Carrie Diaz Eaton has devoted her teaching and research to breaking down barriers to education, particularly in math, science, and technology.

A computational and mathematical biologist by discipline, the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ associate professor of digital and computational studies works with colleagues worldwide to create and share open educational resources, or OER:— free, licensed materials that anyone can access, customize, or share.

Diaz Eaton recently received a one-year, $380,213 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support those efforts. The grant will help her and her colleagues from two networks, and , to create and share OER, help educators use them in their classrooms, and put equity and inclusion at the center of everyone’s efforts.

Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton received a grant from the Hewlett Foundation to help her create sustainable ways to use, create, and share open educational resources. (Theophil Syslo/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

“We’re looking at all angles of what happens in the classroom and making sure those practices and resources are open to everyone who needs access to them,” Diaz Eaton says.

Diaz Eaton is the co-founder of QUBES, an online hub for open access materials in biology and related fields. Created in 2014 to share lesson plans, software, and online modules for mathematical and quantitative biology, QUBES has since expanded into helping instructors learn how to incorporate free materials in their classrooms and guiding scholars as they create and share their own OER.

The Hewlett grant will subsidize QUBES’ operations, ensuring the site continues to be free to all, Diaz Eaton says.

“Who pays for these resources, and how do we keep those projects and communities going?”

OER stakeholders extend beyond the students and teachers who use the materials. Education researchers study the effectiveness of OER, librarians work with online textbooks and other OER in many fields, and professional societies can set standards for materials.

To bring these different stakeholders together, Diaz Eaton co-founded and directs the SCORE Network, which addresses challenges in open education and finds ways to make it sustainable. In other words, Diaz Eaton says, “Who pays for these resources, and how do we keep those projects and communities going?”

The network made some headway in answering these questions at a summit at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ in October. With support from Hewlett, ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ will make “catalyst grants” to individuals and organizations from the SCORE network to implement some of the ideas that the summit produced.

The Hewlett Foundation supports a variety of initiatives related to open education.

For example, an OER hub that’s having trouble getting submissions of material from the creators of lesson plans might collaborate with a professional organization that already has a good way of getting such submissions.

Or, two different OER hubs might work together to combine their websites, saving money.

“Many of the folks that we’ve been talking to are coming from different worlds, and each might have a problem or obstacle they might want to overcome that the other might have a solution to,” Diaz Eaton says.

Even with the rise in open access materials, barriers persist, Diaz Eaton says.

Proprietary software remains expensive, for example, and many professional conferences — critical opportunities for scholars to stay abreast of developments in their fields — remain costly.

“We really want to close the gaps in who can succeed in a mathematical and computational education.”

So with the help of the Hewlett grant, the organizations Diaz Eaton works with will create programs to help keep equity, inclusion, and social justice at the center of conversations around open access.

QUBES is already helping run virtual conferences, for example, and is creating a summer program to help curriculum developers incorporate universal design and inclusive pedagogy, two concepts focused on increasing access. With the new Hewlett funding, SCORE and QUBES will collaborate to set up a mentoring network to help faculty and curriculum developers adopt these practices.

“We really want to close the gaps in who can succeed in a mathematical and computational education,” Diaz Eaton says — not only because it would help individual students and teachers succeed, but because “having a quantitatively-literate society is important, especially now.”

The importance of open educational resources has hit home for Diaz Eaton in the past several weeks. This semester, she was already teaching her digital and computational studies classes using free online textbooks and software that students can access through a web browser.

Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton teaches her 2019 course “Calling Bull in a Digital World” in Carnegie Science Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

While the transition to remote learning due to the coronavirus pandemic was abrupt and difficult for everyone, at least the way her students accessed their course materials was consistent.

“Adopting these principles helps make us more nimble moving forward, more resilient,” Diaz Eaton says.

Diaz Eaton says that she’s lucky to work at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, which has made OER a priority in recent years. The library in particular, in an effort led by Associate College Librarian for Collection Management and Scholarly Communications Krystie Wilfong, has acquired materials that are free for students and helped faculty create their own materials.

“ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ has been a leader in its own right in thinking about OER and also in conversations about inclusivity,” Diaz Eaton says. “It’s the best place to drive these conversations forward.”

Kirk Read’s oral French course has long had a theatrical flair.

To teach lessons in vocabulary, grammar, and francophone culture, the professor of French and francophone studies conjured the fictitious Marie Malika d’Alger and created an episodic play, in French, about her life and adventures as a young Franco-Algerian woman.

For more than 20 years, Read gave the scripts to his students in hard copy. The students would learn the lines, create their own additions to the protagonist’s life and times, and take quizzes and tests that Read administered.

This year saw a change in the presentation of Read’s course. With support from the college’s Information and Library Services department, Read and a group of students spent last Short Term turning Marie Malika d’Alger into what’s known as an open educational resource (OER) — specifically, a website that anyone at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ and beyond can use freely.

In April, students in Professor of French and Francophone Studies Kirk Read’s oral French course perform a scene from Read’s Marie Malika d’Alger plays. From left, Kaylah Johnson ’21, Kate Carrier ’22, Jamie Kelleher ’19, Jake Michael ’21, and Emma Vlahakis ’20. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Read and his students are perhaps the most, ahem, dramatic example of efforts at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ to use advances in information technology to make course materials cheaper, more accessible, and more versatile.

Key to the college’s growing success in adopting OERs — or, more broadly, less-expensive course materials — is creating new partnerships across campus. To that end, ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ librarians reach out to individual faculty members, and professors know that they can come to the library with their own ideas. Meanwhile, staff at the College Store review course materials and reach out to professors if there are cheaper options available.

The ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ library monitors the cost of course materials and helps faculty secure less-expensive alternatives, says Pat Schoknecht, vice president for information and library services and college librarian.

“We’re actively looking for the courses where the textbooks are really expensive, or those courses that have a very high enrollment even if the textbook isn’t that expensive,” says Pat Schoknecht, vice president of Information and Library Services and college librarian. “When we find them, we will go in and actively talk to the faculty member” about alternatives.

That could mean using an open educational resource, or OER, strictly defined as a material whose components are in the public domain and are free and open for anyone to use. It could also mean using an ebook or journal that the library licenses, or simply a less expensive textbook.

Recently, the library received a grant from the Davis Educational Foundation to join the and provide mini-grants to ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ faculty who review, use, or implement open access materials.

Long an economic challenge for students, required course materials — whether a copy of the Norton Anthology of American Literature ($50.65, used) for an English course or much more expensive textbooks in STEM disciplines or foreign languages complete with a code for online assignments — can run into the hundreds of dollars, potentially shutting students out of certain courses and majors.

Students pack the Ladd Library during the week before finals in April 2018. Students have sometimes pushed the library and their professors to explore alternatives to traditional textbooks.  (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

In response, ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ has tried to make those costly materials available through Ladd Library: Since 2013, the library has kept a copy of every required course material on reserve, one of the few such programs of its kind. In addition, other campus offices, including the Office of Intercultural Education, maintain collections of frequently needed course materials.

What’s different now is that technology and the availability of OERs have caught up to the need.

“The resources and platforms have been upgraded to a point where they’re actually really good,” says Krystie Wilfong, an associate college librarian who works to gather and share open access materials. “The content the faculty needs is there, because a faculty from a different institution has written something they can then adopt.”

In 2011, the price of a book that Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer uses for her differential equations course rose “precipitously,” she said.

“It really helped to make the point clear in a way that I couldn’t ignore, and students let me know that that was a problem.”

Associate Professor of Mathematics Meredith Greer works with students on Pi Day in 2018. Greer has used a variety of free or low-cost online textbooks for her math courses. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Greer found a cheaper textbook for that course, but the episode prompted her to try to minimize costs across all her classes. She took materials she had already created for graduate-level courses and adapted them for ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ juniors, and she pored over listservs and online repositories for math assignments.

For her multivariable calculus courses, she used free online materials by MIT mathematician Gilbert Strang, and Calculus I and II courses across the department transitioned to an this year.

Along with Kirk Read and Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton, Greer shared her story at an April symposium on open educational resources, organized by ILS, supported by the Dean of the Faculty’s office and the Davis Educational Foundation, and attracting librarians, booksellers, and informational technologists from 22 institutions in New England.

After assigning Strang’s material for several semesters, Greer surveyed the students who had used the online textbook and presented her findings to the attendees. Using the website had its drawbacks — students had to get used to navigating sections online as opposed to turning the pages of a book and writing notes in the margins — but they enjoyed the low cost, versatility, and accessibility.

Indeed, finding and using OERs benefits students in at least two ways: reduced cost and, in some cases, improved teaching.

In 2013, then a professor at Maine’s Unity College, Diaz Eaton was seeking resources to teach quantitative biology, an emerging and growing field that incorporates math and computer science. Colleges and universities were trying to develop new educational materials on the fly — but the experts from school to school weren’t necessarily talking to each other.

“People were reinventing the wheel at multiple institutions,” Diaz Eaton says.

Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton teaches a course on detecting misinformation in March. Diaz Eaton created QUBES, a hub for free biology course materials. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

Now, at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, Diaz Eaton is continuing her work with QUBES; this month she on making open access to biology education sustainable. She and her DCS colleagues are also working to incorporate open access into the structure of the nascent program. She makes sure to use free software to teach programming and involves students in designing her courses.

“We’re thinking about open access as being more than just digital access, but also access into DCS itself,” she says.

Kirk Read’s spring 2019 oral French course was the last to use traditional printouts or PDFs of the play Marie Malika d’Alger. The class now uses a dedicated website, which will be opened beyond the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ community by next year. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College)

The ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students who helped Kirk Read redesign his oral French course last May felt similarly empowered. They were quick to grasp the benefits of OER, as well as some of its challenges, like how to compensate or reward scholars who invest time and talent to create the materials.

Now well into the first semester of the redesigned oral French course, Read and his students are liking the online version of Marie Malika d’Alger. Lessons and scripts are clearly organized, each image is licensed or copyright-free, and Read and his students thought through issues like how best to give assessments through the site and how to make the site accessible to users with disabilities.

And if a problem crops up during the course, Read can change the site on the fly. The course website is designed to be usable by anyone and everyone with some knowledge of French, and he plans to open it to outside users within the next year.

“The students get to own this text more than anything else,” Read says. “It’s online. I can upload a different PDF or talk about things they like better than what I propose. They’re not spending a dime for this, and it’s attractive and interactive. I’m totally happy with it.”