OER for Social Justice is a three-year initiative that began in 2023 to support the creation and use of open educations resources (OER) across four California private institutions.
OER are teaching, learning, and research tools that are free of cost and access barriers, which also carry legal permission for open use. We received $1,533,300 in funding from the U.S. Department of Education for this project. With leadership from the project team at Loyola Marymount University, librarians from LMU, Saint Mary’s College of California, Santa Clara University, and the University of San Francisco are supporting 39 faculty on 11 teams in eight disciplines to adapt, create, and publish OER.
These newly developed resources will both save students money over commercial textbooks and integrate diverse, equitable, inclusive, and anti-racist resources into high-enrollment courses. As proposed, the OER that our faculty teams design will impact more than 6,000 students with at least $550,000 in savings in the first year in which they are taught.
From January through May 2023, we dedicated our efforts to building the administrative infrastructure needed to recruit and support our 11 faculty teams in meeting the goals of the grant, including hiring an instructional designer. From June 2023 through the remainder of the academic year, we turned our attention toward the faculty, starting with a two-day virtual workshop that onboarded the faculty teams and introduced them to their OER community peers across our four institutions.
To demonstrate the development of OER in action, two members of the project team are publishing a workbook in the online open publishing platform Pressbooks. Titled “Open Choices, Just Voices: OER for Social Justice Faculty Handbook,” each chapter features concepts and tasks that align with the development of each faculty team’s OER project.
In addition to introducing faculty to theoretical, technical, and practical resources that can help them author their own OER, “Open Choices, Just Voices” integrates a variety of interactive assessments using H5P and models best practices in universal design and accessibility. The grant funding also supports an “Open Choices, Just Voices” speaker series covering topics including DEIA, copyright, and artificial intelligence in open education. The first speaker, Meggie Mapes of the University of Kansas, discussed her experience creating the OER “Speak Out, Call In: Public Speaking as Advocacy” and, more generally, how OER can aid faculty to integrate social justice principles into high-enrollment courses and empower students to enact change in their daily lives.
Thanks to this support, all 11 faculty teams are on track to introduce their new OER in their courses in spring or fall 2025. We look forward to sharing more about the impact of this project next year.