Roxanna Miranda/The Rider
Jacqueline Peraza | EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
UTRGV is among 21 institutions that competed and secured a spot in the OpenStax Institutional Partnership Program, which provides students access to some free textbooks and other resources.
OpenStax is an educational initiative of Rice University. It publishes “high-quality, peer-reviewed, openly licensed college textbooks that are absolutely free online and low cost in print,” according to openstax.org.
The program is “designed to provide institutions with free coaching, training, and support with the goal of increasing use of OpenStax and other open educational resources,” according to the OpenStax website.
Other institutions that were awarded a partnership this year include Lamar State College-Port Arthur, Lincoln University, Minnesota State University, Molloy College, Saginaw Valley State University, San Antonio College, Spring Hill College, Tarleton State University, Texas Southern University, Texas Woman’s University and Volunteer State Community College.
Art Brownlow, UTRGV Faculty Fellow for Academic Innovation and director of UTRGV’s Open Education Resources Program, said the university sent the application to be approved for the program in July and was accepted in mid-August.
The purpose of the OpenStax partnership is to help universities with free consulting on how to build open education resource programs, increase awareness about open-source materials, to provide free textbooks to students and increase adoption by faculty to offer these open sources for their courses.
“It’s basically a consulting service, but they also help us put together a strategic plan moving forward that we can use year by year to establish and grow our OER program,” Brownlow said. “They also provide one-on-one counseling for us. … The third thing is that they inject us into a network with other universities across the country that are working on the same thing as we are, and we can get lots of great advice.”
The resources are available for all professors, but only about 50 are taking advantage of it, he said.
UTRGV’s Open Education Resource Team consists of Brownlow, OER Librarian Gabrielle Hernandez and Scholarly Communications Librarian Justin White.
“The three of us are basically leading the efforts for OER in the university,” Brownlow said.
A task force to spread awareness of OER is made up of nine members from various UTRGV colleges and departments. Members’ duties are to be affordability advocates in their colleges and departments.
“[They encourage] others to look into OER and what it’s all about,” Brownlow said.
Members include Akinloye Akindayomi, School of Accountancy; Michelle Alvarado, University College; Colin Charlton, Writing and Language Studies chair; Jamalin Harp, Department of History; Tracia Forman, Department of Health and Biomedical Sciences; Sofia Montero, University College; Randall Monty, Department of Writing and Language Studies; Volker Questschke, Department of Physics and Astronomy; Zaena Zamora, School of Mathematical and Statistical Studies.
The university will participate in the OpenStax Institutional Partnership Program for one year.
“What happens next year is that we will be [like past partners] and we’ll add our expertise to those new partners next year and help them learn about who we are and best practices,” Brownlow said.
He said when he first started working on OER three years ago, less than 25% of faculty knew what the acronym stood for and what it was. Now, that number is up to 40% to 50%.
“But we don’t want to stop there,” Brownlow said. “We want to increase awareness of what OER is and the possibilities for saving students money, and the second goal is to increase adoption. Once faculty know that there are good-quality, free textbooks to use, we would like them to consider using them in their courses. … The ultimate overall goal is to save our students money.”
