Susan Stirrup
   Instructor, Chemistry

 

 

Susan Stirrup was recognized for adopting an OpenStax OER textbook for a required Chemistry for Engineers course, eliminating the need for students to purchase a $200 commercial textbook. This benefits mechanical, civil and electrical engineering majors who likely won’t need a chemistry textbook beyond the course. By integrating the OER text into Canvas, Stirrup provided students with assessment tools and bilingual (English and Spanish) access to the material. She also serves as co-chair of the campus OER committee and is a vocal advocate for open education at CU Denver.

   Kim Paxton
   Associate Professor, College of Nursing

 

 

A pioneer in OER, Kim Paxton has not only adopted and created open resources but also conducted a study on their effectiveness. In a controlled comparison of commercial vs. OER textbooks in a health promotion class, 66% of students preferred the OER version, citing it as more essential to their learning. Paxton authored an OER textbook after years of dedicated effort, saving each student $160. Accepting Paxton’s award was Catherine Jankowski, a nursing colleague and contributing OER author.

   Dan Driscoll
   Associate Professor, School of Business

 

 

Since 2018, Dan Driscoll has been a driving force behind OER at UCCS, adopting OpenStax’s Macroeconomics textbook and developing Measuring the Macroeconomy, shared on Canvas Commons. A founding member of OpenCU who is celebrating five years of participation, Driscoll inspired his department to adopt OER for all macroeconomics courses at UCCS. Survey data from the OER SUCCESS Program showed a 95% approval rating from students, who appreciated the cost savings, accessibility and clarity of the materials.

   Michael Klymkowsky
   Associate Professor, Biology

 

 

Michael Klymkowsky was recognized for co-creating the CLUE (Chemistry, Life, the Universe and Everything) curriculum, an OER-based learning framework that promotes reasoning over memorization. CLUE, which incorporates AI-driven learning tools to assess student understanding and enhance engagement, has had a national impact, improving learning and inclusivity for students from diverse backgrounds. Besides being implemented in CU Boulder’s MCDB courses, CLUE has been used at Michigan State (4,500 students annually) and the University of Minnesota (3,400 students annually).

    Jamie Cronin
    Medical Student, CU Anschutz

 

 

The inaugural Student OER Champion Award was given to Jamie Cronin for developing a 3D model of the brain, providing an innovative, free study tool for medical and dental students and, as with all OER, openly accessible to anyone. The model is downloadable and 3D-printable, increasing access to anatomy education for low-income schools. Cronin’s creation, which enhances student learning by visualizing complex 3D anatomical relationships, has been integrated into four courses across CU Anschutz’s medical, dental and graduate programs.

   Jiayue Cecilia Wu
   Assistant Professor, College of Arts & Media

 

 

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Awarded for: Creating course materials for Digital Music Techniques and Music, Meditation, & Tech courses 

Notable: 
- Creation of OER course materials for Digital Music Techniques and Music, Meditation, & Tech courses enhances the courses’ effectiveness by providing students with high-quality, cost-free learning materials tailored to the subject matter
- Continuous project funding since 2021
- Projected cost savings to students for nearly $250,000 in synthesizer sound design students

   Teresa Connolly
   Assistant Professor, College of Nursing

 

 

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Awarded for: Creation of nursing OER materials and being a fierce advocate of OER on the AMC.

Notable: 
- Applying with Fort Lewis for a collaborative CDHE OER grant of $100k to work towards a z-degree BSN.
- Creating an open site for nursing OER ancillary materials to which nursing faculty can submit their OER.
- Spreading the word of OER within the College of Nursing and inspiring other faculty to create or adopt OER.

   Niki Juhl
   Associate Teaching Professor, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry

 

 

   Tisha Mendiola Jessop
  Teaching Professor, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry

  

 

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Awarded for: Creating an open chemistry lab manual

Notable: 
- Creating an OER lab manual for CHEM 1201, 1211, 1402, and 1412
- Increasing inclusive and digital access to lab manuals for hundreds of students while increasing student engagement in chemistry
- Applying OER principles learned through their participation in the UCCS OER SUCCESS Program as well as perpetuating the advocacy and use of OER campus wide.

   Alexander Saltzman
   Teaching Assistant Professor

 

 

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Awarded for: Open Chemistry Online - CHEM 1 and Open Chemistry Online - CHEM 2

Notable: 
- Alexander has participated in CU Boulder’s Open CU Course OER Adaptation and Creation Initiative in 2021, 2022, and 2023. This year, he created a final output as a learning management system Canvas cartridge file that can serve as a starting point for Introductory Chemistry and General Chemistry 1 courses in learning management systems.
- Saltzman advocates on behalf of students and students’ rights. He is passionate about educators taking action in response to the financial burdens and barriers of higher education. He shares his experiences creating OER with colleagues, encouraging them to participate in the CU Boulder Open CU Course OER Adaptation and Creation Initiative.
- Salzman’s approach to creating OER is considering accessibility and ease of use. All of his videos have closed captions, and he provides instructions and details of what is provided, so educators may easily integrate the materials into their own courses. 

   Baye Herald
   Senior Instructor, Technical Communication & Information Design

 

 

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Professor Herald has been awarded for the creation of the open Technical Communications Across the Professions textbook, which was co-created and co-edited with students. She incorapted universal design for learning principles and represented diverse perspectives through adequate samples, examples, and links.

Also recognized: Joshua Ferguson, undergraduate student, Technical Communication and Information Design

   Troy Butler
   Associate Professor, Mathematics and Statistical Sciences

   

 

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Troy Butler has developed open course material for two undergraduate courses: Programming for Data Science and Partial Differential Equations. Butler utilizes the free cloud-based Jupyter notebooks and Colab that ensures that every student has access to the same content and computing platform. The live code makes the interaction with the course materials transformative by bringing an experimental mindset into mathematics and statistics curricula previously reserved for physical science disciplines.

   David Paradis
   Associate Teaching Professor, Department of History

 

 

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David Paradis created the Origins of European History open textbook in collaboration with students Sheena Barnes and Abby Lagemann. This customized course text directly addresses students’ needs. Paradis has also saved CU Boulder students approximately $15,750 annually.

Also recognized: Sheena Barnes, former graduate student, Department of History; Abby Lagemann, former graduate student, Department of History

   Chloe Page
   Instructor, Department of Psychiatry

 

 

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Chloe Page has been awarded for the creation and open licensing of 3D augmented reality brain models that afford spatial and holistic interaction with important regions of the brain, typically not available to neuroanatomy students. This neuroendocrinology educational content has greatly benefitted medical residents.

   Katherine Cliff
   Senior Instructor Mathematics at UCCS

 

 

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Katherine’s work on curating, revising, and creating OER for mathematics education has lessened the financial burden of math classes for hundreds of students. Her advocacy for open source online homework platform MyOpenMath has led to several colleagues adopting this system which closes the feedback loop and offers students the chance to make sure they are understanding content while they work on their homework. In the 2021/2022 school year, Katherine officially rolled out a fully interactive OER trigonometry textbook.

  Dennis DeBay
  CTT Assistant Professor of Math Education

  

 

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Dennis DeBay is a CTT Assistant Professor of Math Education in the SEHD. His  perspective on learning goes further than numbers. It is about using an equity approach to encourage lasting wonder Din higher ed learning. 

   Maureen Stabio, Doctor
   Vice-Director | Modern Human Anatomy Program 

 

 

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Dr. Stabio is vice-director of the Modern Human Anatomy program and a leader in neuroscience education at the Anschutz Medical Campus, where she teaches master’s students, dental students, and medical students.  In 2016 she started a small collection of plastinated human organs as well as a free lending program for CU educators.  In 2019, Dr. Stabio received an OER creation grant to digitize the models into a virtual library under a creative commons license now available at https://www.anatomylibrary.org/. Since then, the use of these specimens has exploded.  The lending program has over 50 physical specimens that have been utilized by over 10,000 students across 10 professional programs and is continually growing.  Importantly, Dr. Stabio is passionate about involving graduate students in the creation of innovative anatomy OER.

               

   Ryan Curtis
   Teaching Associate Professor | Dept. of Psychology & Neuroscience

 

 

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Ryan Curtis is currently a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder. Curtis has been been using, and developing, Open Educational Resources in his classes for about 10 years.

   Eleanor Haberl
   Research Associate, Boulder

 

 

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Haberl is a research associate on an NSF project on Artificial Intelligence and Ethics (PI Tom Yeh and Co-PI's B.Dalton and S. Forsyth). She authored 5 short stories with embedded AI ethical dilemmas to develop students' critical understanding of AI ethical issues. These stories are open source digital materials and are being used in two CU Boulder (Computer Science and English) courses taught by T. Yeh and B. Walsh, as well as in high school English Language Arts classes and Science Discover summer camps on AI. 

   Debnath Chatterjee, MD, FAAP
   Associate Professor of Anesthesiology, Director of Fetal Anesthesia, Colorado Fetal Care Center,

   Program Director, Pediatric Anesthesiology Fellowship, University of Colorado

 

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Dr. Chatterjee has given presentations to his department about how to find openly licensed images and OER. He was recently awarded an OER creation grant from the CU Anschutz OER committee to fund the creation of an OER pediatric airway course.  The comprehensive OER pediatric airway course will include case studies, quiz questions, and recorded presentations that will be accessible to anyone. The course will be linked to OER repositories.  

   Stephen Hartke
   Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical and Statisical Sciences

 

 

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Professor Hartke has used and developed OER and OSS (open-source software) materials in his courses for many years, primarily in Math 3000 Introduction to Abstract Mathematics and Math 4110/5110 Theory of Numbers.  In both courses, Professor Hartke uses OER textbooks and has developed a series of class handouts to present material and guide classroom discussions.  The Math 3000 handouts have been shared with the other instructors of Math 3000 and used in every section since Spring 2016.  Other instructors have added their own additions to the handouts, which have been incorporated in the primary versions maintained by Professor Hartke. (So far, no other instructor has taught Math 4110/5110, since it is only taught every other year.)  Professor Hartke also uses open-source software (primarily Sage or Python and SymPy) in his number theory course.

               

   Lynnane George, Ph.D
   Professor, College of Engineering and Applied Science

 

 

 

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Dr. Lynnane George has progressively integrated OER into her astrodynamics course over the last five years which has culminated into a custom eText using Pressbooks. She has revised, remixed, and created her own material to create a comprehensive and relevant curriculum for the subject matter.

Joanne Addison
Senior Instructor, College of Education

 

 

 

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Dr. Button utilizes a variety of OER, not only using it as her curriculum but introducing it to her education students and requiring them to locate, select, and evaluate OER for their course projects in hopes that they will incorporate it into their own classrooms. Her resources are highly rated by participating students, and she is dedicated to giving her students a rich educational experience.

Julia Dixon
Assistant Professor Emergency Medicine
 

 

 

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Dr. Dixon has developed OER used to support the WHO Basic Emergency Care Course, EMED 6631 Wilderness Advanced First Aid, Pre-Health Wilderness and Emergency Medicine Course. The videos provide hands-on examples with clear guidance for essential skills. Her commitment to OER has shown what a force multiplier open source innovative educational resources can be to different contexts.

Brad Hinson
Assistant Dean & Senior Instructor, Digital Learning & Technology, School of Education & Human Development

 

 

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Brad is a tireless advocate for open educational resources and open education through teaching, organizing, oversight, imagining, and partnering. As Assistant Dean & Senior Instructor of Digital Learning & at the School of Education and Human Development (SEHD), Brad runs IT operations in the SEHD, leads faculty professional development and support centered on digital education, and serves as faculty in the SEHD Learning Design & Technology program.

Brooke Huibregtse
Instructor Psychology & Neuroscience, Institute for Behavioral Science

 

 

 

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Dr. Huibregtse completely overhauled materials for the Behavioral Genetics course, offered by the department with the largest number of declared undergraduate majors in the CU system. She was able to curate a complex set of OER materials that actually improve and update the longstanding curriculum of the course, and thus was able to drastically reduce costs for students, while also actually increasing the quality of course content.

 
OEWeek Activities: https://libguides.colorado.edu/openedweek

Websites/libguide pages
Open educational resources: https://libguides.colorado.edu/oer
Creative Commons licenses: https://libguides.colorado.edu/cclicenses
Open pedagogy: https://libguides.colorado.edu/openped
CU Scholar Open Educational Resources Collection: https://scholar.colorado.edu/collections/qf85nc31p

OER Award
Open educator award: https://libguides.colorado.edu/openeducator

News Posts
Call for applications
Open Educator Award story

Additional Resources
2020–2021 Course OER Creation/Adaptation Initiative call for proposals (widely distributed via university communication channels)
Accessibility check-list
Memo of Understanding (2021-2022 version)
Canvas course for grant participants

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Open Educational Resources (OER) at CU Anschutz: OER Home
OER in Promotion & Tenure presentation at the 2020 Open Education Conference

OER Creation Projects
Teaching Future Nurses
Clinical Decision Support Artifact Design Assignment
Nurse Practitioner Student’s Pocket Guide to Clinical Guidelines
CU Plastinated Organ Library

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Web Resources
Faculty Resource Center OER page
Faculty Resource Center OER SUCCESS (Start, Use, Choose, Customize, Educate, Survey, Share) Program
Faculty Resource Center Universal Design for Inclusive Teaching (UDIT) Program
Kraemer Family Library OER Libguide
List of UCCS Courses Using OER, No-cost, or Low-cost Materials for Fall 2021

UCCS OER Council
UCCS OER Initiative (Council)

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OER LibGuide: https://guides.auraria.edu/textbookalternatives

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