The Secretary of State/Illinois State Library has awarded NIU Libraries an open education resources (OER) grant of $149,925 for HuskiesUnbound: Developing OER for Undergraduate Success in High-Impact Courses.
The project will develop OER and/or open ancillary materials for 11 high-impact undergraduate courses from five of the university’s six undergraduate colleges — all of which fulfill either general education requirements or requirements for a major. These course OER projects will not only increase student success by addressing course materials affordability, they will also make the learning content more meaningful for NIU students by employing diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies that center and celebrate the diverse identities of our undergraduate population. In addition, the OER developed will serve as models that can be easily adopted or adapted by other institutions in the state and beyond.
The project will be led by Larissa Garcia, Associate Professor, and Dee Anna Phares, Assistant Professor — both from NIU Libraries — in collaboration with faculty authors Gibson Cima, Theatre Studies; Nancy Dominguez-Fret, World Languages and Cultures; Ricela Feliciano and Kevin Palencia Infante, Mathematical Sciences; Xiaohui Sophie Li, Family and Consumer Sciences; Nick Pohlman, Mechanical Engineering; Alan Polansky, Statistics and Actuarial Sciences; Michelle Sands, Special Education; and Eric Hoffman, English. The authors will receive project support from CITL staff members, Tracy Miller, Director of Instructional Design and Development; Cynthia Paralejas, Assistant Director of Instructional Design; Lindsay Vreeland, Inclusive Teaching Coordinator; and from Jaime Schumacher, Senior Director of Scholarly Communications, NIU Libraries. The goal is for faculty to use the OER and ancillary materials developed by spring 2026.
The project builds on the efforts of NIU’s Course Materials Affordability Task Force (CMAT) — co-chaired by Garcia, Phares, Miller, and Amanda Hirsch, Teaching and Learning Coordinator, CITL — which led efforts to employ course marking for low and no cost courses in MyNIU, offers rewards to departments with the highest percentage of affordable course sections, and provides support to faculty who elect to transition their courses to low or no cost resources.
The ISL OER grant program is part of a state-wide initiative to reduce the high cost of textbooks and encourage student success. In 2023, the Consortium for Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) awarded an Illinois SCOERs subgrant, underwritten by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education in the U.S. Department of Education, to Garcia and Jessica Labatte, Director, School of Art and Design, to create an OER for beginning photography courses, which has been used in NIU classes since spring 2024.
