Grant program: Open Educational Resources Grant Program

Grant recipient: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Department of Biological Sciences

Project team: Kevin Lam, Department of Biological Sciences, Yonathan Uriel, research assistant

Timeframe: July 2019 to August 2020

Funding: $5,000

Course addressed: BISC 202 – Genetics

Description: For this project, we aim to build an open access resource for our students that can replace the textbooks we currently use. These are expensive and very dense, whereas our students are less adept at reading for conceptual understanding than even 10 years ago, and they do not need the large amount of detail in current textbooks. Our idea is to develop and build an interactive website that functions both as a concise and concept-focused e-Text, and as a website that provides properly-vetted resources that enhance student understanding (e.g. animations and instructional videos) and problem-solving ability (e.g. practice problems with marking rubrics and strategic coaching); these would be high quality, open access resources at the appropriate level for our students.

Knowledge sharing: We plan to make the resource openly licensed through a creative commons license.