STAR: Successful Teaching with Affordable Resources
UNL’s STAR initiative seeks to drive down the cost of student education by educating faculty about the numerous options they have to choose low cost, high quality, peer-reviewed academic materials and technologies for teaching. Through a collaboration of the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor, University Libraries, and Information Technology, STAR provides resources, workshops, individual consultations, and grants to help faculty identify course content, develop curriculum, and implement technologies that support their teaching goals. Seven UNL faculty, Courtney Hilebrecht, Carolyn Brown Kramer, David Mabie, Patrice McMahon, Guy Trainin, Alan Donsig & Nathan Wakefield, received an Open Educational Resource (OER) Kelly Seed grant to integrate OER materials into their courses this semester. This has resulted in over $117,000 in savings to students in eighteen classes. Another round of funds is available for faculty to integrate OER materials into their courses in 2019. You can contact Brad Severa at bsevera@nebraska.edu if you are interested in applying for the current Kelly Seed Grant for OER.
Open Textbook Network
The University of Nebraska - Lincoln has joined the Open Textbook Network (OTN) to increase the number of campus initiatives to support affordable content. OTN an alliance of colleges and universities working together to promote the use of open educational resources (OERs), especially open textbooks, in higher education.
OTN’s Open Textbook Library is a collection of faculty developed books that are peer-reviewed and rated. These books can be found in the UNL catalog and offer faculty the opportunity to review and adopt these books for their classes. Open textbooks, according to the OTN, are “complete textbooks licensed so teachers and students can freely use, adapt, and distribute the material . . . . [and that] can be downloaded for no cost or printed inexpensively.”
As member of OTN, UNL agrees to hold an on-campus workshop led by the network’s experts to support faculty adoption of open textbooks, train a campus representative to facilitate future workshops, and help OTN collect measurably, evidentiary support of open textbooks’ impact for their institution’s students. To help ensure its open textbooks’ quality, faculty from OTN member schools are invited to review their faculty peers’ textbooks in the Open Textbook Library. According to OTN, 70 percent of its textbooks’ reviews have four stars or higher, and all reviews and comments are freely available.
Open textbooks allow for measurable savings for students, with early OTN members reporting over $1,000,000 in aggregate savings in textbook costs to students. As the first institution in the State of Nebraska to join the OTN, the University will be in a position to provide continuing leadership in these areas as part of its strategic commitments to supporting educational innovation and “remaining financially accessible and affordable to a diverse student population.”
The Open Textbook Network is housed at the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development, and currently counts more than 70 individual and system members, including the Boston Library Consortium, Penn State University, the Ohio State University, Temple University, the University of Kansas, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and is active on more than 200 campuses across the United States.
The OTN Workshop, open to all faculty, is scheduled for Thursday, February 21, 2019. Faculty can submit their books for the OTN Network for peer review and other campuses to use. More workshop details will be forthcoming. For more information contact: Charlene Maxey-Harris, University Libraries, cmaxeyharris2@unl.edu