The University of Iowa Libraries has awarded 14 OpenHawks grants for the development of open educational resources (OER). OpenHawks is a campuswide grant program that funds faculty efforts to replace or avoid high-cost textbooks with OERs for enhanced student success.
The projects, which are set to be completed in summer 2024, will save UI students nearly $200,000 in the first year alone. These funded OER projects, which were selected through a competitive application process, will benefit students in a wide range of disciplines, including Spanish language learning, law, otolaryngology, dentistry, finance, teaching and learning, social work, library and information science, Chinese language learning, and more.
The next call for proposals will be in spring 2024. For more information, visit www.lib.uiowa.edu/openhawks.
You can read more about each project below.
Rachel Klevar, OER Creation Grant
Semillas II: An Elementary Spanish II OER Textbook
Klevar will develop the second in a sequence of OER Spanish language textbooks that all sections of Elementary Spanish classes at the University of Iowa will use. This project will benefit students by providing educational savings and increasing the quality of Spanish language learning.
Mark McDermott, Travis Henderson, and Ann Browning, OER Creation Grant
Developing an OER for Secondary Orientation and Classroom Management
This team will design an OER specifically for a new course. It will allow instructors to provide a clear repository of the specific, updated and relevant resources, all in one source, for the concepts they encounter in class and provide the flexibility to add and revise these resources as course development continues.
Jason Rantanen, OER Creation Grant
Introduction to Intellectual Property: An Integrated Approach
Rantanen will develop an integrated open educational resource for teaching intellectual property law. The OER will consist of a written text, video lectures, knowledge assessment quizzes, and problem sets for in-class use. The coursebook and quizzes will be made available for free via Pressbooks, while the videos will be published on a publicly accessible platform and integrated into the Pressbooks site.
Michelle Higgins and Rustin Kashani, OER Creation Grant
OpenOto: Open-source, Online Dissection Courses for Otolaryngologists
Higgins and Kashani will create a single massive open online temporal bone dissection course that helps trainees learn otology through a series of videos showing human ear anatomy and surgical approaches. The MOOC will replace learners’ cost of enrollment in expensive commercial simulation courses.
Erica Teixeira, OER Creation Grant
Concise Dental Materials- Iowa OER
Teixeira’s objective is to develop an open and concise dental materials book. Currently, most open sources of dental materials books are a compilation of different research papers that do not address foundational concepts of applied materials science. This OER will fill these gaps.
Bonnie Sunstein and Jessica Kraemer, OER Creation Grant
Teaching Nonfiction Writing Pressbooks Resource
Sunstein and Kraemer will work with the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio to create a resource that can serve as a pillar of the Teaching Nonfiction curriculum. It will make existing but scattered resources searchable so future teaching assistants, students, and outside scholars can access pertinent materials reliably as they build curriculum. This resource will be a living document for the program, to be updated annually.
John Lewis and Yash Diwate, Course Redesign Grant
Introduction to Quantitative Finance Using Python
Lewis and Diwate plan to provide a comprehensive guide in practical quantitative techniques which will not require supplemental texts. The material will be an expansion of material used by John Lewis in his FIN 4340, 9160, 9200 and 9350 classes. The book will include the quantitative material for each course.
Julia Kleinschmit, Course Redesign Grant
Social Work Leadership Practice: Policy Analysis and Advocacy for Programs, Organizations, and Communities
Kleinschmit will create an OER to emphasize leadership skill development, requiring students to dig into current issues and develop policy analysis and advocacy projects and products that will leave them with abilities they can take beyond the course and into communities they serve. This OER will support a new required course, in which social work graduate students will develop policy analysis skills to understand how policies impact individuals, communities, and organizations.
Stephen Cummings, Course Redesign Grant
Death and Dying Course Redesign
Cummings will redesign an online class with OER materials to cover key theories, case studies, interactive learning modules. This will require reformatting modules that used to rely on lengthy text passages for surveys on principle theories, professional engagement, and various patient populations.
Jennifer Burek Pierce and Nancy Henke, Course Redesign Grant
Librarians Learning Together: Developing an OER Introductory Library Science Textbook
Pierce and Henke will begin developing an OER textbook for first semester library science students in a core course, generating a minimum of four chapters, so that issues in this dynamic field can be adequately addressed.
Huiqiang Zheng, Support Materials Grant
Interactive Activities for Chinese Learning
Zheng will create OER micro videos recordings of every single sound and common combinations in Chinese pronunciation, which will lower the anxiety of learners and also provide models in learning pronunciation. She will also create user-friendly interactive pre-lesson and post-lesson activities and games. These activities will replace a commercial workbook.
Jared Stiles, Support Materials Grant
A Virtual Experience in Radiation Therapy
This grant continues a 2023 OER Creation Grant by Stiles and Emily Heithoff. This project will add virtual reality videos simulating the localization and treatment procedures described in the OER content. The videos influence on students understanding of the content will be tremendous.
Sruti Prathivadhi-Bhayankaram, Boulos Nassar, and Shareef Mansour, Support Materials Grant
POCUS Anki: A Consolidated Resource for Point-of-Care-Ultrasound
Grantees will consolidate information and design flashcards on the topics of cardiac ultrasound, lung ultrasound, and abdominal ultrasound, as well as methods to measure hemodynamics and the volume status of patients. These flashcards will review the anatomy, technique, and pathologies for medical students. The project will be published under a Creative Commons license on Eyerounds.org.
Erica Kaldenberg and William Lloyd, Jr., OER Adoption Grant
Secrets to College Success
Kaldenberg and Lloyd will be using College Success, the OpenStax OER by Amy Baldwin in their first-year seminar. According to their proposal, the text aligns perfectly with the grantees’ course objectives.