Open Educational Resources Grant Awards Ten Projects in 2025 Cycle

Congratulations to the recipients of the 2025 Open Educational Resources (OER) Grant! 

The OER Grant Program (formerly the Alternative Textbook Grant Program) supports the adoption and creation of open educational resources for use in University of Kentucky courses. The ten recipients of the 2025 cycle span a wide variety of disciplines and their projects range from open textbooks to interactive assignments. When completed, all materials will be openly licensed and freely available to the public. 

Learn more about each of the grantees and their projects below:

• Molly Blasing, Russian Studies: This project will bring lessons on climate, energy, and sustainability topics for learners of Russian to a wider audience of students and instructors. Lessons developed in 2023-2024 with support from UK's Energy RPA will be converted to open access modules in Pressbooks with interactive H5P exercises to promote engagement. Designed primarily for Intermediate Level learners of Russian, the modules support students in developing speaking, reading, and writing skills while engaging with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, climate science, and sustainability initiatives at home and across the Russophone world.
• Bradley Lewis Burdick, Mathematics: This project is a textbook for a History of Mathematics course designed around active learning. Specifically, the body of the text will include class activities illustrating mathematical concepts throughout history. The subject of the book will be the mathematical constant π.
• Cory Curl, Public Policy and Administration: The resource Public Policy Writing at the UK Martin School will guide students in the craft of writing to inform policy decisions. It will be a supplemental resource for students in the UK Martin School’s undergraduate public policy major and minor. It will also assist undergraduate students from a variety of disciplines who enroll in the PPL 201 Introduction to Public Policy course, which fulfills the UK Core requirement for Intellectual Inquiry in the Social Sciences.
• Amanda Ellis and Audrey Brock, Biostatistics: This project will support the development of a textbook tailored to two undergraduate biostatistics courses, aligning with GAISE guidelines while addressing the applied data literacy needs of bachelor-level public health students. The project will engage health department partners and review employer publications to identify key content, tools, and data visualizations used in the public health workforce. This input will inform the creation of a detailed table of contents and initial draft materials for the upcoming textbook. By addressing the gap between existing statistics texts and workforce needs, this OER will help prepare students for careers in public health through a more contextualized and applied approach to statistical thinking.
• Jason Hans, Family Sciences: Development and evaluation of CanvasCards, a novel Canvas-integrated and student-driven flashcard application intended to address academic performance disparities in online courses by removing study barriers and implementing engagement strategies. The tool will be piloted in HDF 253: Human Sexuality to assess its effectiveness for enhancing self-directed learning, critical thinking, and knowledge retention. Ultimately, the project goal is to create a validated learning tool that can be scaled to benefit students across various disciplines and institutions.
• Bridgett King, Political Science: This project is an undergraduate handbook for students in political science and law and justice adapted from the Handbook for the Recently Admitted. The handbook will provide a tailored roadmap to help students navigate their undergraduate programs (e.g., what a syllabus is, how to use it, how to write an email to a professor, what to do when you’re having a problem in class, etc.) and highlight co-curricular activities and opportunities in the discipline, at the University, in the College, and the Department.
• Ann Kingsolver, Anthropology: This open-source textbook is being developed to support students in every Kentucky county in learning about the many deep global connections the Commonwealth has had throughout its past and present and will continue to have in the future. High school, community college, and early-career university students will have access to a broad range of free online resources for learning about how global Kentucky really is – from our environment to our work to the ways in which we imagine who we are as Kentuckians. Students will also be able to access free ways of connecting with students around the world to share stories of those global connections and learn from them together.
• Alan Kluegel, Law: This is a casebook for an upper-level law school course on Mergers & Acquisitions, covering the statutes, legal doctrines, and contracts that govern corporate transactions. Taking students all the way from preliminary negotiations to closing the deal, the book provides a practical view of the law regarding mergers, stock purchases, asset acquisitions, hostile takeovers, defensive maneuvers, deal protection provisions, shareholder voting, and the fiduciary duties of directors and officers.
• Rosie Lanphere, Kinesiology and Health Promotion: This project is an open access textbook about exercise physiology that students can use for KHP 420G: The Physiology of Exercise. The textbook will be tailored to content that is tied to the Council on Accreditation of Strength and Conditioning Education’s professional standard and guidelines and UK's Kinesiology programs and student learning objectives. The textbook will also include study questions, figures, tables, and student learning objectives.
• Jaleesa Wells, Arts Administration: The Creative Social Entrepreneurship open textbook is the first educational resource of its kind, designed to support students and learners in creative social entrepreneurship and adjoining fields of study such as cultural, creative, and arts entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and sustainable entrepreneurship.