With textbook prices continually rising, college students often face a choice between course materials and other necessities. UNI graduate faculty is working to change that with the help of a new grant.

The Regents Open Educational Resources (OER) grant program awards funds to faculty who create free, open-source course materials for college students. Open resources are textbooks that are “freely available for the world,” says Anne Marie Gruber, UNI’s very own OER librarian. “It reframes how we think about sharing information.”

Open-source textbooks are made available to students free of charge and provide valuable course materials for other universities to “modify, adapt, remix, and print,” continues Gruber. This particular OER initiative is also focused on creating resources that speak to diversity, equity, and inclusion, so the textbooks written at UNI will address themes of local and creative importance as well as critical social issues.

It’s an exciting project, and one that wouldn’t be possible with the OER grant and UNI’s passionate and generous graduate faculty, who are deeply involved in 4 out of the 5 projects sponsored by this grant. Representatives from UNI’s Departments of Spanish, Media and Communication, Education, and Music have marshalled their talents and expertise to create digital textbooks for several introductory courses.

UNI students will save approximately $200,000 per year by using these open resources. The authors of these open resources–both at UNI and other Iowa universities–hope that universities across the state and throughout the nation will adopt their open-source textbooks as well, saving students hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run.

They’ve also involved graduate students in the process, inviting them to contribute by reviewing new chapters and teaching the material in undergraduate classes. UNI’s graduate students will also retain access to the open-source materials when they graduate and begin to teach at other universities–spreading the word and the savings wherever they go!

“This grant program has increased interest in and awareness of faculty authorship of open educational resources,” says Gruber. “We are already receiving requests for future funding opportunities and for support for faculty who want to author their own open course materials, which is wonderful!”

Gruber hopes that more faculty at UNI will take advantage of the resources available for using open-source textbooks. She’s proud of the work being done by UNI graduate faculty, and she can’t wait to see more faculty dive into the process of creating and using open resources.

“These projects are set apart because they each have a diversity, equity, and inclusion focus and they fill gaps in previously-available resources, so we’re hopeful that faculty elsewhere will consider and adopt or modify them.”

Stay tuned for more open resource updates, and learn more here.