SCALE - Grants

2022 SCALE Grant Awardees

Greenville Technical College | GTC OER Award

Project Leads: Tara Weekes & Michelle Rubino

The GTC OER Award project will incentivize Greenville Technical College instructors to replace traditional and Inclusive Access course materials with Library, PASCAL, or open educational resources with the outcomes of reduced or eliminated student course materials costs and corresponding increased enrollment, retention, and graduation rates.
 

Midlands Technical College | Open Educational Resources Faculty Learning Community

Project Lead: Laura Baker

The Midlands Technical College (MTC) Library, in partnership with the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE), will utilize the Fall 2022 Faculty Learning Community (FLC) course to focus on OER-based instruction and open pedagogical techniques. This FLC promotes innovation in teaching and learning through a collaborative course design process in a community of practice. Modifying MTC courses using OER makes college more accessible and affordable to a diverse student population by addressing the rising cost of textbooks. Up to 12 faculty will create customized course materials using OER and ancillary software to replace traditional course textbooks, saving an estimated $36,000 each semester.
 

Newberry College | Open Resources, Open Books, Open Knowledge

Project Leads: Steffi Hiltgen & Russ Conrath

Newberry College will implement a 4-part plan to further increase campus OER awareness, encourage the revision of, and teach faculty how to build a course around OER materials. Faculty will have the opportunity to learn more about OER and the wide range of no-cost materials through multiple presentations and workshops. They will be invited to review an open textbook that would be suitable for their course and encouraged to adopt open course materials for one of their Spring 2023 courses. Stipends will be given to participating faculty and students, after completing surveys, attending workshops, reviewing OER texts, and/or implementing OER materials in their courses.
 

Spartanburg Community College | Shifting Faculty Culture and Increasing OER Utilization

Project Lead: Katherine Stiwinter

Spartanburg Community College (SCC)’s SCALE project will prompt a cultural shift among faculty towards adopting OER by 1) enhancing faculty understanding of OER and its benefits to students and 2) incorporating new OER into 7 courses. The project will begin with an OER workshop to teach faculty members about OER and its benefits. After the workshop, 15 faculty members will review already-published OER materials and 7 will develop, adapt, and incorporate an OER component into their curriculum. At the end of the grant, these faculty members will submit reports on their projects and outcomes.
 

Tri-County Technical College | Leveraging Institutional Partnerships to Drive Awareness and Adoption of Affordable Learning

Project Lead: Som Linthicum

There are many affordable learning strategies, initiatives, and open-educational resources that could be deployed at the curricular and co-curricular level to substantially affect the overall cost of a college education for any given student. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, very little is known or understood about our local landscape when it comes to affordable learning at the curricular or co-curricular level, and this lack of knowledge mitigates against successful advocacy and adoption efforts. We propose to change that – first, by collaborating with our Department of Institutional Research to more thoroughly investigate the current state of affordable learning practices at TCTC, and, second, by leveraging those findings and the expertise of our Marketing partners to expand campuswide appreciation of the power of affordable learning via an awareness campaign. Our internal research would enable us to better address faculty concerns and hesitancies around affordable learning, while the awareness campaign would intentionally recognize and champion the efforts of those faculty who have already incorporated affordable learning tools into their courses.
 

University of South Carolina Beaufort | Promoting and Creating OER Textbooks

Project Lead: Emily Smith

We intend to create an OER textbook for the course University 101 Student in the University, UNIV B101. This project will be completed in collaboration with cross campus partners for the purpose of providing free and accessible course materials for students to reduce the cost of textbooks and ease the financial burden for college students. In addition, we plan to increase institutional awareness of OER resources. This will be done through marketing and sharing with the USCB community how the library is developing an OER in collaboration with other campus departments.
 

University of South Carolina Upstate | Pilot OER Faculty Stipend Program

Project Lead: Andrew Kearns

The OER Faculty Stipend Program is intended to recognize and support faculty projects that go beyond the adoption of open textbooks and the necessary course revisions that accompany such an adoption, providing an additional incentive to faculty to replace conventionally-published course materials with affordable alternatives. Eligible projects will fall in one of six areas: 1) the creation of ancillary, supplemental or primary course materials to be issued under a Creative Commons license, 2) extensive revision and updating of open educational resources, 3) making OERs accessible, 4) remixing OERs, including contributing original material, to customize for a particular course, 5) extensive collection, adaption and curation of OERs, library subscription and other affordable resources to use as a replacement for a textbook in a course, and 6) revising teaching and learning materials to include open, transformative and inclusive pedagogies. Awards will be made depending on the scope and complexity of the project, including quantity of material involved and estimated time investment.