PALNI’s Affordable Learning Program, PALSave, has named eight faculty members from five PALNI schools recipients of the “PALSave Open Educator Award” for the 2020-2021 academic year.  The Open Educator Award recognizes innovation and excellence in support of textbook affordability and student success. 

Three categories of awards were given: Open Education Champion, Open Textbook Publisher, and Open Pedagogy Innovator. The Open Education Champion award was bestowed to faculty who adopted and integrated open educational resources (OERs) into their courses and advocated for their use with colleagues. The Open Textbook Author was awarded to those who created their own open textbook and/or course materials. The Open Pedagogy Innovator award was given to a professor who, already using open textbooks for course materials, empowered and facilitated the creation of a student-created open textbook as a classroom assignment.

We thank them for their participation and innovative work in open education with PALSave!

To find out more information for PALSave please see: https://palsave.palni.org/

PALNI’s PALSave Textbook Creation Grants Program has awarded funding to faculty members from PALNI supported institutions to create six open textbooks. These open textbooks will be freely available on the web, reducing costs to students enrolled in courses in the future. Financed with support from Lilly Endowment Inc., each author will receive up to a maximum of $5,000 with a cap of $6,500 per proposal.

After starting a successful pilot with Butler University Professor James McGrath, the PALNI Open Educational Resource (OER) Publishing Task Force put out a call for proposals in October 2020. They received twenty proposals from institutions varying in size and scope. A review committee recommended this diverse set of projects based on proposal quality, need, and adoption potential within PALNI schools and beyond. 

PALNI will coordinate peer review, copyediting, layout, and hosting services to assist the faculty in their textbook creation.  Each project will also be supported by a local project manager to monitor progress and answer questions.  The open textbooks will be published on the PALNI Press supported Pressbooks platform alongside other faculty-contributed works like Brass Techniques and Pedagogy, by Butler University faculty member Brian Weidner, and will ultimately be submitted to the Open Textbook Library and OER repositories.

The textbooks will be tentatively available by Fall 2023.

Congratulations to the awardees: 

About PALSave: PALNI Affordable Learning

Supported by a Lilly Endowment Inc. grant, PALSave supports student success and retention by fostering the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). It provides collaborative resources and a framework for OER awareness, education, and engagement. In addition, it funds and supports faculty adoptions of affordable learning materials to enhance the teaching and learning missions of private higher education in Indiana. PALNI campuses are affiliate members of the Open Education Network through this initiative. The PALSave Admin Team team started in 2018, after PALNI’s Affordable Education Initiatives Task Force completed an environmental scan of peer programs, resulting in a preliminary project plan identifying components for future work.   

About the PALNI Press

The PALNI Press openly publishes the scholarly and creative content of PALNI-supported institutions. This service provides the capacity to create and host open access publications such as journals, textbooks, monographs, and digital exhibits, without the costs associated with program design or platform maintenance and hosting. In May 2018, the Library Publishing Task Force was formed to explore how to create a more robust publishing service by addressing structure, needs, and plans for the future. Now, in 2021, the Publishing Services Admin Team administers the PALNI Press by creating documentation and developing services.  The Team is also engaged in the larger library publishing community as part of the Library Publishing Coalition.

Indianapolis Business Journal recently covered PALNI’s PALSave program in their article, “Local academic library organization getting creative to save students big bucks.”

Journalist Anthony Schoettle describes the program goals and initial successes showcasing the true cost-saving potential for students.

“To combat the financial pressures on college students and their families, PALNI has created its affordable learning program—PALSave—with the goal of saving students more than $1 million in five years. Due to the early growth of their initiatives, PALNI officials are confident they’ll beat that goal, saving students $1.25 million by mid-2024.”

Note, the article can only be viewed in full using an IBJ subscription. Please contact your local library to see if they have IBJ access or consider purchasing a subscription to keep up with local/regional/state news.

Butler University faculty James McGrath is the founding editor of AcademFic, a new open access periodical dedicated to publishing fiction by academics outside areas that include writing in their academic and professional activity. Using the PALNI’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) and team support, and with assistance from Butler University Libraries, McGrath was able to launch the journal on an open-access platform eliminating the financial barrier to creating and accessing new issues and articles.

McGrath shares the inspiration behind AcademFic saying, “When I first had the idea to create a place that would publish works by academics outside of the field of creative writing […] I soon discovered that it was of great interest to many. There is a burgeoning area of publishing novels that seek to explore subjects like biblical studies through the writing of historical fiction, including quite a few penned by academics in the field. In addition to everything else, writing fiction can be a way to convey historical information to a wider audience. It can also be a way to test our [professional academics’] historical reconstructions and hypotheses.”

The first volume exemplifies McGrath’s vision and includes stories ranging widely in length, genre, and professional fields. The journal was made possible through the PALNI Press, which hosts a suite of publishing platforms.  All faculty, staff, and students affiliated with a PALNI supported institution may propose an open access publication for the PALNI Press that supports the teaching and learning objectives of their institution. See press.palni.org for more information.

To view AcademFic,  please visit: https://press.palni.org/ojs/index.php/academfic/index

About Butler University: www.butler.edu

Located in the heart of the Indianapolis Butler-Tarkington neighborhood, Butler University seeks to provide the highest quality of liberal and professional education and to integrate the liberal arts with professional education, by creating and fostering a stimulating intellectual community built upon interactive dialogue and inquiry among students, faculty, and staff. In 1855  attorney and abolitionist Ovid Butler founded the school on the principle that everyone deserves an excellent education, regardless of race or gender—a bold idea in pre-Civil-War America. Today, we’ve built on Butler’s vision to create a community of students and faculty that learn by doing—a community that values hard work as an essential building block for success, whether in the classroom, on the field, or out in the world. Butler University is the only Midwest Regional University to earn the U.S. News designation as Most Innovative School, according to the magazine’s 2018 rankings. For the eighth consecutive year, Butler ranks No. 2 overall among 171 Midwest Regional Universities. Butler is also recognized among the best in the nation for four co-curricular programs that enhance the educational experience for students. For more information, visit www.butler.edu.

Mennonite Historical Library and Goshen College Librarian Tillie Yoder opens up digital access to a unique collection of quilts by the College Mennonite Church using the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana’s (PALNI) Omeka platform service. Using this open-access software to digitize the physical collection exhibit, the public can view the special collection online, for free.

“I am grateful that PALNI provides access to Omeka hosting and enjoyed tinkering with the many options the platform provides,” shares Yoder. “Using Omeka enabled us to create a professional online exhibit at a time when access to our in-person exhibit is restricted. We anticipate digitizing past exhibits as well and look forward to seeing how our partner libraries use the platform in their own ways.”

The online exhibit was co-sponsored by the Mennonite Historical Library and Goshen College Good Library. The public can view photos of the various quilts and the corresponding physical display, a list of the exhibit leaders, and a video showcasing the physical exhibit alongside interviews and statements from several quilters. 

PALNI’s Omeka service is made possible through the efforts of the Publishing Services Administration Team (PSAT), which administers the PALNI Press.  The PALNI Press openly publishes the scholarly and creative content of PALNI-supported institutions. 

To view the “Quilts from College Mennonite Church” collection exhibit, please see: https://press.palni.org/omeka/exhibits/show/quilts2020