We are delighted to announce the 12 faculty teams who have received $40,000 in grant funding to create open educational resources (OER). Each team has committed to a three-year project to adapt or create free, open textbooks that further issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism and that will be used in high enrollment courses at Loyola Marymount University, Saint Mary’s College of California, Santa Clara University, and the University of San Francisco.
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 more than 4,000 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.
Twenty-two project teams submitted applications for 12 awards, with nine from Loyola Marymount faculty (yielding a 33% acceptance rate for LMU). The awardees for LMU’s three allocated grants are:
Nicole Bouvier-Brown, professor, team lead
Ryan Hunt, assistant professor
Emily Jarvis, professor
Saori Shiraki, instructor
CHEM 110 and 112: “General Chemistry”
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Seaver College of Science and Engineering
Melissa Fitzpatrick, assistant professor, team lead
Ingrid Greene, clinical assistant professor
Jeffrey Thies, clinical assistant professor
Trevor Zink, associate professor
BCOR 4910: “Business Ethics and Sustainability”
Department of Management, College of Business Administration
Mischa Livingstone, clinical assistant professor, team lead
Jessica Livingstone, instructor
Kennedy Wheatley, assistant professor
PROD 101: “Production Bootcamp: The Film Crew at Work”
PROD 200: “Visual Storytelling”
PROD 500: “Directing 1: Vision and Exploration”
Department of Production, School of Film and Television
In addition, one inter-institutional project team received a grant:
Shirin Mollah, visiting assistant professor, team lead
ECON 1050: “Introduction to Economics”
Department of Economics, Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts
In partnership with Michael Jonas and Sandhya Patlolla, USF.
Congratulations to all of our OER for Social Justice grant recipients, and to everyone at LMU 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 the William H. Hannon Library’s Open and Affordable Textbook Initiative.
You can learn more about the faculty teams from all four grant partner institutions on the OER for Social Justice website. For more information, contact Nataly Blas, OER for Social Justice project director.