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Scholarly Communication

Announcing the 2021-2022 Course Material Fellowship Program Cohort

The Scholarly Communication Department is excited to announce the Course Material Fellowship Program cohort for the 2021-2022 academic year. Following our successful launch of the program in 2020-2021, we are welcoming a new group of faculty who are passionate about developing open educational resources (OER) that will be used in their classes and shared with the wider scholarly community. 

As fellows in the program, faculty will receive institutional support as they develop OER. OER are no-cost, freely accessible course materials which are licensed for others to reuse and revise. By participating in this program and developing their own materials, the 2021-2022 CMFP fellows will contribute to the mission of removing barriers to higher education. Fellows will transform their course materials over the 2021-2022 academic year and implement them in their courses starting in fall 2022.

The 2021-2022 CMFP cohort consists of eleven instructors from the IU Bloomington and IUPUI campuses who represent a wide range of academic disciplines. Our fellows teach in the humanities, STEM, business, law and public affairs, and philanthropy fields. The program will impact a broad array of students: by providing no-cost materials, fellows will tangibly mitigate education costs for these students.

We estimate that, altogether, the 2021-2022 cohort’s projects will directly impact over 2,000 students per academic year at the IUB and IUPUI campuses. This amounts to an approximate total cost savings of $233,500 per year.

The CMFP fellows’ OER projects will contribute to teaching and learning in their respective fields through the creative development of unique resources which:

  • Target distinctive student audiences
  • Incorporate values of diversity, equity, and inclusion
  • Attend to currently relevant topics

For example, Gregory Carter of IUB’s School of Nursing is responding to the problem of astronomical medical/health textbook costs by developing an OER unique to their course. As Carter describes their project:

“What makes this course unique is the focus on community health as well as perinatal concepts. This forces us to use two different (expensive) textbooks in order to present the required materials. What we envision is to develop a resource that combines both areas and allows for a deeper dive into the barriers and facilitators of rural health. Because the Bloomington campus is more focused on rural nursing issues, the proposed resource would not only be unique, it would provide the information in a way that is more accessible to our students.

Meanwhile, L. Anne Delgado, an IUB English instructor, plans to address the current issue of Internet/media misinformation by including relevant readings in their OER text. Additionally, the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion are an important cornerstone of the program’s OER development. While all fellows are promoting these values in their work, some are making it a centerpiece of their OER development. For example, Lasana D. Kazembe of IUPUI’s School of Education will develop an OER focused on teaching for social and racial justice. 

Our CMFP fellows are enthusiastic about the promise of OER development to increase the accessibility of higher education and to strengthen teaching and learning materials. Adam Maltese’s project for their STEM for Educators course highlights the value of developing OER materials. Not only will OER allow Maltese to directly impact IUB students by cutting costs, but Maltese will also use OER to challenge common narratives of scientific endeavors as primarily white and male, which is important for their students, who are mostly women. OER development enables instructors to make decisions about the content of their textbooks; in this way, instructors can fully integrate the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion and appeal to students’ particular needs and interests. In eventually sharing their OER online, faculty fellows will also make their valuable resources widely accessible for the use of others.

We are excited about the Open Educational Resources our 2021-2022 CMFP fellows will develop and look forward to seeing the impact of these OER materials on the IUB campus, IUPUI campus, and beyond. 


The Scholarly Communication department also offers support to faculty outside of the program who wish to implement Open Educational Resources into their teaching. Please contact us at iusw@iu.edu for more information.

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