UT Signature OER Projects

UTA Student Government OER Outreach

Since 2017, UTA Student Government has played an active role in shaping OER outreach and encouraging the use of affordable course content across campus. Student government representatives have collected data on the impact of course material costs, presented on OER to various audiences, and advocated for price transparency at the UT System level. This video features Katie Gosa, 2017-18 Student Body President and psychology/history double major at UT Arlington, who presented on OER at TEDxUTA in April 2018. 

OER for Transportation Planning

In December 2020, UTA received one of only four grants from the U.S. Department of Education’s Open Textbook Pilot Program. Funded at $582,322, the grant will develop OER for transportation planning graduate students, in partnership with Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo and the University of South Florida.

UTA CARES Grant Program

In October 2019, a notable institutional investment in the amount of $500,000 was made to OER efforts at UT Arlington, making it the largest commitment by any public academic institution in Texas.  The investment funds the UTA CARES Grant Program that was established by UTA Libraries in 2017 and provides OER adoption stipends and scale and innovation grants to improve student success and college affordability.  To date, the UTA CARES Grant Program has funded 28 OER projects impacting each college and school at UT Arlington. 

One notable project was led by Dr. Habib Ahmari, Assistant Professor in UTA Department of Civil Engineering, who received a UTA CARES Innovation Grant in 2018 to develop an OER for an applied fluid mechanics lab. Dr. Ahmari worked with students to develop instructional videos used in a flipped classroom model, along with a manual and worksheets for ten experiments. Applied Fluid Mechanics Lab Manual has been viewed nearly 240,000 times, downloaded approximately 1,500 and adopted at numerous other institutions; the videos have been viewed over 75,000 times on YouTube. In his final report, Dr. Ahmari noted that course grades improved with the transition to OER while the time student spent preparing for class decreased significantly. The OER has saved UTA students approximately $30,000 since it was piloted in Fall 2018. 

OER Outreach Working Group 

UT Austin Libraries created an OER Outreach Working Group with members from UT Libraries, COERRL, Texas Digital Libraries (TDL), and UT Austin faculty. These partners are an integral part of this group. COERLL works nationally but is located at UT, and as a result of COERLL’s work, many of the faculty on our campus who are aware of and have embraced open initiatives are from the languages departments. As we expand campus conversations about OER, we are relying heavily on our partners at COERLL to share experiences and strategies they have used. TDL is a consortium of academic libraries that builds capacity for digital scholarship and supports open access initiatives in higher education. TDL also co-hosted a statewide OER summit for Texas institutions as part of an ongoing interest in spreading information about OER. 

Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) Projects 

The Center for Open Educational Resources & Language Learning (COERLL) is one of 16 National Foreign Language Resource Centers (LRC’s) funded by the U.S. Department of Education. The overall mission of these federally-funded centers is to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages by producing resources (materials and best practices) that can be profitably employed in a variety of settings.

COERLL’s work is organized around seven basic areas:

• Applied linguistic research
• Teaching materials
• Language assessment
• Teacher development
• Less commonly taught languages
• K-12 initiatives
• Outreach and dissemination

The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project 

The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project is a data entry site, built in Drupal, for the Digital Yoknapatawpha Project. Theresa M. Towner is Ashbel Smith professor of literary studies at The University of Texas at Dallas. She has published extensively on Faulkner and on African American literature and theory in The Faulkner Journal, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Quarterly and other venues. Her books on Faulkner include Faulkner on the Color Line: The Later Novels, Reading Faulkner: Collected Stories (with James B. Carothers), and The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner. With Peter Lurie, she is co-editor of The Faulkner Journal. 

The American Yawp: A Massively Collaborative Open U.S. History Textbook 

The American Yawp is a collaboratively built, open American history textbook designed for general readers and college-level history courses. Over three hundred academic historians—scholars and experienced college-level instructors—have come together and freely volunteered their expertise to help democratize the American past for twenty-first century readers. The project is freely accessible online at www.AmericanYawp.com, and in addition to providing a peer review of the text, Stanford University Press has partnered with The American Yawp to publish a low-cost print edition. Furthermore, The American Yawp remains an evolving, collaborative text: you are encouraged to help us improve by offering comments on our feedback page, available through AmericanYawp.com. 
 
The American Yawp is a fully open resource: you are encouraged to use it, download it, distribute it, and modify it as you see fit. The project is formally operated under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA) License and is designed to meet the standards of a “Free Cultural Work.” 

Joseph Locke & Ben Wright, editors. 

2019-2020 OER/Affordable Course Materials Research Cohort 

In September 2019, UT El Paso launched its inaugural 2019-2020 OER/Affordable Course Materials Research Cohort. This initiative included a competitive process to select 18 faculty to curate or create affordable resources. Participants receive $3,000 for OER professional development or to purchase technology that will facilitate their OER work. During 2019-2020, students saved nearly $200,000 in textbook costs. Approval from the Institutional Review Board has been secured to study the impact of this OER project on student success outcomes and faculty satisfaction with OER materials. 

OpenStax Institutional Partner Program  

UTRGV has been accepted into the OpenStax Institutional Partner Program for 2020-2021. The OpenStax Institutional Partner Program is designed to provide institutions with free coaching, training, and support with the goal of increasing use of OpenStax and other open educational resources.

Open Education Network and Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition  

UTRGV has acquired subscriptions to the Open Education Network (OEN) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) beginning in 2020-2021. 

OER @ Math Matters  

Math Matters uses a hands-on approach where students learn math by doing math, not listening to someone else telling them how to do math. Student work with faculty, staff, and dedicated peer learning assistants in the classroom and in the Success Center, where students work online to complete course assignments. The YouTube video below provides OER-related information vis-à-vis Math Matters.  

First Year Experience: Research Press Repository

UT San Antonio is working with their First Year Experience team to document stories of incoming freshmen attending USA during Fall 2020. They are creating Spark pages and vlogs. We will upload their work to the RR Research Press repository. Exemplary projects will be featured in a custom UTSA version of Foundations of Academic Success: Words of Wisdom. Spark pages and vlogs will be collected in our repository by the end of the semester. The OER text will be ready sometime next Spring once faculty have selected exemplary student projects to include.    

eBooks for Learning from the Robert R. Muntz Library  

As an initiative to reduce the cost of attendance and enhance student success, the Robert R. Muntz Library purchased 116 eBooks which serve as required Fall 2020 textbooks and course materials at UT Tyler. When possible, the ebooks were purchased with unlimited access. If all students enrolled in these Fall 2020 courses used the library version rather than purchasing their own ebooks, cost savings for students would be over $130,000. If students avoided purchasing the print version of the required textbook or course materials, the savings to students would be over $200,000. The Library staff have made a commitment to purchase required course titles available for sale to libraries every semester, with the belief there is no greater impact the Robert R. Muntz Library can make.    

OnCourse Texas Politics and American Government Textbook Project  

As part of its OnCourse digital learning and student success project, the UT Tyler Office of Academic Success supported political science faculty to author two OER textbooks. POLS 2305:  Introductory American Government and POLS 236: Introductory Texas Politics are required for all majors as part of the undergraduate core curriculum. The faculty-created OER textbooks were piloted during the fall 2019 semester, and then fully launched in all sections of these courses in spring 2020. Typically, the textbook for each course averages $100. During 2019-2020, the use of the OER textbooks saved students approximately $46,300 in POLS 2305 and $66,300 in POLS 2306 resulting in a total savings of $112,600. In addition, these OER textbooks were shared with local community college partners.  

The textbooks were published by the UT Tyler Press, the official imprint of The University of Texas at Tyler. The UT Tyler Press is focused on publishing books with two objectives:  1) providing quality low-cost and no-cost textbooks to help lower the cost of higher education; and 2) publishing books that focus on capturing the legacy of East Texas and its people.

OpenWorks @ MD Anderson  

MD Anderson Cancer Center is in the implementation stage of OpenWorks @ MD Anderson. This platform will ensure that enduring materials and scholarship created by students, faculty, and staff are visible to the wider academic community in order to promote MD Anderson as a center of excellence for cancer education and research and an active participant in open science.