Metropolitan State University of Denver is being awarded $134,000 from the State of Colorado for Open Educational Resources initiatives through spring 2024. The grant will fund the continuation of the Open Roadrunner program, which supports faculty members in OER exploration and adoption.
Specifically, the grant will allow the program to continue providing faculty members with $750 OER-adoption grants ($300 for adopting an existing OER course shell), $500 stipends for OER Faculty Learning Community participation and $200 stipends for reviewing an open textbook after attending an open-textbook-review workshop.
There is also support for larger OER-adoption projects in General Studies courses that involve teams of faculty members. For example, a History Department faculty team will focus on resources for the Multicultural America course (HIS 1150).
“The course takes up a provocative challenge: History is a series of catastrophes that we can still fix,” said History Professor Todd Laugen, Ph.D. “We explore the history of racism and injustice in America in order to consider how that history can guide us to make changes in the present. An OER primary-source reader will bring neglected voices into the classroom for this important work of historical interpretation.”
OER Task Force debuts new website
The MSU Denver OER Task Force is also pleased to announce the new OER website. The site consolidates OER information, provides links to upcoming trainings and internal grant opportunities, and has information about the State of Colorado OER grants received by MSU Denver since spring 2019.
Faculty members can also use the website to find the survey to mark their courses as no-cost or low-cost (less than $40) for materials. Faculty members are encouraged to fill out the course-marking survey as soon as they receive their course assignments for fall so students can have access to this information during registration. Summer courses can also still have the low- and no-cost attributes added.
Learn more
Please contact Emily Ragan, Ph.D., associate professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and chair of the OER Taskforce, at [email protected] for more information.