Announcing the 2024-2025 AggieOpen Fellows
Fellows will adopt, adapt open educational resources into their courses
What is OER?
Open educational resources (OER) are openly licensed alternatives to commercially available course materials.
By choosing OER, instructors can make course materials more affordable and readily available for students.
OER includes open access or Creative Commons licensed publications, resources in the public domain, and learning objects and texts that instructors create themselves.
We are excited to announce the AggieOpen Fellows for academic year 2024-25 — four UC Davis faculty members and instructors who will integrate open educational resources (OER) into their courses with support from AggieOpen: Russ Carpenter, Briel Brown, Sascha Nicklisch and Miriam Markum.
Each Fellow in this cohort will receive funding and consultative support to adopt or adapt openly licensed, freely accessible course materials for a course they will teach in Summer 2024, Fall 2024, Winter 2025 or Spring 2025:
- Adopt – for Fellows who have identified open learning materials appropriate to their curriculum and would like support navigating the licensing and distribution of these materials.
- Adapt – for Fellows who have identified open learning materials but need to make significant revisions, annotations, and/or create instructor resources appropriate to their curriculum.
Introducing the 2024-25 AggieOpen Fellows
Russ Carpenter
Adopt: Russ Carpenter is a continuing lecturer in the University Writing Program and a member of the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) committee. He will incorporate an open access text reader for students enrolled in UWP 102: Writing in the Biological Sciences.
Briel Brown
Adapt: Briel Brown is an associate instructor of English. She will collaborate with students enrolled in ENL 5: Introduction to Creative Writing to develop a primary source reader of poetry and prose in the public domain, using digital collections like the Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center.
Sascha Nicklisch
Adapt: Sascha Nicklisch is an assistant professor of environmental toxicology. He plans to work with students in his ETX 128: Food Toxicology course to develop informational resources that provide food contaminant data.
Miriam Markum
Adapt: Miriam Markum is an associate professor of teaching in microbiology and molecular genetics. She plans to adopt an open textbook in her MIC 102: Introductory Microbiology course, along with curating open materials like video tutorials, interactive tools, and simulations.
Building Community, Deepening Engagement
In addition to the central benefits of OER, which improve the availability and affordability of course materials for students, the 2024-25 Fellows noted opportunities to build community and deepen students’ engagement with learning objectives.
“Supplementing textbook readings with a variety of resources (videos, simulations, etc) is recommended in Universal Design for Learning guidelines,” wrote Miriam Markum, associate professor of teaching in microbiology and molecular genetics. “Varied representation supports the learning of students for whom any one type of representation is not accessible or optimal. It also promotes a deeper connection with concepts for learners in general.”
Associate Instructor Briel Brown plans to design a course assignment for her ENL 5: Creative Writing class in which students will curate a primary source reader for future students.
By incorporating archived poetry recordings, students can hear often marginalized writers in their own voice and on their own terms. The material will showcase a variety of lived experiences, providing students with an opportunity to learn about and connect with the lives of others. Altogether, this provides significantly more opportunities for students to identify with the writers they encounter.”
Briel Brown, Associate Instructor, English
Participation in the AggieOpen Fellows cohort will help Sascha Nicklisch, assistant professor of environmental toxicology, empower student authors. “The overall goal of this project is to implement an active learning component in which students will learn how to search, collate, and summarize food contaminant data from existing online literature and databases. These data will be synthesized, instructor- and student peer-evaluated, and finally disseminated by building a new publicly available website.”
Over the program period, the AggieOpen team will provide Fellows with professional development opportunities to support their activities in finding, evaluating, and creating OER. Financial awards reflect the associated costs and recognize the time and effort involved.