The Measuring Digital Impact (MDI) project of the DX Initiative seeks to create a new blueprint for scaling the integration of continuous improvement processes into teaching and learning, including a measurement framework. For this project, the MDI grant team at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has focused on one course, HUM 2023 Introduction to Humanities, a core curriculum course with high enrollment and high impact. This introductory survey course meets the creative arts core curriculum requirement for UTSA students.

For this project, the MDI grant team has developed a survey for faculty so that we can better understand their knowledge and comfort level with online course development and teaching before and after the redesign process, including measures with an equity focus, attempts to quantify student use of digital tools in an online course, and developing a plan to use UTSA’s formal course evaluation results, DFW rates and students grades as additional measures of student success with a focus on equity.

The high cost of textbooks has become a serious obstacle to the affordability
of a college education. The textbook market is rigged so that publishers can
generate huge profits and engage in bad practices at students’ expense.
Fortunately, we have solutions to this problem, most notably in the form of “open
textbooks”—high-quality books that are available online for free or for a very low cost
in print. With solutions like these, we can break the publishers’ stranglehold on the
market and help make higher education more accessible to everyone.
These changes won’t happen on their own—students will need to work for them. This
toolkit provides the resources that student governments and state student associations
need in order to bring open textbooks to their campuses and save students money

This session showcases how OERTX has contributed to widespread use of OER across the state. Faculty share how they use OERTX and how they have supported the use of OER on their campuses. Explore the features in OERTX and how they can be leveraged for individual and institutional success.

The Open Educational Resources (OER) in Texas Statewide Playbook is a resource developed by practitioners and advocates actively involved in the labor of open education to guide new and expanding OER work at institutions of higher education. The Playbook is the result of partnerships between the Division of Digital Learning, the Institution for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) – creators of OER Commons and experts in open education practice and research – and faculty, librarians, staff, and administrators from institutions and systems across Texas. It aims to support institutions as they work to build capacity and drive systems change around OER. It also serves as a guiding document for institutions that have not yet engaged in OER work or taken advantage of existing programs and opportunities. The hope is that the Texas OER Playbook will serve as a companion on the journey towards OER awareness and advocacy at your institution.

This document represents the planning, strategy, logistics, and timeline for the TCC Connect Digital OER program. Use this resource as a guide to help build an OER program at your institution.