Gabrielle Stecher, Ph.D. was named the 2024 Open Educator of the Year, an honor bestowed annually to an IU Bloomington faculty member for their outstanding contributions to open education, measured by the resulting cost savings for students and the broader educational influence.
Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching and learning materials of any kind that are either in the public domain or licensed to allow free use, revision, remixing, and sharing. More information on OER is available at IU’s OER Libguide.
Serving as a Lecturer and Associate Director of Undergraduate Teaching in the English department since 2022, Stecher stands out for her prolific creation of OER focused on writing and writing pedagogy. Her resources encompass a rich array of materials including activities, guides, videos, and toolkits. Noteworthy is her incorporation of OER like Purdue’s open access writing handbook, OWL, into her teaching curriculum. Reflecting on her dedication to OER, Stecher underscores, “A major component of my teaching philosophy is ‘walking the walk’: if I am asking students to create carefully designed digital content that can make an impact and speak to a wide audience, I should do the same” Beyond her efforts as a professor, Stecher has fervently championed OER in her role as Associate Director, providing mentorship to teaching assistants and fostering a culture of OER adoption within the department. Readers can learn more about Gabrielle’s work as well as view her collection of OER at her website here.
The other nominees, Angela Jackson-Brown and Elizabeth Kenderes have made notable contributions to saving students money by making use of OER and IU Libraries collections in their courses.
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