Elizabeth Pople

Program Coordinator/Lecturer,
University College

Course Awards

2019

NCB 0540: Specialized Study for MAT 1043
Student savings/semester
$2,000

Pople finds, evaluates, and selects free and low-cost learning materials from OpenStax, Khan Academy, Google Classroom and more for incorporation into University College math courses.

More from Pople: 

“In the past, we used the Openstax Intermediate Algebra and Pre-algebra textbooks in the NCB courses. With the state legislature’s shift to requiring co-requisite courses for Developmental Math, Reading, and Writing, our structure had to change. Now our co-requisite courses are paired concurrently with a credit-bearing college level course. For this new course, we were utilizing a combination of sources from Openstax, Khan Academy, Google Classroom etc. 

Currently there is no OER textbook for the credit-bearing math course, so this grant provided an opportunity to identify what was available in existing OER books that would fit the new co-requisite support course. With the grant, we were able to combine topics/sections from the different books in Openstax and other sources to create a single, cohesive review text for the students. 

We also want to look into integrating a courseware that is either free or low-cost to use as an alternative to the current materials, such as WeBWorK. Prior to the shift to corequisites, we used WeBWorK in tandem with the single topic Openstax book. Once a new book is created, we will then be able to work towards creating problems for the courseware."