LibreText Project Announces $1 Million Innovation Grant

The LibreText Project is receiving a $1 million Innovation Grant from the California Learning Lab. This award aims to increase student success by creating a freely available open-education-resource adaptive learning platform and by developing editable, culturally responsive learning and homework modules for introductory Chemistry courses.

The California Learning Lab award supports the collaborative work of an intersegmental faculty team lead by UC Davis Professor Delmar Larsen with faculty from California State University, San Bernardino and Mendocino College, as well as additional partnerships with the California State University Chancellor’s Office and the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges.

Developing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) skills are necessary now more than ever for California to compete in the national and global economies, but the last decade has seen a tremendous decline in the number of American students enrolling in math and science programs, and those who start college with the intention of majoring in STEM-related majors change their decisions within the first two years of college. Additionally, research shows that attrition among minority students is significantly higher than among white students.

The Learning Lab Innovation Grants support innovative projects that aim to improve learning outcomes and close equity and achievement gaps in undergraduate STEM courses. The UC Davis award was one of five projects to be selected for an Innovation Grant by the Director of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, based on the recommendations of a prestigious panel of faculty experts.

The premise of our proposal is that addressing California’s equity and achievement gaps in post-secondary STEM education requires providing personalized education at the individual student level that addresses each students’ past education histories, while fostering their inclusivity in STEM fields that often traditionally neglect students’ socio-economics, sexual orientation, and cultural backgrounds.

The award supports the team’s effort to develop, test and widely distribute an open-education-resource (OER) adaptive learning platform that will be freely available to students without charge. This individualized learning technology will couple to the existing textbook content within the LibreTexts platform (https://chem.libretexts.org) - California’s most popular resource for students accessing chemistry content (100 million pageviews last calendar year).

With our track record of developing and disseminating high-quality, open textbooks in partnership with institutions of higher education across the country, the LibreText Project is ideally positioned to maximize the impact of this investment from the State.

ABOUT THE California Education Learning Lab Innovation Grants

The California Education Learning Lab supports curricular and pedagogical innovations that aim to improve learning outcomes, transform the culture of learning, and close equity and achievement gaps in online and hybrid learning environments. Projects are encouraged to promote students’ sense of belonging in STEM, students’ STEM identity, and connections between STEM and students’ lives, career aspirations and home communities, leveraging affective components of learning to reduce achievement gaps. The Learning Lab will fund both projects that develop curricular and pedagogical innovations aimed directly toward students in lower-division STEM courses, and projects that indirectly support curricular and pedagogical change through the creation of innovative, large-scale faculty professional development programs that are closely related to improving learning outcomes or closing equity/achievements gaps in STEM fields.

For more information visit http://opr.ca.gov/learninglab/