ALS Team Members
Kate Holvoet, SDSU Library, and Lia Dearborn, Montezuma Publishing, are the ALS and AB 798 grant coordinators. Working together, we provide faculty assistance in locating materials, creating custom course packs, and redesigning Blackboard courses to accommodate ALS resources.
Other members of the ALS team are:
James Frazee – ITS
Maureen Gaurcello – ITS
Trish Whited Edwards – ITS
Ben Compton – Aztec Shops
Kim Mazyck – Montezuma Publishing
History of the Affordable Learning Solutions and AB 798 Grants @ SDSU
In the Spring of 2016, Instructional Technology Services (ITS) and the SDSU Bookstore, working in conjunction with a team that includes the Library, Student Ability Success Center, and the Center for Teaching and Learning, submitted two grants to the CSU Chancellor’s Office to fund an Affordable Learning program at SDSU. These grants provide incentives and reward campus, staff and faculty efforts to accelerate the adoption of lower cost or free open educational resources (OER) in credit-bearing, stateside courses.
You can find out more about the CSU Affordable Learning Solutions programs here.
ALS activity: the Immediate Access Program
Affordable Learning Solutions (ALS) is currently embodied at SDSU by the Immediate Access program. The Immediate Access program provides discounted digital textbooks to students before school begins to ensure that students are “Day One Ready.” Students can opt out any time before the drop/add period ends. So far, about 95 percent of students remain opted-in thus saving over $3 million dollars.
ALS activity: Departmental “mini-grants”
Recently, the ALS grant was used to provide a $10,000 mini-grant to the Department of Rhetoric and Writing Studies to expand the use of more affordable and free resources in RWS100 and RWS200 potentially impacting over 3000 students in Spring, 2019. We anticipate savings of $90,000 in just one semester.
Assembly Bill 798 Grant
The second grant, AB798 College Textbook Affordability Act of 2015, is similar to ALS but requires replacing a for-fee, required textbook with free OER resources or textbooks. Open materials include: full courses, course modules, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, quizzes, lab and classroom activities, pedagogical materials, games, simulations, and many more resources contained in digital media collections from around the world. So far, savings have been over $600,000. One AB 798 success story is the adoption of an OpenStax textbook for Chemistry 100 and 200, saving students $200+ each for their chemistry textbook.