FIPSE Awards New Grant to Open Oregon Educational Resources

The Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) in the U.S. Department of Education has awarded a $712,829 grant to Open Oregon Educational Resources to develop openly-licensed, targeted pathway materials with an equity lens for Criminal Justice. Eighty percent of the total cost of the program is funded by FIPSE, with the remaining twenty percent representing in-kind personnel costs funded by Open Oregon Educational Resources.

This grant began on September 1, 2021, and runs through August 31, 2024. It is designed around the priorities and reporting requirements defined in the call for proposals.

This project will support faculty authors from Oregon community colleges and universities to develop high-quality, accessible open educational resources with an equity, diversity, and inclusion lens for high-enrollment courses in Criminal Justice that lead to in-demand occupations. The courses selected for development currently have few open educational resources for faculty to choose from, so by creating and disseminating openly licensed course materials, this project addresses a gap in the existing marketplace and offers a replicable model for other projects. This project will eliminate required textbook costs in 4 pathway courses and improve student achievement by providing access to higher quality learning materials than those available commercially.

Open Oregon Educational Resources is excited to work with our partners at Chemeketa Press, RMC Research, and Pressbooks on this project. Thank you to the many OER champions in the state who contributed to the grant proposal in Fall 2020.

We’ll be looking for additional faculty and community partners to contribute to the redesign of the following courses:

• Introduction to the American Criminal Justice System
• Introduction to Criminology
• Race & Crime
• Mental Illness & Disability in the Criminal Justice System

The contents of this post were developed under a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.