Grant supports revisions to free textbooks at Trine

Efforts to provide more affordable textbook options within Trine University’s Allen School of Engineering and Computing have received another boost.

Roberta Gagnon, associate professor in the Department of Design Engineering Technology, has been named the recipient of a $3,000 PALSave Revise and Remix Grant.

The grant will allow her to revise two open education resource (OER) textbooks she co-authored.

“Prof. Gagnon continues to keep the design engineering technology program curriculum materials top-notch and affordable through the development of specifically targeted OER learning textbooks for our students that keep them at the forefront of engineering,” said Tom Trusty, chair of Trine’s Department of Design Engineering Technology.

Keeping costs down, improving flexibility

OER resources are educational and research materials such as textbooks, lesson plans or videos that are free to access, share and modify. OER materials reduce costs for students and allow educators more flexibility to customize content to meet course needs.

Gagnon said she originally pursued OER to make texts more accessible to students beginning on the first day of the semester.

“Students have increasingly struggled to have textbooks at the start of the semester. Cost usually is the reason,” she said. “Understandably, they want to wait until classes start to decide whether a textbook will truly be required and then they may have to wait for it to be shipped.”

She applied for and received a stipend from PALNI to work on two textbooks, which she co-authored with Andrea Bearman, who then served Trine as director of instructional design and development.

They started with the book for the Statistical Process Control/Lean Manufacturing course, which was published in 2022.

 “(Statistical process control and lean manufacturing) overlap some, but a single text was not available, so the course required two separate texts,” Gagnon explained.

That project received very positive feedback from students, which encouraged Gagnon to develop an OER text for the Design for Manufacture and Assembly course in 2023. 

“This replaced a very comprehensive but expensive textbook with an online, interactive option for students,” Gagnon said.

Supporting faculty efforts

According to the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana (PALNI) website, the Revise and Remix Grant supports faculty who want to improve, update or build upon existing resources.

The grant is one of several ongoing OER funding opportunities provided through the PALSave Textbook Creation Grants program offered by PALNI and funded by Lilly Endowment, Inc.

PALNI is a 501(c)(3) owned by 23 private academic institutions. This library-to-library collaboration strives to provide high-quality support for student learning and effective teaching aligned with institutional missions.