About the Open Education Initiative
The Open Education Initiative seeks to reduce textbook costs and improve student learning by replacing expensive textbooks with open educational resources. Learn more about the Open Education Initiative.
2023-2024 Cohort
Roberto Rey Agudo, Spanish and Portuguese
With the help of the OER Initiative, I am writing an open-access handbook for Spanish 9, an intermediate language course that bridges the first-year language sequence and upper-level courses. The current textbook is pricy and underutilized; almost all topical materials for discussion in class have already been replaced by texts and media posted on Canvas. The next logical step is to replace the grammar review component and the writing manual with an open-access handbook tailored to the needs of the course.
Lucas Dwiel, Psychological and Brain Sciences
I will be creating video lectures for some of the core content of the class, PSYC22 Learning, which will be used by students in the class. However, these videos will also be designed to be stand-alone content that could be useful for learners not in my class or who haven't watched the previous lectures.
Wendy Epps, Chemistry
Our overarching goal is to support student learning in CHEM 5 (first term of general chemistry). As part of those efforts, we will identify sections of the OER book Chemistry 2e that could be provided as supplemental reading for our CHEM 5 students to help enhance their learning experience. The focus of this project is two-fold. First, we plan to identify material in Chemistry 2e that is congruent with the current course textbook. We will offer these specific sections as supplemental reading (in the next offering of CHEM 5 taught by W. Epps), and we will survey students to get their thoughts on the effectiveness of Chemistry 2e as a course resource. Second, we will identify material that is incongruent with the current course textbook and the way in which the course is taught. This will identify specific subject areas for which we could develop more appropriate OER content ourselves in the near future.
Shevaun Mizrahi, Film and Media Studies
Part II of an Intro to Film instructional manual. Topics will include sound and post-production. We will also be translating the entire manual (Parts I & II) into Spanish.
Chiamaka Okorie, Shahin Shahsavari, and Alicia Dagrosa, Medicine
Produce a series of educational videos for the Geisel School of Medicine's dermatology course and clinical elective as additional resources for learners. The videos will offer a more dynamic and engaging learning experience, providing a comprehensive learning experience and increasing student engagement.
Shahin Shahsavari, Medicine
Having a basic background in programming and data analysis is of significant value in scientific and clinical research. Using the OER grant, I hope to create content for the Dartmouth community in learning basics of data analysis using publicly available datasets. I hope to deliver workshops using this platform in the near future.
Thomas Thesen, Medicine
Contemporary Basic Science medical education courses integrate content across many disciplines in biomedical, social, and clinical sciences and are delivered by a multidisciplinary team of instructors. This content is traditionally available across a number of discipline-specific textbooks, requiring students to gain access to multiple costly resources. For this project, we are creating video-based resources for the Neuroscience & Neurology course in the Geisel MD curriculum that integrate interdisciplinary neuroscience and neurology content in a single, open-access resource.
2022-2023 Cohort
Lucas Dwiel, Psychological and Brain Sciences
Project: Creating video lectures that replace the previously used textbook for PSYC 22 and allow the class model to be flipped. See the completed project here.
Harold Frost, Engineering
Project: Developing materials for the new course Computing Before Electronics.
Shevaun Mizrahi, Film and Media Studies
Project: Writing a manual specifically tailored to the Dartmouth film student's needs, to be used in multiple courses.
Rafe Steinhauer, Engineering
Project: Developing a set of editable frameworks, lesson plans, instructor guides, lecture slides, student worksheets, and demonstrational videos for how to incorporate Human-Centered Design methods into core Engineering Design courses.
Michelle Warren, Comparative Literature
Project: Turning course policies and assignments into public facing documents that can be adopted by others at Dartmouth as well as those beyond Dartmouth. See the completed project here.
2019-2020 Cohort
Nick Camerlenghi, Art History
With funding from DCAL's OER initiative, I am developing an interactive tool for my virtual reality walk-through of a very important and ancient church in Rome, namely the Church of St. Paul, where one of Christianity’s foundational figures is buried and venerated. That building burned tragically in 1823 and, though rebuilt, only vaguely resembles the original. My VR walk-through already exists (albeit in an improbable version 1.0) so, with this OER, now the desire is to enable users to point to objects in the buildings and to learn about them on their own. They should be able to take measurements, listen and take audio/visual tours, and leave impressions. The principle is novel: to enable meaningful exploration of a building that no longer exists! Students and scholars from disciplines including art, architecture, and religion should benefit. Additionally, a dialogue should ensue about my reconstruction as well as about the use and meaning of such an important space. My research—collaborative in nature and developed over the course of nearly ten years—has been funded by a variety of universities, institutions, and foundations. At the core of this support is a desire to make learning broadly accessible. It is only fitting to share this work as openly as possible.
Eric Hansen, Engineering
I am creating an eBook for Digital Electronics (Engs 31 / CoSc 56). This course was overhauled in 2016 with the support of the Gateway Course Initiative, to incorporate active learning through in-class design exercises. The eBook is being designed to further support the new course format with focused readings, videos, embedded design exercises, and hyperlinks to online resources. Standard textbooks are adequate for basic material, but fall short in supporting the design and prototyping tools we use for labs and projects. The initial version of this book, available March 2020, focuses on supplemental material for these topics. The basics will be added in, over the next year, to cover the entire course. Also, unlike print textbooks, it can be updated as the course and tools evolve, and the open format could enable instructors of other courses to adapt the content to the particular needs of their courses. The authoring platform enables both HTML output (for web reading) and LaTeX (for print versions) to be produced from the same source.
Alan Taylor, Institute for Writing and Rhetoric
College students are commonly required to purchase handbooks for use in their writing courses. These reference texts introduce students to the conventions of academic writing and often include chapters on academic research, critical thinking, grammar, punctuation, and formal citation.
However, most handbooks on the market today are bloated in both content and price. (I think the former is often the justification for the latter). The book I used previously is over 900 pages long and costs around $60. I think that is too long and too much.
My goal for this project is to create a brief handbook with everything students need to successfully navigate their college writing assignments, then give it away for free.
Tim Tregubov, Computer Science
With the help of the OER Initiative I am developing a set of interactive in-class coding mini-games for CS52 and CS66. The goal of these interactive exercises is to help students in and out of the classes to practice what they are learning, use discovery play to help understand certain programming concepts, and to get the students to engage with the materials in a more hands on way but without doing code demonstrations. All of the resources I create are open to the public as not all students are able to take these projects based capped enrollment courses. Putting the materials online allows for more students to benefit, both in and outside of Dartmouth. Additionally, students help create some of the content and to see it being used by future courses is empowering and motivating. Passing on what they have learned is a more effective teaching tool than learning the material initially, and should be an integral part of all courses.
James Whitfield, Physics
I am making an open source course which will help teach quantum information to graduate students at Dartmouth and beyond. Dartmouth is a premier place to learn quantum information science and our group has built and contributed to some of the open source tools widely used include the codebases of IBM and Google's quantum computing software platforms.
The teaching resources are a curated collection of examples utilizing modern quantum technology and their interfaces. The use of actual quantum resources hopefully helps students realize that these ideas are no longer philosophical nor abstract but actual technology that can be deployed at small scales. The aim of this course is to guide students in applying quantum information concepts to their work.
Despite the splintering of the quantum computing community by universities, companies, and their interests, the paradigm of open source pervades the zeitgeist. Our course is consistent with this community ideal in that other open resources will be both borrowed, curated, and remixed into something appropriate for Dartmouth graduate students with the Spring quarter timeframe.