Chapter 3: Giant Leaps

The giant leap – all three of the grant requests we received were for our largest grant categories – creating textbooks and redesigning a course.

Andrew White, Professor of Chemical Engineering, was our first grant recipient for his Open Textbook, Deep Learning in Chemistry and Materials Science, published through the Living Journal of Computational Molecular Science. This textbook applies deep learning and artificial intelligence to chemistry and materials science.

David Miller and Rafaella Borasi, professors at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development had a print-ready version of their co-edited book, Promoting Innovations in Education: Stories and Practices of Entrepreneurial Educators.  There is no comparable case-study of educational entrepreneurship, and as a text for their course, Entrepreneurial Skills for Educators, they wanted to share their work and also encourage educators to use and add to their ground-breaking work. For this project, we decided that Pressbooks would be the ideal home for the text, and that a companion WordPress site would be a great way to encourage additional authors, and to share other materials.

For Scott McGuiness, professor of Counseling at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development and his co-teacher, Kyle Sullivan, sharing tools for educators of counseling was the impetus for applying for the OER grant. They are well aware that the United States needs more individuals trained in the areas of substance abuse and addiction. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 100,000 Americans died from a drug overdose between November 2020 and November 2021.  Their course, Addictions Counseling and Prevention, already included some open pedagogy, and their goal with the grant was two-fold: work with graduate students to create materials for counselor educators, and sharing the course as an OER.   

The materials, initially to be housed in the University’s Institutional Repository are going to be transferred to Pressbooks for easier access and sharing.