The University of Iowa Libraries

University Libraries is pleased to announce another 12 OpenHawks grants for the development of open educational resources (OER). OpenHawks is a campus-wide grant program that funds faculty efforts to replace or avoid high-cost textbooks with OERs for enhanced student success.

The cohort of projects, which are slated to be completed in 2023, will save UI students $167,688 in the first year alone. Removing cost barriers to course materials opens student access and positively impacts learning. The funded OER projects, which were selected through a competitive application process, will benefit students in a wide range of disciplines, including law, radiation oncology, communication science and disorders, language learning, mathematics, library and information science, pediatrics, and social work.

The next call for proposals will be in the spring of 2023. For more information, visit www.lib.uiowa.edu/openhawks.

Jared Stiles and Emily Heithoff, Radiology, OER Creation Grant

Localization & Treatment Procedures in Radiation Therapy

Stiles and Heithoff team will develop an OER textbook for radiation therapy that would replace the textbooks currently used in the program. The OER will be regularly updated to account for developments in the field and will include a number of multimedia activities developed in collaboration with other radiation therapy programs.

Sean Rodriguez, Margaret Strampe, Andrew Goldstein, Caroline Yu, Salma Dawoud, and David Ramirez, Ophthalmology, OER Creation Grant

EyeRounds Anki: An Openly Licensed Resource for Ophthalmology Education

The group will develop EyeRounds Anki, an OER based on a free flashcard program that uses a spaced repetition algorithm to enhance knowledge acquisition and retention over traditional study methods. The resource is meant to increase global access to a body of knowledge that is currently only available as expensive, multi-volume books.

Jason Rantanen, Stella Elias, Derek Muller, Caroline Sheerin, and Maya Steinitz, Law, OER Creation Grant

Rules and Laws for Civil Actions

Grantee will develop an OER supplement in Pressbooks containing rules and statutory laws related to civil litigation. This will replace one of the textbooks in the intro to civil procedure course and will be referenced by students throughout their legal studies.

Philip Combiths, Communication Sciences and Disorders, OER Creation Grant

A Software Tool for Phonological Analysis and Treatment Target Selection

This project is for further development of phonological analysis software and an accompanying manual for students in speech pathology. It would modernize the process that speech language pathologists use to analyze children’s speech patterns by using digital transcription rather than the manual process currently used.

Maricelle Pinto-Tomas and Mariana Ruiz Nascimento, Spanish and Portuguese, OER Creation Grant

Primeiros passos: Portuguese for Beginners

This project aims to replace the current Portuguese textbook with an OER. It will address the current book’s deficiencies, with a focus on incorporating social justice pedagogy and avoiding the outdated stereotypes. The book is intended to save students money, increase learner motivation, facilitate cultural learning, and has the ability to be adopted outside the university.

Isabel Darcy, Mathematics, OER Creation Grant

Interactive Jupyter Textbook for Differential Equations

Darcy will replace the current text and homework system with an OER textbook in Jupyter Notebooks. She and a colleague have developed most of the content, and the PI hopes to hire a student to compile it all into an interactive text.

Micah Bateman, Library and Information Science, Support Materials Grant

Introduction to Metadata through Dublin Core

Bateman will develop resources for beginning users of the metadata standard, Dublin Core. The project will equip future librarians with skills often used in community and university archives, as well as in the digital humanities.

Alexander Tuttle, Vanessa Curtis, Jeffrey Pettit, and Katherine Schultz, Pediatrics, OER Creation Grant

An Inpatient Pediatric Diabetes Management Resource

The project team will develop a resource on pediatric diabetes management for residents at UIHC. A preliminary version has already been developed on Pressbooks, and this grant would allow them to further develop it and publish it as an OER.

Olga Sokratova, Mathematics, OER Creation Grant

Graph Theory and Applications

This project will replace several commercial texts with an OER targeted to the needs of the course. Sokratova hopes that this resource will allow students to use their class time more efficiently and spend more time actually solving math problems.

Susana Nkurlu, Swahili, OER Creation Grant

Developing Swahili Reading Comprehension Textbook

Nkurlu will develop an OER to supplement Swahili language learning. The objective is to make sure students start with the common knowledge before getting into more complex structures. Grantee will match collected stories with relevant pictures for ease of message comprehension.

Gregory Shill, Law, Remixing Grant

Transportation Law & Policy

For this interdisciplinary project on transportation law and policy, Shill proposes an OER to replace several costly textbooks. The work will incorporate multimedia and archival materials and could be used in several different classes at UI.

Megan Gilster and Aislinn Conrad, Social Work, Course Redesign Grant

Open to Working with Organizations and Communities

This team will create an OER using existing openly licensed materials, new content, and library resources. From the application, “For our pedagogy, we expect the impact to be a succinct, robust set of OER materials and a high-quality, new course that employs active learning teaching techniques.”