ABSTRACT FORM

1. Loyola Marymount University (LMU), in consortium with Santa Clara University (SCU), 

Saint Mary’s College of California (SMC), University of San Francisco (USF) and SCELC.

2. OER for Social Justice at Four California Catholic Colleges & Universities

3. OER for Social Justice is a collaboration between four mission-driven, Catholic universities in 

California with support from the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) 

to support the creation and expand the use of open educational resources (OER), addressing an 

identified gap in the adaptation and creation of OER in private college and universities. The 

program will support faculty to adapt and create OER to integrate diverse, equitable, inclusive, 

and anti-racist (DEIA) perspectives into high-enrollment courses across disciplines. The program 

aims to reduce the cost of education for the culturally, racially, and economically diverse 

students enrolled in the high-enrollment courses at these four institutions (target population), 

increase faculty capacity to create and promote OER in their disciplines, and to add new content 

to the growing body of OER that can further diversity, equity, justice, and inclusion into the 

curriculum. OER for Social Justice will implement a three-phase OER framework to support 

faculty in the creation of OER that is of high-quality, student-centered, and inclusive. Services 

and proposed activities include training to increase faculty competencies in OER and 

integration of DEIA practices, OER review and curation to identify gaps in the OER 

marketplace, dedicated personnel to support faculty in OER creation, publishing, and 

implementation, as well as the sharing of the OER through a robust dissemination plan. The 

anticipated results are approximately 6,000 students will save an estimate of $500,000 annually 

to promote course affordability and student success and the creation of OER that furthers DEIA. 

4. The Consortium is committed to fully addressing each of the three Absolute Priorities

(detailed on page 28 of the Project Narrative). The Consortium will 1) Improve collaboration 

and dissemination by leveraging their AJCU, LACU, and SCELC sector and employer networks

and build upon their existing relationships to create and expand the use of OER across private 

institutions; 2) Address gaps in OER by adapting and creating DEIA and social justice-related 

OER materials; 3) Promote student success by achieving the highest level of savings for students 

through sustainable, expanded use of OER in high-enrollment courses.

5. The Consortium addresses the Competitive Preference Priority (Narrative p.32) to improve 

instruction and student learning outcomes by integrating technology-based strategies into OER 

published in Pressbooks and through the use of H5P, which supports branching scenarios for 

adaptive learning. The Educational Technology Expert will train and support faculty to integrate 

the appropriate techniques such as universal principles of design, accessibility, and personalized 

assessments. Adequate resources will be made available to faculty teams to facilitate the 

integration of the technology-based strategies such as Pressbooks, Camtasia, and H5P. These 

tools are compatible with multiple LMS and enable faculty to monitor student learning. 

6. The Consortium addresses the Invitational Priority (Narrative p.34) through their minorityserving designations. SMC has a dual status of a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) and an Asian 

Americans and Native American Pacific Islanders Serving Institution (AANAPISI). LMU, SCU, 

and USF are all designated as Emerging Hispanic Serving Institutions (EHSI).
1. University of Houston- Downtown (UHD), Houston Community College (HCC), Baylor 

University (BU)

2. Experimentium: Inclusive by Design

3. a. Experimentium will be a collection of digital experiments with resources for 

instructors on how to effectively implement a custom curriculum that is generated 

through the website in their courses. Support for teaching math concepts, scientific 

writing, teamwork, and inclusion and assessment instruments will be included. Instructors 

will be able to customize and upload their custom curricula in any learning management 

system. All students will benefit from having all experiment instructions and supporting 

resources integrated into one editable document. The experimental protocol will be 

demonstrated by expert chemists on video with closed captioning, English and Spanish 

subtitles, transcripts, and audio description. Staff at the implementing institutions will 

benefit from having the supply lists automatically generated and the use of non-hazardous 

materials in some experiments.

3. b. The faculty from the consortium will create free hands-on experiments in the 

Experimentium format and implement those in their classes. Dr. Bryan Shaw from BU is 

an expert in working with differently abled, including visually impaired students, and will 

train all content creators. English and Math faculty at UHD will generate training materials 

and tutorials to support students and instructors. The project coordinators will bring 

together the consortium members to develop the Experimentium resources. They will 

work with the technology experts to create a seamless, easy-to-use interface for 

students and instructors, and they will study the effectiveness of the generated 

Experimentium collection. The results of the project will be disseminated locally, and 

globally to promote OER adoption.

3. c. A collection of openly licensed, employer and instructor reviewed, student-tested 

hands-on chemistry experiments with a uniformly formatted structure and accessibility 

features for all students will be created on the Experimentium website which can be 

used to generate customizable, flexible, and scalable curricula for General, Organic and 

Introductory Chemistry courses.

4. Yes. Faculty and staff from UHD will partner with HCC faculty for content creation and 

Dr. Bryan Shaw from BU will recommend approaches for making resources accessible to 

all students. Employers from the public and private sector, and a Medical School 

instructor will give their perspective on essential skills for future success and will review

the Experimentium resources. 

5. Yes. Hands-on chemistry experiments are the ultimate active learning experience. The 

experiments are built on a guided discovery approach where students first engage with 

the task with their hands. Students will have the demonstration videos available to monitor 

the progress of their experiment and make comparisons, which makes independent and 

team trouble-shooting possible. Students will engage all their senses in collecting data 

and observations, making each experiment a complex multi-sensory problem-solving 

task. Students will work as a part of the team which allows them to take advantage of 

social aspects of learning and establish a peer support and peer review network.

6. Yes. This project will be led by faculty from UHD, a minority serving and Hispanic 

serving 4-year public university (52% Hispanic, 20% Black, 13.7% White, 8.9% Asian). 

The consortium includes HCC (36% Hispanic, 27% Black, 13% White, 11% Asian),a 

community college, and BU (60% White, 15% Hispanic, 7% Asian, 6.5% Black), a private 

research university.