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Open CU is based on a premise of openness and collective impact across CU’s four campuses and beyond.

Each campus brings Open Educational Resources (OER) expertise, resources, and practices for awareness and adoption to the shared table, all of which are customized to meet campus needs and cultures. By working together, the campuses succeed in their common goal of increasing the reach of quality OER experience and cost savings for students.

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Open CU Champions

Annual System award honoring campus faculty for high-impact implementation of OER in their course(s) and for their OER advocacy.

 

2023 OER Champions

Baye Herald, UCCS

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   Baye Herald
   Senior Instructor, Technical Communication & Information Design

 

 


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, CU Denver

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   Troy Butler
   Associate Professor, Mathematics and Statistical Sciences

   

 


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, CU Boulder

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   David Paradis
   Associate Teaching Professor, Department of History

 

 


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, Anschutz

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   Chloe Page
   Instructor, Department of Psychiatry

 

 


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.

2022 OER Champions

 

Katherine Cliff, UCCS

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   Katherine Cliff
   Senior Instructor Mathematics at UCCS

 

 


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, CU Denver

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  Dennis DeBay
  CTT Assistant Professor of Math Education

  

 


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, Anschutz Medical Campus

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

 

 


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, CU Boulder

               

Picture of Ryan Curtis

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

 

 


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.

 

2021 OER Champions

 

Eleanor Haberl, Boulder

   Eleanor Haberl
   Research Associate, Boulder

 

 


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, Anschutz

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

   Program Director, Pediatric Anesthesiology Fellowship, University of Colorado

 


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, Denver

   Stephen Hartke
   Associate Professor, Department of Mathematical and Statisical Sciences

 

 


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, UCCS

               

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

 

 

 


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.

 

2020 OER Champions

 

Linda Button, UCCS

Image of Linda Button

Joanne Addison
Senior Instructor, College of Education

 

 

 


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, Anschutz

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Julia Dixon
Assistant Professor Emergency Medicine
 


 

 


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, Denver

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


 

 


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, Boulder

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Brooke Huibregtse
Instructor Psychology & Neuroscience, Institute for Behavioral Science

 

 

 


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.

 

In 2020-2022, the Open CU initiative continues to:

 

  • Ensure that the Open CU campus teams (including teaching and learning centers, libraries, offices of information technology, and accessibility units) continue to deliver high-quality awareness and adoption workshops to additional educators and assisting educators with their course redesign efforts.
  • Provide financial incentives to faculty to adapt or create OER content that is fully accessible, discoverable, and openly-licensed.
  • Targeting educators teaching high school concurrent enrollment courses for participation.
  • Build a cadre of educator experts and advocates who will integrate open education principles into campus academic culture.

 

The Open CU initiative serves students across Colorado, including urban and rural populations, non-traditional and underrepresented students, and high school students across the state. This initiative has garnered over $200K in grant and in-kind funding.


 

Campus Web Resources and Information

CU Boulder Campus

 
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


CU Anschutz Medical Campus

UCCS Campus

CU Denver Auraria Campus

 

Open CU Committee Members

Anschutz

 

Boulder

 

Denver 

 

UCCS