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In Fall 2017, the Kirwan Center assembled a leadership team made up of representatives from four USM institutions to help advance system-wide efforts to scale, sustain, and assess High-Impact Practices (HIPs). The team will spend a year building capacity within its institutions to track student participation in HIPs, adapt and use emerging quality frameworks associated with HIPs, and assess the individual and cumulative impact of HIPs on student retention/progression/completion and on student learning.

As part of a first wave of new services, the M.O.S.T. initiative has launched the M.O.S.T. Course Hub to support Maryland faculty in finding easy-to-adopt, high-quality OER.

As a way to help bridge the gap between students’ accomplishments in college and their workplace readiness, the USM Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation is working with institutions within the System to develop digital badges that will help students choose experiences aimed at developing career-ready skills and better communicate what they know and are able to do once they enter the world of work.

The Maryland Open Source Textbook (M.O.S.T.) initiative, led by the University System of Maryland’s William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation, is .seeking proposals for its 2018 High-impact OER Mini-Grant program to strategically support Maryland public institutions’ efforts to adopt Open Educational Resources (OERs) as a means to greatly reduce textbook costs and address college affordability for students.  Building on the prior success of the M.O.S.T. initiative and the first round of mini-grants, this funding program will target OER adoption in “high impact,” high enrollment courses for which high-quality OER already exists.  Two types of mini-grants will be awarded: 1) Adopt/Adapt OER ($500 - $1,500) and 2) Scaling OER ($1,500 - $2,500).  

The Kirwan Center is seeking institutional partners from across Maryland to participate in a Kresge Foundation funded project starting in Spring 2018 that will pilot the efficacy and feasibility of replacing the high-stakes mathematics placement exam process currently in use with a process that empowers students to assess and remediate their mathematics knowledge using adaptive learning tools instead.

The William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation invites you to attend one of four half-day Maryland Open Source Textbook (M.O.S.T.) initiative workshops being offered this fall to support the adoption of open educational resources (OER).  These workshops, which will be offered on November 9th and again on November 10th, will be focused on high-enrollment courses in mathematics, the humanities, and the sciences and OER-related delivery technologies (see below for the workshop descriptions).

Advancing Postsecondary Student Success Through OER: A Statewide Symposium on Open Educational Resources was a day-long summit that brought together faculty, instructional designers, librarians, and administrators from across Maryland’s higher education institutions to explore the promise of using open educational resources (OER) to replace costly textbooks with affordable, high-quality learning materials while giving instructors the opportunity to repurpose content to meet their students’ needs.

Are you passionate about the use of OER and interested in engaging others in adopting OER by sharing your experiences – both what has worked and what hasn’t? Have you created new open content within your field or discipline? Do you have OER content adoption strategies to share? Have you seen significant savings with respect to student course costs? Has the use of OER led to broader redesigns of courses? Greater student engagement or student learning?