Congratulations to the following faculty who received an Open Educational Resources Grant in spring 2019 and are using OER in their courses this fall!
Derek Turner, Philosophy
Professor Turner received a creation grant to write a textbook for his introductory logic class.
Form and Content: An Introduction to Formal Logic
Textbook published in 2019 under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
“For many years, I had used one of the standard popular textbooks in my logic classes. But the publisher kept issuing new editions and adding bells and whistles that no one needed, while steadily raising the price. Logic is something that should be accessible to anyone who takes an interest in studying it. So I decided a couple of years to write a textbook that students at Connecticut College, or anywhere, could access for free. The book also differs from other standard textbooks in its reliance on fun, low-stakes examples involving dinosaurs, my dog and his friends, etc. The sillier the content, the easier it is to see the logical form.”
Maria Rosa, Biology
Adopted and revised content for Invertebrate Biology: BIO 215 (Laboratory Course)
OER “will make my classes more accessible. I’m also working actively on assigning less reading and giving the students more meaningful reading/recall assignments. Not having a textbook means that I will have to be more creative in how I make sure the students are prepared for each class. With this grant I have developed OER plans for the 3 courses I taught at Conn in 2018. I plan to keep updating my OER plans, and hope to implement more of the resources I have been finding in future classes. Thanks to the support and the resources made available, I was able to locate and implement OER resources for 3.5 out of the 5 courses I have taught.”
Kathy McKeon and Warren Johnson, Mathematics and Statistics
Adopted OpenStax Calculus for 100-level Calculus 3-course sequence (MAT 111 Calculus A, 112 Calculus B, 113 Calculus C)
“We have shared this information with the other faculty in our department and there is interest in investigating OER texts for other courses. Tina O’Keefe hopes to use one in MAT 226 this fall. Finding an appropriate and quality OER text for the introductory statistics course (STA 107, 6-8 sections per year) is a short-term goal for the department. We anticipate this OER will have positive impacts for both the calculus students and instructors. With the cost of standard calculus texts over $200, many of our students would try to get by without purchasing the text, which has a negative impact on their learning. The cost and quality of the OER we’ve selected should make a difference.”
Rachel Black, Anthropology
Adopted material for Power and Inequality in a Globalized World: ANT 114
“I am trying to convert people and raise their awareness of the burden that expensive textbooks create.” OER “will make my course more accessible. I also plan on discussing the OER initiative with my students. We will talk about how academic knowledge is produced and disseminated and how this creates issues of power and inequality.”
Emily Kuder, Hispanic Studies
Adopted and revised material for Spanish for the Professions: SPA202
“I will be creating course content entirely from OER materials. I will be incorporating some items from a textbook that I own, but again, the students will not be purchasing anything for the course. I hope the implementation of OER in my course will provide a richness of materials and expose the students to bilingualism in legal and medical fields from a variety of perspectives. I also believe that OERs will facilitate a more interactive, hands-on environment, particularly with the use of scripted roleplays.”