Virginia's Academic Library Consortium

VIVA Open Grant Program: Spring 2020 Awards

The response to VIVA’s Course Redesign Grant Program continues to be tremendous, with 41 proposals requesting more than $560,000 submitted in February, 2020. VIVA has awarded 11 projects in this round of funding, totaling $130,538 in grants with the potential to save Virginia students more than $500,000 dollars each year. Grant recipients represent 16 VIVA institutions, with many of the projects representing multi-institution collaborations. When combined with the projects awarded grants in the spring and fall of 2019, VIVA Course Redesign Grant projects have the potential to save Virginia students as much as $15 million over five years. Summaries of the awards and descriptions of the projects funded in the Spring of 2020 are found below.

Creating an Interactive Family and Community Engagements OER for Future and Novice Teachers
Dr. Adria Hoffman
James Madison University, University of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University
$30,000
Dr. Hoffman and her team will create a resource for required courses in teacher preparation that focus on developing partnerships between educators, families, and communities. The resource will include simulation and case studies in order to address the need of educators to engage with families in educational contexts.

World Languages OER Textbook Collaboratory
Dr. Kathryn Murphy-Judy
J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, University of Mary Washington, Virginia Commonwealth University
$23,827
This collaboration, the continuation of work begun with a Mellon Humanities Grant, will co-produce student-driven OER for 4th semester courses in Spanish, German, and ASL, required courses for majors at all the institutions represented on the team. Instructors manuals will also be created.

Pre-College Composition for English Language Learners
Ms. Breanna Bayraktar
Northern Virginia Community College
$15,350
This project will develop a set of course materials to address the gap in available OER for English language learners. Those course materials will include reading assignments, vocabulary and grammar exercises, collaborative activities, quizzes and exams, all of which can be adapted for upper-level composition courses.

Adapting OER for Principles of Management
Dr. Andrew Bennett
Old Dominion University, New River Community College
$11,000
Instructors at Old Dominion University and New River Community College will adapt OpenStax Principles of Management for a core course for business majors at these institutions. In addition, faculty will create ancillary materials, curate class activities, and migrate new material into existing online course modules.

Adapt OER for Quantitative Reasoning
Ms. Jennifer Polm
John Tyler Community College, Tidewater Community College, Virginia Community College System (VCCS)
$9,975
Faculty on this team will adapt OER content and create a MyOpenMath course framework that includes assessments, homes and test questions, and samples of student projects that can be used online or face-to-face.

Adaption of OpenStax Anatomy and Physiology by Preparing a Lab Manual for Nursing and Allied Health Students
Dr. Aylin Marz
Norfolk State University
$10,000
Dr. Marx and her collaborators will adapt the OpenStax Anatomy and Physiology textbook for the two-semester course that nursing and allied health students take at Norfolk State University and create a lab manual to accompany the textbook. The manual will include interactive exercises, use the scientific method, and provide sketching exercises in order to significantly enhance learning.

A No-Cost, All-Inclusive Statistics Course
Dr. Neville Fogarty
Christopher Newport University
$8,400
As many as 500 students take Math 125: Elementary Statistics at Christopher Newport University each year. This project will eliminate their materials costs entirely and ease instruction by curating a selection of free textbooks, revising existing lecture notes, creating a set of video lectures, and creating homework sets.

Aerospace Structures — Three Projects in One
Dr. Mayuresh Patil
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
$8,712
This three-part project will complete and make the open textbook Aerospace Structures, redesign three engineering courses that will adopt the text, and create and release a pilot database of relevant homework and test problems that will be exportable in multiple formats.

Increasing the Accessibility of General Undergraduate Education in Physical Science
Dr. Nadine Gergel-Hackett
Mary Baldwin University
Dr. Gergel-Hackettt will adapt open access chemistry and physics textbooks for non-science majors in introductory courses. The project team will include undergraduate researchers who will bring the text to life through multimedia resources, including 3D models and simulations.

Making Free Textbook Adoption Easier with Minimum Compromise in Quality
Dr. Can Dogan
Radford University
$4,000
Dr. Dogan's team will create and align text bank questions for the OpenStax Principles of Macroeconomics and Microeconomics textbooks in order to allow instructors to create practice and graded assignments in each chapter.

Adaptation of the PHI220 Ethics Course
Ms. Deborah Holt
Southside Virginia Community College
$2,600
The PHI 220 Ethics course will be modified, and new course resources will replace the traditional textbook and associated learning material. Ms. Holt will also make instructor's notes available to increase the utility of this resource to other instructors.