Announcing the 2025-2026 AggieOpen Fellows
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 2025-26 — five UC Davis faculty members and instructors who will integrate open educational resources (OER) into their courses with support from AggieOpen: Amy Goodman-Bide (UWP), Yutian Tan (East Asian Languages and Cultures), Cindy Juyoung Ok (English), Melissa Bender (UWP), and Mona Monfared (Molecular and Cellular Biology).
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 2025, Fall 2025, Winter 2026, or Spring 2026:
- 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 2025-26 AggieOpen Fellows
Amy Goodman-Bide
Adopt: Amy Goodman-Bide is a continuing lecturer in the University Writing Program. Goodman-Bide will incorporate an open-access publishing module for students enrolled in UWP 102: Writing in the Biological Sciences.
Yutian Tan
Adopt: Yutian Tan is a lecturer in the East Asian Languages and Cultures department. Tan will curate openly licensed videos along with library-licensed resources for her Introduction to Chinese Languages and Cultures course to support multi-modal learning.
Cindy Juyoung Ok
Adapt: Cindy Juyoung Ok is an assistant professor of English. Ok will develop open-access multi-genre introductory readers for creative writing students in ENL 46: Topics in Creative Writing. She will use Creative Commons-licensed scholarly publications and works in the public domain.
Melissa Bender
Adapt: Melissa Bender is a continuing lecturer in the University Writing Program. Bender plans to design a course reader around the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The reader will include open access materials from scholarly books, textbooks and articles, as well as case studies for each of the 17 SDGs. In addition to the course reader, she will curate relevant, openly licensed audio-visual materials to prompt in-class discussions.
Mona Monfared
Adapt: Mona Monfared is an associate professor of molecular and cellular biology. Monfared plans to adopt open textbook materials from the LibreText libraries for her BIS 102 and BIS 103 Biochemistry courses, along with curating open educational resources like video tutorials, interactive tools and simulations.
Advancing Inclusive Education
In addition to the central benefits of OER, which improve the availability and affordability of course materials for students, the 2025-26 Fellows noted opportunities to create a more inclusive learning environment and deepen student engagement with learning objectives.
As an instructor in the University Writing Program working with STEM students to cultivate their science communication skills, Amy Goodman-Bide plans to design a module about the role of open access and Open Science in her UWP 102B course:
Doing this work will add to students’ knowledge of the publishing world and develop greater understanding of research and inequities within scientific publication. It may help them think about how they can be a part of ensuring that impact of scientific knowledge is available to all.”
— Amy Goodman-Bide, Lecturer, Writing in the Biological Sciences
Associate Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Mona Monfared will curate a spectrum of open resources, including texts, images, simulations and videos for her biochemistry courses, “so that students can access the material in multiple ways, allowing them to engage with the course material in the way they feel most comfortable.”
Assistant Professor of English Cindy Juyoung Ok plans to work closely with her graduate teaching assistants in redesigning her ENGL 46: Creative Writing course. In working with openly licensed resources, she hopes that the “graduate students will learn about open materials and the potential to include them in their own classes. They would learn skills and resources helpful not only to their own teaching, but also to their current and future research and writing.”
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.