Aiken Technical College (ATC) will offer a series of Open Educational Resources (OER) Workshops designed by the Open Education Network for faculty members to motivate them to adopt OER textbooks for their courses at ATC. To encourage faculty participation, a stipend will be provided to participating faculty members who both attend an OER workshop and complete a textbook review on the Open Textbook Library. The goal of this project is to double the number of ATC course offerings that utilize OER textbooks. The ATC Library Director has established a goal to increase the General Education faculty members’ knowledge of the Open Education Network to 100% by 2021. This grant will be used to achieve that goal; however, workshop participation will enhance OER awareness with all ATC faculty who participate in the OER workshops. This project also supports and aligns with Aiken Technical College’s Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP): Read, Write, Achieve, which includes specific OER goals and outcomes.
This project will be an opportunity to offer nursing students at Anderson University a centralized location for all resources utilized in NUR 453 Leadership and Management. Based on anecdotal feedback received from students, the textbook is not fully utilized, thus providing an unnecessary financial burden upon students. The creation of an OER for Leadership and Management will remove the cost associated with purchasing a text book.
All PASCAL member libraries migrated to Ex Libris in June 2020. In July 2020, Coastal Carolina University became the first PASCAL member institution to implement Ex Libris’s Leganto, a platform that seamlessly integrates the library’s catalog and databases with Moodle, our online learning system. A SCALE grant will enable Kimbel Library to award a monetary incentive to faculty who implement Leganto reading lists; it will provide librarians with a dedicated audience of faculty to whom we can promote the Leganto reading list tool and demonstrate the ease of delivering library licensed materials to students; and it will help librarians cultivate Leganto ambassadors to promote the platform to a wider audience.
This project aims to increase the number of CofC faculty who seriously consider and eventually adopt Open Educational Resources (OER) in their courses, and to increase the number and quality of projects submitted to the College’s own OER incentive program. Interest in OER is growing at the College of Charleston, and College Libraries play a central role in efforts to expand usage among faculty. In Spring 2020, librarians began offering workshops, based on the PASCAL-supported Open Textbook Network (OTN) workshop model, to increase awareness of OER among faculty and introduce instructors to the benefits of adopting OER. The OTN model pairs a workshop with an invitation to write an OER review for the Open Textbook Library (OTL), and a financial incentive is offered to faculty who submit reviews. Although the College offers incentive grants for faculty to convert courses to OER, incentives have not been offered to faculty in the early stages of exploring OER. With the support of a SCALE grant, the College Libraries will fully utilize the OTN model in 2020-2021 by offering stipends for 20 CofC instructors who attend an OER workshop offered during the 2020-2021 academic year and subsequently submit a review for the OTL.
Limestone University library, with the support of the Provost, is partnering with the Center for Teaching Learning and Innovation, the Office of Academic Success, the Office of Equity and Inclusion and the Director of the Nursing program (as the faculty representative) in order to bring awareness to Limestone administrators, faculty and staff regarding affordable learning initiatives. The main goals of this project is to conduct an information campaign that would (i) both educate and motivate administrators, faculty and staff to recognize the substantial cost-saving value of adopting affordable learning options for students (ii) encourage faculty to consider OER options (including library and PASCAL resources) for their course(s) (iii) incentivize faculty to review Open Textbook(s) for potential use in their course(s). Faculty will be awarded stipends based on established criteria.
The Midlands Technical College Open Educational Resource team will offer an open textbook review workshop to introduce open education textbooks, explain their importance to higher education, and promote their benefits, if funded. The workshop model has two parts: a faculty workshop presenting open textbooks as an affordable and quality solution to the problem of high textbook prices, followed by faculty reviewing an OER textbook that would be beneficial for their course from the Open Textbook Library. The online workshop will be modeled after the Open Textbook Network Workshop from The University of Minnesota. Participating faculty members would receive a stipend for their participation after the review is submitted. Our objective is to make faculty more aware of these resources and help reduce the cost of course materials to students. As an outcome, we would like to increase awareness of affordable learning on campus with this training workshop for faculty and share the process/materials with PASCAL members.
This initiative will encourage faculty in the Department of Mathematics at the University of South Carolina to use, adapt, and create open educational resources and library-licensed resources in high-enrollment mathematics courses, with the goal of making mathematics course materials more affordable for students. All promotional and instructional content produced to assist Mathematics faculty for these purposes will be made available for anyone facilitating the adoption of open educational resources (OER).
The University of South Carolina Upstate serves a diverse student body, including significant numbers of first-generation students, non-traditional students, and students receiving Pell grants; recent studies have shown that these populations benefit financially and academically from open educational resources (OER). This project will result in significant savings for students on course materials, and has the potential of improving retention and student learning, by facilitating the redesign of multiple courses using OER and other affordable resources. Framed as a competition at the unit level, a number of courses would go through the course revision process during spring and summer 2020. This project will also improve the visibility of the affordable learning/OER program on campus and strengthen collaboration among campus partners.
