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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?

Traditional transcripts provide basic information about the courses students took: course names, dates of the course, credit earned, and grades.  What traditional transcripts don’t provide is more in-depth information on the skills students learned and their competency in these skills.  In Fall 2016, the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) piloted a digital “extended transcript” to better reflect student’s progress and competency of defined learning outcomes.  UMUC is one of twelve institutions around the country to take part in a $1.27 million Lumina Foundation

Completion of college-level requirements in the mathematical sciences is one of the most common and vexing impediments to college completion rates, especially for students from lower-income families and underrepresented minorities, where high-school preparation in mathematics is often insufficient.

Twelve Maryland Public Higher Education Institutions Receive Mini-Grants to Increase the Use of Open Educational Resources

In collaboration with the University System of Maryland Student Council, the USM’s Center for Academic Innovation is exploring the feasibility of adopting open educational resources (OER).