Six colleges, led by Framingham State University, including the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, have received a $441,367 grant from the U.S. Department of Education in order to test a hypothesis students in underrepresented groups will perform better academically when provided free, culturally-relevant course materials.
The project is called Remixing Open Textbooks through an Equity Lens: Culturally Relevant Open Textbooks for High Enrollment General Education Courses and Career and Professional Courses at Six Public Massachusetts Colleges, and is estimated to save students $800,000 over the course of the three-year grant period.
Colleges participating in the program will support and provide monetary incentives for faculty, encouraging them to create free, open educational resources (OER) and adaptations of existing open textbooks, using what Framingham State termed an equity and inclusion lens.
“We are excited about the project’s potential and outcomes for our students,” says Millie González, interim dean of Framingham State’s Whittemore Library and the project lead for the initiative, in a statement. “We will track performance measures, including numbers of courses, sections and faculty using new OER materials, student grades and satisfaction in those courses.”
Project results will be shared with all 29 Massachusetts undergraduate degree institutions.
