Open Oregon Educational Resources received two grants to develop openly licensed course materials with an equity lens in Human Development and Family Studies, Sociology, and Criminal Justice. After four years of collaboration with an outstanding team of authors and instructors, we are delighted to share our openly licensed course materials for free online and in print at low cost.
Our peer-reviewed textbooks are designed with equity in mind. You will find rich images and multimedia in addition to written content. You will also find interactive reflection prompts and self-check questions aligned with each chapter’s learning objectives. Scroll down each book’s landing page to review the table of contents.
Each textbook has a course pack of integrated course materials where we share ancillaries. We know instructors want relevant and practical resources to support their teaching. We post course content on Google sites to make sharing easy.
Our materials are all collected in OERCommons Groups so that instructors can find links to textbooks and ancillaries at a single link. Community members can contribute relevant openly licensed materials to the group.
Open Oregon Educational Resources is especially proud of the collaboration that took place among 200-plus people to bring these high-quality course materials to launch. Enjoy the entire list of collaborators at Open Curriculum Project Participants [Google Doc]. Thank you to each and every person on this list!
Where to find our materials
* Textbooks with learning outcomes that align with Oregon’s statewide course name, number, description, and learning outcomes adopted in 2024. For more information please visit the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission’s Educator Resources – Common Course Numbering [Website].
Introducing the Open Curriculum Development Model
The Open Curriculum Development Model [Website] by Amy Hofer and Veronica Vold is a comprehensive collection of training and process materials for a variety of audiences: authors, pilot instructors, support roles, and project leaders who are developing openly licensed textbooks and ancillaries with an equity-minded design approach. We created this collection so that:
- Authors have one place to look for training materials when writing an open textbook
- Pilot Instructors have one place to look for training materials when developing openly licensed course materials
- Support team members have one place to look for process documentation.
Project partners in any role can find relevant information about our three-year curriculum development model. At the end of the process, we are ready to launch high-quality, peer-reviewed textbooks designed with an equity lens. Each textbook has a course pack of integrated course materials where we share ancillaries. Our criteria for success rely on four instructional design frameworks: Transparency in Learning and Teaching, Culturally Responsive Teaching, Universal Design for Learning, and Open Pedagogy. All materials shared are openly licensed.
Learn more about our approach in High-quality Curriculum Design with an Equity Lens [Website]. This post explains what we mean by “high-quality” and “equity lens,” and shows how we connect our criteria for success for textbooks and course development with equity-minded instructional design frameworks.
Publications and Presentations
Learn about student savings and outcomes:
- More Bang for No Bucks: Students Save Big with Federal Grant Courses [Website]
- Our key finding regarding student savings is that we almost doubled our projected student savings estimate!
- Strong Design, Strong Outcomes: Instructional Design Support Makes a Difference [Website]
- Our key finding regarding student savings is that we almost doubled our projected student savings estimate!
- Customizing the Curriculum: An Assessment of the Impact of Federally Funded OER [Website]
- Open Ed Conference session where we will finally, finally, share our project outcomes.
Browse a list of all publications and presentations related to this project via Open Curriculum Development Project Presentations and Publications [Google Doc].
Additional Information
Download a custom one-sheet for each curriculum via Final Targeted Pathways Book Flyers [Google Folder].
Learn more about the materials in a 5-minute video created by Veronica Vold, Open Education Instructional Designer for this project.
Learn more about our publication process in a 20-minute webinar presented by Veronica Vold, hosted by the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources.
Funding
Our grants drew from Governor’s Emergency Education Relief funding and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) in the U.S. Department of Education (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).
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.
