ISSUED: 16 January 2025
MEDIA CONTACT: Hans Fogle
SHEPHERDSTOWN, WV — Students at Shepherd University will benefit from the West Virginia Open Education Resources (OER) grant program this year.
Professors from various departments are leveraging the grant and associated professional development opportunities to help develop new resources for their students.
Through the grant, Shepherd University professors in business, arts, nursing, mathematics, economics, and social work have been able to create new course materials for their classrooms that eliminate out-of-date commercial textbooks and better connect students to course material.
Dr. James Dovel, assistant professor of business administration at Shepherd, believes this opportunity with OER will be beneficial for the University.
“My personal experience and education in innovation and entrepreneurship helped shape a vision where OER involvement could be used to fulfill multiple tenure requirements while improving class materials, research, and the ability to engage students,” said Dovel in a recent case study.
The OER grant program supports teachers in developing new course resources and ensuring that materials are current, customized for their area, and for students.
The following Shepherd University faculty members received an OER grant award in the most recent rounds.
Round 8 awards:
| MBA 520 | James Dovel |
| ART 400 | Jennifer Yablonsky |
| NURS 447 | Mary Hancock |
| MATH 307 | Robert Monahan |
| BADM 199A | Robert Szarka |
Round 7 awards:
| BADM 338 | Carol A. Goolsby |
| BADM 369 | James Dovel |
| BADM 407 | Joshua J. Beck |
| SOWK 201 | Pippa McCullough |
| ECON 205 | Robert Szarka |
Dr. Robert Szarka, assistant professor of economics at Shepherd, already has plans for what he will do with the grant funding.
“[With the grant] I’ll be producing a series of videos (and other materials) that I hope will also be useful to other folks in business and maybe beyond,” he said. “I plan to make those available via the learning repository on Brightspace to make it easy for others to adopt the bits and pieces that might be useful in their classes.”
Szarka and Dr. Jacquleyn Cole, associate professor of chemistry at Shepherd, attended and spoke at the annual OER convocation last April, sharing their ideas with others in the program, and helping create a more accessible resource library for teachers of all disciplines.
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