From Judith Thomas, Director of Faculty Programs:
The Library would like to announce the first faculty cohort of the Affordability and Equity program. This program, sponsored by the Jefferson Trust and offered by the University of Virginia Library, provides support to faculty who want to adopt, adapt, or create open educational resources (OER).
OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. Open resources have the potential to provide equitable access to knowledge, drive down student costs, and create a more inclusive learning environment.
The following faculty received Affordability & Equity grants:
Anna Borovskaya-Ellis, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
“Our project seeks to fill a perennial need in language instruction while working within the Open Educational Resource sphere to contribute to Russian classrooms inside and outside of UVA. We aim to create linguistically appropriate and culturally relevant open educational resources for First-Year Russian courses (RUSS 1010 and 1020). Our authentic and engaging interactive videos, vocabulary presentations, and grammar reviews are being created with specific grammatical and cultural goals in mind and allow our students to work with level-appropriate, contemporary resources that reflect modern Russian lexicon and style. We plan to turn this collection of materials into a full-fledged, digital textbook replacement for our students to ease a significant financial burden that buying textbooks imposes on them.”
Stella Mattioli, Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
“Resources currently available for the study of Italian do not comprehensively reflect the reality of Italian culture and society. This project will fill this gap with open educational resources that show students how Italian society is changing and evolving. Authentic videos and other inclusive material will be included in the Italian language syllabi for first- and second-year courses (ITAL 1010, 1020, 2010, 2020), allowing the students to learn the language by exploring diverse topics pertaining to the reality of life in Italy.”
Emily Scida, Kate Neff and Matthew Street, Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
“This project has two goals; the first is to move online materials for our recently developed 6-week non-credit refresher course SPAN 160 (Elementary Spanish Online) from UVA Collab to Pressbooks, making them free and accessible to other language educators. The second is to develop additional modules and assignments, expanding the content for use in our SPAN 1060 (Accelerated Elementary Spanish) course offered in Fall, Spring, and Summer.”
Congratulations to the recipients, and thank you to all who applied! Read more about services for faculty at UVA Library.
The Library is now accepting new proposals. Applications are being accepted on a rolling basis,