Gleeson Library and the Open Educational Resources for Social Justice project team are delighted to introduce the 12 teams of faculty who have received the $40,000 grant awards.
Each team is committing to a three-year project to adapt or create free, open textbooks that further issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism that will be used in high enrollment courses at the University of San Francisco, Loyola Marymount University, Saint Mary’s College of California, and Santa Clara University.
As a cohort, the teams include 45 faculty from eight different academic disciplines across our four institutions. Together, their projects have the capacity to save over 4000 students nearly $700,000 each year that the new course materials are used. This is just the beginning! The course materials produced through the OER for Social Justice grant will be openly licensed, and made available for adoption and adaptation to faculty teaching in these disciplines around the country.
OER are learning materials, such as textbooks, that are free or low cost; and immediately and perpetually accessible to students. The proven equity strategy empowers instructors to create culturally inclusive materials to support the whole student in their learning.
22 project teams submitted applications for 12 awards, with four successful grants from the University of San Francisco. Our awardees are:
Leslie Bach, Assistant Professor, Team Lead
Nour Al-muhtasib, Assistant Professor
Leslie King, Instructor
Nicole Thometz, Associate Professor
BIOL 115: “Human Physiology”
Department of Biology
College of Arts and Sciences
Leigh Meredith, Associate Professor, Team Lead
Phil Choong, Assistant Professor
Cathy Gabor, Professor
Melissa Garcia, Assistant Professor
RHET 120 and 250; HONC 132
Department of Rhetoric and Language
College of Arts and Sciences
Joyce P. Yang, Assistant Professor, Team Lead
Aline Hitti, Associate Professor
Lily Ma, Gerardo Marin Fellow
Zachary Reese, Assistant Professor
PSYC 101: “General Psychology”
Department of Psychology
College of Arts and Sciences
Additionally, a grant was awarded to an inter-institutional project team with members from USF and LMU:
Michael Jonas, Associate Professor
Sandhya Patlolla, Assistant Professor
ECON 111: “Principles of Microeconomics”
ECON 112: “Principles of Macroeconomics”
Department of Economics
College of Arts and Sciences
Inter-institutional project in partnership with Team Lead Shirin Mollah, LMU.
Our applications underwent a rigorous evaluation process with multiple rounds of scoring. Many thanks to Angie Portacio (Senior Instructional Designer) and Penny Scott (Reference Librarian) for their assistance and insights in this process.
Congratulations to all of OER for Social Justice grant recipients, and to everyone at USF who is committed to moving our campus accessibility and affordability efforts forward through innovation in open education and open pedagogy. For resources about OER, please visit our Open Access & Open Education page.
Click here to view details about the faculty teams from all four grant partner institutions.
For more information, please contact Nicola Andrews, Open Education Librarian.
Image: Erwan Hesry, Unsplash