UW Libraries Selects Alternative Textbook Grant Recipients for 2024-25 Academic Year

University of Wyoming Libraries has awarded alternative textbook grants to seven faculty members to implement open educational resources (OER) in their classes for the 2024-25 academic year.

OER materials are teaching and learning materials published under an open copyright license -- frequently a Creative Commons license -- that permits others to freely use, revise, remix and share the materials. These resources can exist in numerous formats, including books, articles, websites, videos, images and other digital or print materials.

UW Libraries also recently adopted a new publishing platform to host publications created through the Alternative Textbook Grant Program. UW Libraries Pressbooks allows authors to import and export content and create interactive content. The platform makes publications freely available in multiple formats. UW Libraries Pressbooks currently features three publications from this round of alternative textbook grant awards.

The open course materials and textbooks resulting from the grants are projected to save UW students more than $30,500 per semester. Grants are awarded to instructors who adopt, adapt or create new open textbooks or other course learning materials.

"Having access to funding for using and developing OER is so beneficial to instructors and their students," says Breanna Krueger, an associate professor in the Division of Communication Disorders and an alternative textbook grant recipient. "This grant has allowed me to dedicate time and resources to developing my course even further and reducing costs for my students. Pressbooks has been easy to use, and I am excited that students can access it to learn with my guidance during class as well as maintaining their learning once class is over through independent practice that the book I have developed provides."

The grant recipients are:

College of Arts and Sciences

-- Rebecca Steele, an associate professor, and Stephanie Schottel, a temporary lecturer, both in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. Steele teaches first-, second- and third-year German and received funding to adapt and create three new publications for the entire German language course sequence. The publications "Deutsch im Alltag I (DE)," "Deutsch im Alltag II (DE)" and "Deutsch im Alltag III: Gestern und heute" are freely available on the UW Libraries Pressbooks platform.

College of Health Sciences

-- Zoe Kriegel, an assistant professor in the Division of Communication Disorders. Kriegel teaches "Voice Disorders." She will create a series of observation and practice training modules for the clinical assessment of voice. In addition to being used in coursework, the materials will be available to rural health care clinicians across Wyoming.

-- Breanna Krueger, an associate professor in the Division of Communication Disorders. Krueger teaches "Phonetics." She will create a series of online modules using the UW Libraries Pressbook platform. The modules allow students to practice identifying phonetic features, reading phonetic transcription and transcribing words from speech samples.

-- Amy Peterson, an assistant professor in the Division of Communication Disorders. Peterson teaches "Speech and Language Disorders Across the Lifespan." She will create a language analysis database that will allow students to use recordings, transcribe and segment them for practice and conduct an analysis.

-- Alisa Siceloff, an assistant lecturer in the Division of Kinesiology and Health. Siceloff teaches "One Health: Animal, Human and Ecological." She will adopt a previously created OER for the new course.

LeaRN and Writing Center

-- Francesca King, an associate lecturer for LeaRN and director of the UW Writing Center. King will teach "Human Culture," a study-abroad course in summer 2025 and a new "Writing Center Theory" course. She will create a new textbook for the study-abroad course that will feature English translations of Icelandic sagas, folklores, mythological stories and poetry. King also will create a new textbook for "Writing Center Theory" that will feature case studies from the UW Writing Center. Both books will be published on the UW Libraries Pressbooks platform.

UW Libraries will award another round of grants for the spring semester. Grant awards range from $2,500 to $5,000. Interested applicants must attend the "OER 101" workshop Wednesday, Oct. 2, before submitting grant applications. Proposals will be evaluated on several categories outlined in the scoring rubric developed by members of UW Libraries' OER Committee. Proposals are due Thursday, Oct. 31.

For more information, visit https://uwyo.edu/oer or email Samantha Peter at [email protected].

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