Open Educational Resources

U Kentucky Libraries Issues OER Grants 5 Years Running

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 07/06/20

For the fifth year running, the University of Kentucky Libraries has issued grants to faculty to develop open educational resources for their courses, as a replacement for the commercial textbooks they traditionally use. So far, according to the institution, the grants have saved nearly 9,000 students about $1.14 million in curriculum expenses, about $129 per student per course.

This year's recipients of the "alternative textbook grants" include both faculty who will create original OER and faculty who will adopt existing OER materials.

Among the materials already developed and released to the world through the libraries' program are:

• "Chemistry for Allied Health" by Allison Soult;
• "Professional Responsibility: An Open-Source Casebook" by Frye and Elizabeth Schiller; and
• "Shadowing: An Active Approach to Healthcare Exploration," developed by Claire Clark and Sara Cooley.

"This is a fantastic program. It encouraged me to create public domain open access teaching materials that have already saved UK students ~$20,000 and hopefully will generate even greater savings in the future," said Brian Frye, an associate professor of law, in a statement. Frye won a grant in 2018 to develop OER and is the recipient this year of a second grant.

"Having relied on my open source textbook has made my current start into the online teaching world due to COVID so much easier," added Regina Hannemann from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who received a grant in 2018.