HBCU faculty, staff, and administrators will share their practices for supporting faculty changing to no-cost and low-cost digital course materials, including OER, and saving students thousands of dollars. Join us at the pre-conference workshop and get started on your own AL$ programs. It is OPEN to all.
For the past 6 years, the HBCU Affordable Learning Community has been building the organizational, programmatic, and technical foundation for their Affordable Learning Solutions program for all HBCUs. Tennessee State University (TSU) has successfully institutionalized the Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) strategy and has been recognized as outstanding and exemplary by Berkeley project. TSU have been successfully incubating AL$ projects at various HBCUs by leveraging the Hewlett grants in partnership with the California State University Long Beach MERLOT-SkillsCommons programs. Along with other vanguard HBCU institutions, we now have a community of over 20 HBCUs that have implemented AL$ and has successfully enabled HBCU faculty to redesign their courses and adopt OER to reduce if not eliminate the cost of course materials for their students. MERLOT-SkillsCommons closely collaborated with the HBCU leadership group to design and maintain the HBCU AL$ Community Portal that showcases the individually customized, institutional AL$ portals, and all the open educational services that all HBCUs can use.
The HBCU AL$ community, in partnership with MERLOT-SkillsCommons, have designed an open portal (http://hbcuals.org) that provides easy access to:
- the largest aggregate collection of free and open e-textbooks, open courseware, open access journals, open learning objects, and more
- A collection of free and online teaching-learning resources that have can be used to ‘culturally contextualize’ course curriculum with resources about Africana leaders and histories of HBCUs. The collection also lets users explore materials that have been authored faculty from HBCUs across a variety of disciplines as well as materials “curated” by faculty from HBCUs.
- over 50 general education course with multiple free and open e-textbooks aligned with the course curriculum
- free and open collections of virtual labs in STEM and workforce development curriculum
- over 100 free and open teaching ePortfolios that showcase faculty’s adoption of OER across a broad range of disciplines
- a free and open library of planning tools, guidelines, and professional development resources to support HBCUs developing and implementing their own AL$ programs
- free and open methods for sharing their use, reuse, revision, remixing, redistribution, and retention of OER that they have adopted and authored
The pre-conference workshop will begin with the leaders of AL$ programs at the HBCUs sharing their strategies, practices, and outcomes as the first step in helping workshop participants develop their strategies and plans for an AL$ program on their campuses. We will outline a “readiness checklist” for planning your AL$ program and review a planning template for participants to consider how they might customize it for their campuses’ plans. Participants will share their ideas, concerns, and questions for the HBCU leadership team.