WELLESLEY HILLS (November 2, 2016) — MassBay Community College is pleased to announce that seven faculty members have been selected by the Massachusetts Community College Go OPEN Education Council to receive grant funding to adopt ‘open education resources’ (OER) for their courses. The Massachusetts Community Colleges “Go OPEN” initiative had called on grant proposals from community college faculty who wanted to replace their current publisher materials with open educational resources. Open educational resources are teaching, learning and research resources that are copyright-free or have been released under a copyright license that permits others to reuse, revise, remix and redistribute them.
These seven MassBay faculty members will now participate in the state-wide initiative to promote the selection and adoptions of high quality and free open education resources to students including, full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, simulations and more. This initiative is making more open education resources available to faculty and students, which means that more students will have all the required textbooks and materials at their first class meeting, saving them money while also having them begin the semester on track for academic success. MassBay faculty members will use this grant funding to update and/or completely revise their courses with the adoption of OER. These revised courses will run in Spring 2017 and their work will be uploaded and shared to the OER database.
The MassBay faculty members that have been selected are:
- Phara Boyer, teaching PS 101, Introduction to Psychology
- Florencia Gabriele, teaching EC 201, Principles of Macroeconomics
- Carolyn Gutilla, teaching CO 131, Oral Communication
- Janine Lloyd, teaching MA 106, Quantitative Reasoning
- Lynn Moore, teaching CS100, Computers and Technology
- Matthew Walsh and James Grenier, will develop an OER version of EN 100, Freshman English I. This will be a coordinated collaboration with several teams at Massachusetts Community Colleges working on Freshman English I courses.
“OER is a triple win for students,” said MassBay’s representative for the Go OPEN Initiative Dr. Linda Grisham. “First, textbook costs are significantly reduced or even eliminated. Second, students have everything required for their academic success on the first day of classes. Third, newly published research comparing sections of the same course with and without OER report higher course completion rates along with a higher percentage of students earning a final grade of “C”: or better in classes where OER was adopted.”
MassBay has an OER team in place to assist Go OPEN instructors and any faculty member in the identification and selection of appropriate OER materials for their courses. The Massachusetts Community Colleges “Go OPEN” initiative is funded through the GPSTEM (Guided Pathways STEM) project, a $20,000,000 grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration, Grant #TC-26450-14-60-A-25. The second round of applications for faculty to submit for Go OPEN grants are due by Saturday, December 10, 2016.
For more information on MassBay; www.massbay.edu.