Announcing the 2022-23 Open and Affordable Textbook Initiative Faculty Grants

Congratulations to the 2022-23 Open and Affordable Textbook Initiative faculty grant recipients!

The Open and Affordable Textbook Initiative (OATI) at Loyola Marymount University is designed to help faculty identify, adopt, and/or create high-quality, accessible, and low- or no-cost course materials for our students using open educational resources (OER) and library resources. Funded through the Office of the Provost and the William H. Hannon Library, and administered through the Academic Technology Committee and the library, the OATI grant:

  • provides incentives for LMU faculty to explore relevant, high-quality, open alternatives to expensive course materials;
  • encourages a teaching culture that explores new pedagogical models for learning;
  • lowers the cost of an LMU education for our students; and
  • increases equitable access to required course materials for all students.

LMU students want and need high-quality learning materials that bring value to their education. (Learn more via ASLMU’s Open Education Resources Resolution in support of increased university investment in affordable course materials). Further, LMU faculty care deeply about connecting meaningful and expert resources with learning outcomes in their course design. The OATI faculty grant provides the opportunity for faculty to work individually and in teams on adaption, assessment, creation, and implementation of open education work to implement into their courses in the 2022-23 academic year.

This year, the OATI grant will support four open and affordable education projects across four schools and colleges that propose to impact over 460 undergraduate and graduate students with a collective savings of $50,600 on textbooks in a single year. In addition, many of the resources proposed will be openly licensed so that they can be adapted by other educators at LMU and beyond.

Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts

Project 1

Caroline Sauvage, Associate Professor of Classics and Archaeology

Heidi Fessler, Lecturer of Classics and Archaeology

Create a cohesive set of reading assignments with selected OER (readings, pictures, videos, 3-D models, museum and archeological websites, etc.) to replace expensive and hard to find textbooks for CLAR 2360: Ancient Near East, CLAR 3330: Introduction to Near Eastern Religions, and CLAR 4350: Archeology and the Bible.

College of Business Administration

Project 2

Alexander Glosenberg, Assistant Professor of Management

David Choi, Conrad N. Hilton Chair of Entrepreneurship

Develop a series of video-based lectures to facilitate a deeper integration of traditional and experiential learning while replacing costly texts for ENTR 1310: Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship. The resources will also be shared with the wider community via the Center for Entrepreneurship.

School of Education

Project 3

Elizabeth C. Orozco Reilly, Professor of Educational Leadership

Curate and adopt open educational resources to improve content (providing up-to-date and relevant materials that address real-world issues in schools) and affordability of the existing EDLA 6427: Business of Education course textbooks.

Seaver College of Science & Engineering

Project 4

Robert Rovetti, Associate Professor of Mathematics

Create and maintain a computing lab manual (with step-by-step instructions, guide to interpreting output, writing samples, and example datasets) that is flexible and adaptive to diverse pedagogies for MATH 205: Applied Statistics in lieu of adopting a commercial computational software.

Congratulations to all the recipients of this year’s grants!