Champions of Open Educational Resources honored for achieving savings for students
President Todd Saliman – along with the Office of Academic Affairs and the Open CU Committee – recently honored the four recipients of the 2023 Open Educational Resources (OER) Champion Awards.
The honor celebrates an educator from each of the four CU campuses who contributes to the open educational movement through the creation of open access learning materials, and in so doing, increases OER awareness and interest in exploring, adopting and creating OER to benefit CU students.
This year’s resources included openly accessible/no-cost textbooks, curriculum based on open software, and open augmented reality anatomy models. For the first time, students this year received OER Champion Awards as key collaborators of the honored educators.
In the five years since the award’s inception, open educational resources have provided CU students open access valued at nearly $2 million in learning material cost savings.
The 2023 OER Champion Awards were presented at an event March 10 at 1800 Grant St. The recipients are:
UCCS
Baye Herald, senior instructor, Technical Communication and Information Design
Also recognized: Joshua Ferguson, undergraduate student, Technical Communication and Information Design
Awarded for: Creation of the open Technical Communications Across the Professions textbook
Notable:
- Professor Herald co-created and co-edited this textbook with students
- Incorporated universal design for learning principles
- Represented diverse perspectives through adequate samples, examples and links
CU Denver
Troy Butler, associate professor, Mathematics and Statistical Sciences
Awarded for: Developing open course material for two undergraduate courses, Programming for Data Science and Partial Differential Equations
Notable:
- Use of the free cloud-based Jupyter notebooks and Colab that ensures every student has access to the same content and computing platform
- Utilizing live code that makes the interaction with the course materials transformative by bringing an experimental mindset into mathematics and statistics curricula previously reserved for physical science disciplines
CU Boulder
David Paradis, associate teaching professor, Department of History
Also recognized: Sheena Barnes, former graduate student, Department of History; Abbey Lagemann, former graduate student, Department of History
Awarded for: Creation of the Origins of European History open textbook in collaboration with students Barnes and Lagemann
Notable:
- Cost savings to CU Boulder students of approximately $15,750 annually
- Creating a customized course text that directly addresses students’ needs
CU Anschutz
Chloe Page, instructor, Department of Psychiatry
Awarded for: Creation of the neuroendocrinology educational content for medical residents
Notable:
- Creation and open licensing of 3-D augmented reality brain models that afford spatial and holistic interaction with important regions of the brain, typically not available to neuroanatomy learners
The University of Colorado received a total of $137,125 in annual state grant funding from the CDHE this year:
- $67,500 went to the Open CU Initiative for Open CU: Expanding a Successful Multiyear OER Initiative, which is then distributed to educators across all four campuses - CU Open Initiative Committee
- $54,125 went to the Department of Mathematics and Statistical Sciences at CU Denver for OER for the Creation of Interactive Computational Notebooks and a Computational Pathway in Mathematics and Statistics - Troy Butler, Joshua French, Adam Spiegler, Stephen Hartke, Yaning Liu and Gary Olson
- $12,000 went to Thinq Studio, Denver, for ThinqStudio Open Press (TOP) @ CU Denver - Dennis DeBay, Diane Hegeman and Brad Hinson
- $3,500 went to Nathan Schneider, CU Boulder, for Governance Framework for an OER Textbook on Social Media
- $10,000 each went to graduate students D. Hailey Herman, CU Boulder, and Bruce Mandt, CU Anschutz, for GradCO Open Program for Advanced Workforce Readiness