The Diablo Valley College (DVC) activities and the Open Educational Resources (OER) that the DVC team developed under the NSF / DVC grant during the DVC grant period (2015-2017) and the no-cost extension (2018) supported the goals of the parent STEMwiki/LibreTexts Project, satisfying the terms of the DVC proposal and exceeding those of the over-arching collaborative UC Davis proposal for Phase II of the Project, NSF 1525862. The supporting work of the DVC team produced a number of meaningful outcomes that provided intellectual opportunities for students, helped constructively disrupt the definition of what constitutes a college textbook and what should be fair costs to students, and served to assist in affecting the long-term sustainability of the LibreTexts Project. 

The team produced significant, high-quality Open Educational Resources (OER). The process directly benefitted more than 70 DVC students either academically and/or financially, who worked on the project, and indirectly more than 200 students, who class-tested the OER produced and related methodologies used over the three year period.

The co-PI and adjunct DVC faculty gained professional experience that improved their tenure-track hiring prospects. Outside-faculty, who added to their professional credentials, improved consideration for promotion.

An important consequence of the DVC team's contributions being included in the published LibreTexts collection of more than 20,000 webpages that are disseminated through the chemistry library (https://chem.libretexts.org/), is the broad reach to a very large audience who use the library. More than 3.3 million individual global users/month are currently reported to access these pages (Google Analytics; November 2018).

DVC's work-product contributed to improving the prospects for lowering textbook and course material costs to countless future students while advancing and improving student engagement and academic performance through a wide variety of unique Innovative Learning Environments that have been developed and implemented over the course of the grant.

The purview of the DVC grant was expanded beyond chemistry in the no-cost extension year through the student initiated and led DVC Vertical Farming Project, which extended the limits of the grant to include non-STEM areas, Career Education, skill-based courses, and alternative student pathways, which were factors that contributed to a UC Davis proposal requesting $4.9M in funding by the U.S. Department of Education (DoEd), which was approved in October 2018. The award calls for the LibreTexts /UC Davis?s collaborative group to continue development and expansion of the Project with the objectives of minimizing textbook costs and maximizing the instructional value to all students. The DoEd grant incorporated DVC into a larger Contra Costa Community College District (4CD) team, adding two new members, DVC's sister colleges, Los Medanos College (LMC) and Contra Costa College (CCC), an NSF funded Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), for Phase III of LibreTexts continued development.

NSF award, 1525057, provided resources and support that allowed the DVC team to substantively contribute to building a solid foundation for the LibreTexts Project, which offers it the flexibility needed to adapt to changes that emerge over the next decade in the nature of textbooks, new pedagogies and learning environments, and which result in LibreTexts being effectively positioned to evolve with whatever those changes may be, and strengthen the Project's long-term sustainability.

 

Last Modified: 12/04/2018
Modified by: Ronald J Rusay