Next Affordable Learning Exchange Cohort to Save Students Over $80,000

The Affordable Learning Exchange (ALX) has awarded grants to 21 instructors for 2022. This new cohort is planning to use those funds to support affordability and racial justice projects for courses at Columbus, Lima and Newark campuses. These projects cover a wide range of disciplines—from math to music, art and design to architecture, sociology to psychology. The hard work of these instructors over the next year will result in over $80,000 in direct savings to students!

Select each name below to learn more about the latest affordability and racial justice projects at Ohio State:

Jayalakshmi Casukhela – Math (Lima)

Casukhela will use grant funds to create open access customized materials in Carmen for students in remedial algebra. This project will also utilize MyOpenMath and their series of openly licensed online testing modules. Access to course materials from day one will also assist students in successful completion of the class.

Scott Graves – Education and Human Ecology

Graves will utilize grant funds to curate a Carmen Course for students in the School Psychology Program to prepare them for an internship. This course redesign will eliminate the need for a textbook. Work will also include adding research articles and videos as well as openly licensed text excerpts. The Racial Justice portion of the grant will allow Graves to develop role plays and case studies that allow students to practice skills involving emotional interventions for Black children as well as cognitive assessment practices with diverse populations.

Ashleigh Hardin – English

English 1110 is a first-year writing course focusing on information literacy and academic writing. With the support of these grant funds, Course Coordinator Ashleigh Hardin will work to replace the course text with a redesigned Carmen Course that will utilize curated openly licensed and library materials. In addition, this initial pilot of the course content will educate students about OER and instructors about open pedagogical practices so that both groups will use and incorporate the resources mindfully.

Karen Macbeth – Education and Human Ecology

For many international students, critical reading and writing in the academic context is very unfamiliar. The ESL Composition staff typically present workshops on these materials but find they are barely scratching the surface. Macbeth intends to use grant funds to curate a workbook in Pressbooks for college-level writers in the ESL program. By separating this skill from the syllabus, instead of treating as needed, students will be more successful in the course.

Marsha Mack – Art

Ceramics is a highly technical medium, and professional-level skills can be gained quickly with focus and access to the proper tools. Mack will utilize grant funds to build a Specialized Ceramic Tool Lending Library. This lending library will provide tools that can be checked out by students in all levels of ceramic classes on a short-term basis. Early introduction of professional tools and equipment can lead to a higher level of dedication and work quality.

Paula Meijerink and Andrew Cruse – Knowlton School of Architecture

Meijerink and Cruse will utilize their high support grant funds to create a lending library and materials upcycle station for their course, Seeing and Making. The lending library will provide several studio kits for students to borrow during the semester if they express a hardship in purchasing these tools. There will also be an area to store scrap or leftover materials from previous semesters, building on the Knowlton School of Architecture sustainability plan.

Paula Meijerink – Knowlton School of Architecture

Meijerink will utilize racial justice grant funds to create opportunities for community engagement in her Trees for All People course. This work will take place in a Southside Columbus community to augment greening strategies. This studio seeks to give residents skills in tree planting techniques and tree care. Students will act as intermediaries between the local Church for All People’s Green Initiative and the community in targeting and executing green initiatives.

Andrew Millar – Music (Newark)

Millar will utilize grant funds to continue the development and full implementation of racial justice and music-at-the-piano resources for Music for Non-Majors. This work will include adding more audio-visual materials, illustrations from the world of art and images of musical engagement to provide more points of example for students. This work will create a rich course for both online and in-person learners.

William Nickley – Design (2 Grants!)

Nickley will utilize grant funds to develop an open access library of video-based tutorials, curated and co-created with students, in the area of 3D design media in industrial design. This library of videos will fill a gap in freely accessible knowledge about using industry standard 3D design tools and methods within industrial design contexts. Video tutorials as well as supporting texts will be organized in a Pressbook.

Nickley will utilize racial justice grant funds to address issues of sustainability in the design and production of home goods in Intermediate Industrial Design. Readings provided to students will expand on environmental sustainability to include environmental justice or how what the students create in the studio will impact different populations. A more direct effort will also be made to include examples from BIPOC-owned businesses or businesses with racial justice or environmental justice missions.

Gina Osterloh – Art

Osterloh’s project will seek to complete the development of a Canvas Master Course for Photo 1 in the Department of Art as well as a U.OSU.edu site to share course materials and student projects. This work will support the GE Theme for Visual and Performing Arts as well as student projects that address the connections between self, identity, race, gender and the environment. This work will also support the sharing of materials among faculty and will implement established guidelines into the master course.

Danielle Schoon – Sociology

Schoon will utilize grant funds to expand upon a unit in their course that covers race and gender as social constructs and the impact of bias on science and technology. Expansion of these materials will include adding new, updated resources and more information on how racial and gender bias have impacted scientific research and technological innovation over time.

Johanna Sellman – Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

In most Gulf countries, slavery wasn’t officially banned until the 1960s or 1970s, and anti-black racism continues to be a social ill. This racial justice grant award will address locating racial justice perspectives about and from the Gulf region, particularly those created by writers and artists of African descent. Sellman will also feature guest speakers who are scholars of race and citizenship in the Gulf.

Ryan Skinner – African American & African Studies

Skinner will utilize the syllabus review grant to reduce the cost of course materials in the course, Major Readings in African American & African Studies. With the support of university libraries, a subject matter librarian will be assigned to review the course syllabus and find alternate, free or library provided readings for the course. For the racial justice grant, an autobiography will be added to the list of readings and will focus on Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité’s book, A Drop of Midnight. A landmark text in Sweden, this translated book is a notable addition to the literary canon of contemporary Black Studies.

Marco Vergura – Math (Newark)

Vergura will utilize grant funds to build open-access lecture notes-based courses for Precalculus courses on the Newark campus. These course notes will contain definitions and explanations of concepts and results, detailed solved exercises and practice problems to test understanding. The free typesetting system, LaTeX will be used to allow for effective portability, modification and sharing of the source files. The goal is to present the material with an emphasis on conceptual understanding and mathematical rigor.

Joel Wainwright – Geography

Wainwright will work with the support of a subject matter librarian to reduce the cost of books for Environmental Citizenship. This work will include searching for potential new materials or the adoption of openly licensed resources.

Elizabeth Weiss – Psychology (Newark)

Weiss will utilize grant funds to adopt an open textbook for Data Analysis in Psychology. Work will also include adding video walkthroughs on common analytical procedures as well as revisions of existing lectures, assignments and student projects. All materials will be accessible through a redesigned Carmen course.

Amy Welling Gregg – Comparative Studies (Newark)

Racial Justice is a humanities theme that is deeply embedded in the narrative of comparative studies. Welling Gregg will utilize grant funds to include units in the course that cover social injustices towards people of color, women and LGBTQ+ individuals as well as those with differing abilities. Examples will include literature, music, performing arts, history and philosophy.

Zhenjie Weng – Education and Human Ecology

Weng will utilize grant funds to provide a list of pedagogical texts for graduate teaching assistants in the GTA Group Studies course. As graduate students, mostly from Asian countries, these topics are often not overtly discussed. Most of these students are not professionally trained to talk about racial and sexual identities of people of color in the United States. Additional readings implemented into the course will cover these areas and give students more direction on how to discuss race and sexual issues in ESL classes.

Juyeon Yoo – Education and Human Ecology

Yoo will utilize grant funds to empower and lend support to racial minority students taking ESL writing courses. Many of the students in these courses are international undergraduate students from Asian countries who may undergo racially marginalized experiences in the United States. Activities in the unit may include reading passages, discussion points and writing prompts related to three similar themes, xenophobia, Asian hate and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Justin Young – Math (Newark)

Young will utilize grant funds to adopt openly licensed materials for remedial algebra at the Newark campus. This course redesign will allow for the minimization of calculator use, addition of real-world applications/scenarios as well as giving students a solid foundation of basic math operations. Young will also work with Casukhela at the Lima campus who is completing a similar project to exchange ideas and to create problem sets.

Margaret Young – Music (Lima)

Young will transform two courses with a low support and racial justice grant. For the low support grant, openly licensed materials will be curated to give students an overview of music for wellness and help them apply those principles to the context of drumming with patients. This will include content from the fields of music therapy, rhythmic entertainment, drumming skills and Parkinson’s Disease and its treatments.

Racial Justice grant funds will be utilized to curate an assignment for students in The Informed Beginning Pianist. This assignment will ask students to view a piano recital that highlights a composer from an underrepresented group. Course materials will also feature music from various traditions and feature diverse composers.