OAT Award Recipients for Spring 2023

Craig Agule, Assistant Professor, Camden College of Arts and Sciences, Philosophy and Religion

Dr. Agule’s Philosophy of Law is a survey of core issues related to the subject. The revised course will cover approximately 12 topics, each with two key text elements. He will prepare an introduction to the key issues and questions. He will also assign an edited reading, with excerpts from one or two sources, at no additional cost. The combination of custom materials written for students and excerpted readings will provide students both an accessible introduction to the critical questions and a chance to work on key close reading skills.

Taught: Fall 2023

50 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $3,250

Georgia Arbuckle-Keil, Professor, Camden College of Arts and Sciences, Chemistry

Dr. Arbuckle-Keil will curate and evaluate educational materials and electronic resources from various open educational sites to use for Inorganic Chemistry / Advanced Inorganic Chemistry. She will also consult with the Libraries to identify appropriate freely available resources to help defer out-of-pocket student expenses.

Taught: Fall 2023

15 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $2,955

Paula Carabell, Adjunct Professor, Camden College of Arts and Sciences, Visual and Performing Arts

Introduction to Art History II is a survey course that extends from approximately the period of the Renaissance to the mid-twentieth century. Dr. Carabell will replace an existing textbook with materials from multiple online sources at no cost to students. These open-source websites contain articles and videos provided by a wide-range of art historians. This is an online course, and all materials will be posted on Canvas.

Taught: Summer 2024

25 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $3,750

Brian Corbett, Assistant Professor, Camden College of Arts and Sciences, Biology

Neurobiology II: Systems and Behavior is a course Dr. Corbett developed independently from the “ground up”. He uses texts that are effective, easily accessible, and free-of-charge. They provide an excellent foundation for neuroscience concepts that are traditionally included in Neurobiology II courses. The online texts are particularly beneficial because they use visual tools to help students understand complicated concepts, like how components of complex neural networks are interconnected.

Taught: Spring 2024

|24 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $0

Nora Emara, Associate Professor, Camden College of Arts and Sciences, Economics

Principles of Macroeconomics is general education course. Dr. Emara will replace a traditional textbook with open and affordable resources. She will pull from a variety of sources including Openstax, Merlot, and the Open Text Library, among others. She also plans to use existing Libraries resources such as eBooks and eJournals.



Taught: Fall 2023, Winter 2024, Spring 2024, Summer 2024

140 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $36,351

Sara Leshen-Gross, Assistant Teaching Professor, Camden College of Arts and Sciences, Mathematical Sciences

Dr. Leshen-Gross will use a free, open-source textbook for Active Calculus I & II. The course is written in a way that allows instructors to easily implement active learning techniques, such as group work and theory development rather than presenting examples as in a traditional book. She will also have her students use a low-cost homework platform. Combined with the free text, her students will realize an estimated 81% savings on course materials.

Taught: Fall 2023, Spring 2024

150 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $19,050

Greg Salyer, Part Time Lecturer, Camden College of Arts and Sciences, MALS and Philosophy and Religion

Dr. Salyer will update his online course, Philosophy and Religion, by editing and transcribing videos of public lectures on the topic. The course materials will be adapted and enhanced for an online audience and will ensure a higher-quality content bank for future offerings. Individual modules will be added to the Canvas Commons for use by other instructors. Transcripts will be edited into supplemental module content and a course textbook.

Taught: Spring 2024

30 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $0

Jillian Sayre, Associate Professor, Camden College of Arts and Sciences, English

Dr. Sayre plans to redesign her Literature of Horror course by supplementing two low-cost mass-market paperback texts with electronic library resources and various public domain texts. This is in contrast to other literary studies courses, which often require students to purchase 4+ books as well as a textbook.

Taught: Spring 2024

35 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $1,890

Trish Suplee, Associate Professor, Camden College of Arts and Sciences, Nursing

Dr. Suplee will provide students with freely available evidence-based articles from the Libraries and various online sources for Seminar in Professional Nursing. In health care, textbooks quickly become outdated. Practices and standards change constantly. Students need to be aware of the most current material. She will also capture data and use it information to strengthen course materials for the future. This course is taught by multiple faculty and they share resources and collaborate on what works best for students.

Taught: Fall 2023, Spring 2024

60 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $4,500

William Brucher, Assistant Teaching Professor, School of Management and Labor Relations, Labor Studies and Employee Relations

Dr. Brucher will introduce open and affordable materials into his course, History of Labor and Work in the United States, 1880-1945. He will integrate a new version of the textbook into the course, replacing the PDF scans and the second-hand copies of the book some students continue to purchase. The web format of the new edition will better allow him to assign specific sections on relevant labor history topics, rather than assigning whole chapters that also contain material geared to a general American history survey. The online format is also much easier to read and search on computers, phones, and tablets, as it will format to different screen sizes.

Taught: Fall 2023, Spring 2024

490 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $14,700

Alexander Lopez, Assistant Teaching Professor, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Marine and Coastal Sciences

Dr. Lopez plans to reimagine the curriculum for Field Laboratory Methods 2. He plans to further enrich the course while keeping it no-cost for his students. He will increase the time spent on the unit involving the autonomous underwater vehicles that the observational lab operates. New assessments involving the software and remote piloting of the equipment allows the students 24/7 access to the technology without the need to supervise its use. This free instructional tool has not yet been sufficiently utilized for this course, and the skillset gained from this process is greatly sought after by potential employers. The course will also implement a student-led collaborative standard-operating-procedure (SOP) document that serves as a resource and course textbook.

Taught: Spring 2024

7 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $0

Marci Meixler, Associate Teaching Professor, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources

Dr. Meixler plans to incorporate open and affordable resources into a set of linked courses: Landscape Ecology for undergraduates and Landscape Ecology for graduate students. Both courses are taught in a lecture/lab format using a complex geospatial analysis computer program called ArcGIS Pro. Some topics are taught using labs from a textbook. She will switch to free and open resource materials which cover many of the important topics of the course.



Taught: Fall 2023

24 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $1,440

Joann Messina, Assistant Teaching Professor, School of Arts and Sciences, English Writing Program

Professor Messina has been working with her colleagues for two years developing an OAT proposal for her Scientific and Technical Writing and Writing for Business and the Professions courses. Through a series of collaborations with the Libraries all the useful course material has been vetted and organized into two OAT Canvas sandboxes for easy access for students and faculty. Students will no longer be required to purchase an expense text which will result in significant savings.

Taught: Fall 2023, Spring 2024

1,364 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $136,400

Philip Parker, Associate Teaching Professor, School of Arts and Sciences, Psychology

This will be Dr. Parker’s first time teaching Cellular Neurophysiology and Functional Neuroanatomy. The course has been traditionally taught based entirely on a single textbook. He will replace the existing textbook with a variety of materials, including open-source texts, review articles, and primary research articles, all of which are available online for free or through the Libraries.



Taught: Fall 2023

12 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $2,040

Shawn Snyder, Assistant Professor, School of Arts and Sciences, Filmmaking Center

Professor Snyder worked closely with the Libraries to ensure all curricular films for his Directing the Actors in Film course were individually licensed and streamable via either their Rutgers Kanopy subscription or on Swank Digital Campus. In addition to the assigned readings from required books, he will accompany each of the assigned films with supplemental content – readings, articles, interviews and behind the scenes videos – that are curated exclusively from free online sources. This approach will eliminate a significant portion of material cost for his students.

Taught: Spring 2024

15 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $1,320

Luciane Castilho, Teaching Instructor, School of Arts and Sciences-Newark, Spanish and Portuguese Studies

Professor Castilho will create Open Education Resources (OER) to supplement the textbook in her Elementary Portuguese courses. She will write and develop the content which will be incorporated. This will include new vocabulary and grammar exercises, drills, Kaltura-Capture video lectures, pair work and group work activities, video clips, audio files, readings, links to films and music. She plans to continue to supplement the text with relevant materials accessed through the Libraries and other sources at no cost to the students.



Taught: Summer 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Summer 2024

140 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $20,905

Karen Chaffee, Associate Teaching Professor, School of Arts and Sciences-Newark, Chemistry

Xinbo Lau, Assistant Teaching Professor, School of Arts and Sciences-Newark, Chemistry

Dr. Chaffee and Dr. Lau will collaborate to enhance General Chemistry I which already uses a free textbook. At no cost to students, they will create online question banks to help them practice and master the material. These question banks will be tiered with various difficulty levels. Tier 1 will include multiple steps to guide students to learn the logic behind each question. Tier 2 will consist of more challenging questions. For both tiers, they will embed the solutions as part of the feedback, so students can find out instantly how to solve the problem exactly.

Taught: Summer 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Summer 2024

590 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $0

Stephanie Rodriguez, Instructor, School of Arts and Sciences-Newark, Spanish and Portuguese Studies

Legal Translation and Interpreting presents examples of the variety of theoretical approaches which have been practiced and developed within this field of study. The intent is to determine the best approach of translation and interpretation based on the target audience. Ms. Rodriguez will use online materials (textbooks and tutorials), along with computer-assisted translation tools and simultaneous and consecutive interpreting practices. These open and affordable materials will be stored, redesigned, and updated for each semester of instruction of this course.

Taught: Fall 2023

25 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $1,500

Celeste Domsch, Associate Professor, School of Health Professions, Rehabilitation and Movement Sciences

Dr. Domsch plans to redevelop her Research Principles for Evidence-Based Practice in Speech-Language Pathology MS course. She will replace the current textbook by having her students search, select, read, evaluate, and then present on, write about, and cite current freely available peer-reviewed articles. Library access/use will be a critical component and emphasized as one of the core skills utilized for the course.

Taught: Fall 2023

30 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $4,320

Bhagavathi Ramamurthy, Assistant Professor, School of Health Professions, Physician Assistant Studies

Anatomy is an essential course for clinical medicine. The required textbook is expensive, and Dr. Ramamurthy will use the Libraries Clinicalkey subscription to ensure an electronic copy is available to students at no cost. Additionally, two apps available through the Libraries’ databases will be used which offer detailed views of anatomy with the ease of adding and removing structures to study the interrelationships of the various organs and tissues of the human body. These apps can be easily synced into the Canvas module of the course.

Taught: Fall 2023

50 students impacted per year | Projected savings per year:  $3,250

Emily Balog, Assistant Professor, Newark, School of Health Professions, Rehabilitation and Movement

Dr. Balog’s lab manual will consider both normal and pathological aspects of aging and apply this understanding to the Occupational Therapy (OT) process of evaluation, assessment, intervention planning, intervention implementation, outcome measurement, and discharge planning. It will be designed to guide the student through the occupational therapy process, appropriate for scope of practice, using case studies roleplayed in a peer-to-peer fashion. It will closely align with the OT Practice Framework to promote the continued use of the evidence-based approaches.

 

Francis Barchi, Associate Professor, New Brunswick, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy

Dr. Barchi will develop an open-source textbook on research ethics written for U.S. college undergraduates. The textbook will be the primary resource for Research Ethics, a joint course of the Bloustein School and the Department of Philosophy. It will use active-learning, case-based approaches to introduce students to the landmark cases driving the development of modern ethical principles and regulations in biomedical and bio-behavioral research, and to build basic skills in navigating ethics review processes.

 

Rachel Derr, Clinical Assistant Professor, Camden, Camden College of Arts and Sciences, Nursing

Across the landscape there is a paucity of OER resources related to nursing education and the development of clinical judgement abilities. Dr. Derr will address this gap with an Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook that prepares nurse educators to guide nursing students in this critical area. The need for this resource is evidenced by the necessity for new nurses to make complex decisions, the nursing shortage, and the desire to diversify nursing.

 

Jesse Liss, Teaching Instructor, Newark, School of Arts and Sciences-Newark, Sociology and Anthropology

Dr. Liss will create a new OER textbook, Researching Population Health, to be used in an interdisciplinary undergraduate course of the same name. This textbook is aimed at undergrads building pre-requisite competencies for research design in population health. It will also introduce the logic of research design, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of quantitative and qualitative methods. Currently, there are no OER textbooks or eBooks with this purpose and scope.

 

Gabriel Zenarosa, Assistant Professor of Professional Practice, Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick, Management Science and Information Systems

Dr. Zenarosa will author an OER textbook companion to his Canvas-organized collection of PlayPosit lecture videos, formative assessments, and summative assessments for the course, Management Information Systems. No single OER or publicly available open textbook covers the course topics for building MIS from raw data to visual information to afford managerial decision-making using key software tools, as well as uses real-world data.