The Scholarly Communication Department is pleased to announce our 2024 Course Material Fellowship (CMFP) Cohort. In its fourth iteration, the CMFP supports Bloomington faculty members to adapt and/or create their own openly licensed course materials, specifically OER. Fellows will develop projects that use OER, library-licensed, and/or public domain materials, and some of our Fellows will also create original openly licensed resources. The program’s purpose is to eliminate textbook costs for students while giving faculty academic flexibility to tailor their materials to their learning objectives and pedagogical preferences. This year, we have four projects by our faculty including two solo builds, one cross-institution collaboration, and a team of co-instructors.
Meet Our 2024 CMFP Fellows!
Yingling Bao is working with faculty from Northwestern and University of British Columbia to co-create a text for Chinese in Social Science (EALC-C467 here at IU). She is a Senior Lecturer for the East Asian Languages and Cultures department and have developed teaching materials on topics such as public health, popular culture, and gender minorities. Existing advanced-level Chinese textbooks focus on limited types of genres and topics. This project aims to create an OER textbook that covers a wide variety of topics in various genres.
Heather Perkins, a Visiting Assistant Professor for Psychological and Brain Sciences, currently uses an OER text for PSY-P 304 Social Psychology which they are going to enhance by creating a “psychologist spotlight” for each chapter due to the original text’s lack of diversity. The “psychologist spotlight” assignments were designed to emphasize diversity within the field of psychology and introduce students to contemporary researchers. While the psychologist spotlights have been a positive step, framing them as supplementary continues to marginalize racial minorities. To better center the voices of people of color and individuals with marginalized identities in social psychology, Dr. Perkins hopes to integrate the spotlights directly into the text.
Katherine Ryan, Nancy Evans, and Ben Ale-Ebrahim are a Kelley Communication and Professional Skills Area team working to create an edited volume that pulls together information from any number of existing OER sources to produce a no-cost customized resource for our first-year students. In doing so, they expect to create their own content that frames the information of each section/chapter/module, as well as provide introduction and appendix sections. These materials will be for BUS-C104 Business Presentations and could impact over 4,000 students annually.
John Talbott is a Senior Lecturer for Kelley’s M419 Retail Marketing Strategy. They already use a variety of public domain documents to lessen the financial burden for their students and wish to combine/curate materials into an OER text that can be utilized by others in the department. For custom images, diagrams, and organizing the work, Dr. Talbott plans to use AI generative tools. We are excited to see how AI can assist and impact the labor behind building OER.
We look forward to the development of these projects and their impact on students! Any IU Bloomington instructor interested in affordable course materials or OER is welcome to email Open Education Librarian Haley Norris at email@example.com.