OER – Library News

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.”

Cover image for Salón de clase: Intermediate Spanish for Education Professionals

By Georgia Page, UI Libraries Student Specialist, Scholarly Impact, georgiab-page@uiowa.edu

In early March, UI Libraries celebrated Open Education Week in order to raise awareness about open educational resources (OER) and other open education practices. However, many students and faculty on campus are not yet familiar with the positive impact that OER has on students’ academic success, while also making education more accessible and affordable. To get a better understanding of what it means to “create” OER, I interviewed Dr. Giovanni Zimotti, head of the Spanish and Portuguese programs here at the university.

Zimotti, who is now working on his third OER project, talked about the process of creating OER, and how it has benefitted both students and educators within the Spanish program. When asking him how he decided to make open textbooks, he explained, “We didn’t know anything about writing a textbook, but we knew we wanted to write one. The ones that were available were not good enough for our classrooms. They were either really expensive – like $200 – or they were too easy for our students. We want a textbook for four semesters of Spanish and something that would be challenging. This didn’t exist, so we started to make it.”

But how does one even start making a textbook for four different levels from scratch? Zimotti explains that while he didn’t know for sure from the start, he was up for a challenge. “We created a small team, and decided to apply for another grant,” he explains. “Right now, a year later, we have 10 to 15 professors across the country peer-reviewing the textbook to make sure that it is of quality to be used in our classroom and classrooms in other states as well.”

Zimotti explains that over the past few years, he and a team have been working on creating a new textbook that could be utilized not only by students here at the University of Iowa but also across the world. When asked what part of this project most excited him, he says, “The most exciting part, and my main goal, is trying to get all textbooks to a really low cost. All of our students have to pay a lot of money for these textbooks, so my goal is to get the cost as close to zero as possible. If we can save our students hundreds of thousands of dollars in textbook fees, that’s my goal.”

While cost is one of the biggest issues for these textbooks, Zimotti explains that most language textbooks are also out-of-date, which is an issue for students and educators alike. “When we started creating the OER textbook, we started thinking about how to create localized content. Instead of having interviews with celebrities from 20 years ago, or a random piece of technology that is outdated. For this textbook, we tried to interview people that were real people in the community. We found Spanish speakers from different backgrounds, such as a person from West Liberty that run a dual-language program. He is from Mexico, he is on the school board, and he is an indigenous person. He was super interesting and brought a new perspective to the students.” This is just one example of the many folks that Zimotti and his team were able to interview and include in the new textbook, which will help to better immerse students in the reality of Spanish speaking culture, as well as making sure that students can directly relate with the scenarios and references within the text. As Zimotti explains, “This is not something you can just get from your average textbook.”

OER allows for a more inclusive, immersive, and accessible way to educate, and encourages students to be involved and invested in their success. While this project is just one of many here at UI, it will change the way that Spanish is taught not only at the University of Iowa but at universities across the country. Zimotti and his team’s new textbook will be available for use in Spanish classrooms at the University of Iowa and the University of Nebraska starting Spring of 2023.

If you are interested in receiving grant funding to use, adapt, or create your own OER, check out UI Libraries’ OpenHawks program. We are currently accepting proposals through April 29, 2022.

The University of Iowa Libraries

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2023 OpenHawks grants to help students save on textbooks

Spanish Language OER with Giovanni Zimotti