Springfield Technical Community College  is part of a consortium of Massachusetts colleges that received a $440,000 federal grant to encourage the use and development of free Open Educational Resources (OER). This grant is focused on creating and adapting OER for high-enrollment programs that are both free to students and culturally relevant. 

Four STCC faculty have been awarded stipends based on their project proposals for the first round of the grant. Please take a few minutes to learn more about these exciting projects! A total of 21 projects were funded for the first round from all six participating institutions. Now the work begins!

A critical component of the grant is professional development that both faculty and staff at each campus will receive in order to create and publish digital textbooks and/or supporting materials.  The ROTEL team has partnered with the Rebus Foundation to support us through their year-long, cohort-based Textbook Success Program (TSP). The program consists of 12 weekly online classes (with a one-hour synchronous session each week) followed by 9 months of regular support check-ins as faculty work on their OER textbooks. The curriculum will explicitly center DEI strategies when creating OER and techniques to measure OER use in courses. 

I am hoping to build a team of institutional support around adapting and publishing open textbooks. This is an invitation for all of you to become involved in the ROTEL project and participate in the Textbook Success Program. Teams at each campus will consist of any of the following roles:

Instructional designers

Librarians

Center for Teaching and Learning Staff

Disability services

Interested faculty

Potential contributors

OER champions

Administrators

Whoever is interested is welcome to join!

Each textbook project can have up to 4 people enrolled in the TSP. We have plenty of space for those who are interested. Learn more about why having a team is important!


If you are interested in the TSP and/or the ROTEL project in general, please reply to this email. If you’d like more details, I would be happy to meet individually and discuss this opportunity with you. 


Learn more about ROTEL: Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens

Thanks for your consideration!

P.S. One more detail to consider – The Hewlett Foundation was so interested in the ROTEL project that they are paying for the Rebus Textbook Success Program ($75K). This is likely to be a one-time opportunity for us – even though there’ll be more rounds of projects.