The Gleeson Library | Geschke Center’s Open Education Resources (OER) grant is part of the worldwide effort to provide equitable access to students. This year, we congratulate the largest cohort of grant recipients in the program’s history. The following is a list of grant recipients and a brief project description for each:
Chris Brooks, Department of Computer Science
Professor Brooks will construct a publicly available repository of assignments using open-source packages in AI and ML (for example, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Pomegranate, Scikit-learn, etc.) to alleviate the cost of a $180 textbook.
Leigh Meredith, Cathy Gabor, Michelle Lavigne, Julie Sullivan, Department of Rhetoric and Language
This team will create a Multimodal Rhetoric textbook for USF’s Core A2 courses (currently Rhet 250, Rhet 295, HONC 132), fusing instruction in writing, speaking, and digital communication. Currently available multimodal textbooks are expensive and tend to fall short either in terms of theory or practice, and this project addresses a significant lack of instructional resources focused on integrated communication.
Kate Lusheck, Department of Art and Architecture
Professor Lusheck will eliminate the need for expensive art textbooks for Renaissance art and architecture by pulling together free and open resources, taking advantage of the availability of digital art and media and other open-source resources by cultural institutions, universities, and libraries around the world.
Nicole Gonzales Howell, Department of Rhetoric and Language
Professor Gonzales Howell will work with Dr. Missy Watson (City College of New York, CUNY) to develop a linguistic justice “handbook” that works to disrupt standard language ideology. Standard language ideology is pervasive and defined as language attitudes that deem “standard” English superior and all other Englishes and their uses inferior. This project will detail the role linguistic prejudice plays in perpetuating systemic racism and include examples on how to teach and assess in this area.
Giacomo Fiore and Kumiko Uyeda, Performing Arts and Social Justice Program
This project builds on a previous OER grant project to build modular components for an Open Education Music Appreciation textbook. It will include a glossary of music terminology and pertinent examples, as well as a compilation of primary sources from the Middle Ages to the present. It is expressly aimed at counteracting the white supremacist biases of the Western classical canon and of musical pedagogy and historiography, both by foregrounding examples by composers who were women and/or BIPOC, and by using language that is objective and reflective of the variety of musical traditions and experiences across the globe.
Aline Hitti and Saera Khan, Department of Psychology
This project will develop instructional material for students and departmental faculty to learn and use Jamovi (https://www.jamovi.org/about.html), an open source statistical software. This will alleviate the cost of a statistical software program that is used across a sequence of research courses in the Psychology Department’s curriculum. This skill set will make students competitive in the job market, given most institutions are veering away from costly software like SPSS and relying on open-source statistical platforms such as Jamovi and R.
The shift to completely online learning has increased disparities in higher education, amongst them access to educational resources. Most major textbook companies refuse to license electronic versions of their textbooks to libraries, which increases the burden on students who can’t afford them. (In a 2018 survey, we found that 80% of USF students had not bought a textbook due to cost.) We commend our faculty – both these grant recipients and those who are using library and free/public resources in the classroom – for working to provide the best educational experience possible for our USF students in the midst of a pandemic.
For more information about open education, please visit https://guides.usfca.edu/OER or contact Charlotte Roh at croh2(at)usfca.edu.