly long. Two articles are assigned each week." ~Jun Yu

Qiyang Zhang (Physical Sciences)

"I would like to give some feedback. I chose to adopt an open textbook from Openstax.com, for chemistry II course (CH126). The open textbook has very similar content and sequence of the chapters compared to old textbook. I also decided not using online homework system for this course. Instead, I design the homework and quiz for this course in Canvas. I can definitely share these content with other faculty who will teach Chemistry II in the future. In this way, it not only saved students for using open textbook, and also saved money by using online HW and quiz in Canvas. I will send out survey to students, and gather information from students about how they feel about using OER. At least, I did not hear students complain about how expensive the textbook/HW system are, I did not hear students complain about they cannot get full credits even they type the correct answers online. I think students mostly like the simplicity of the OER, I would recommend other faculty to use it." ~Qiyang Zhang

Joyce Zhou (Business)

"The goal is to adopt and adapt some existing OER materials, adapt existing materials, or even create my own materials in the future." ~Joyce Zhou