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Several University of North Georgia (ºìÁ«ÉçÇø) faculty members are developing innovative ways to increase student success and reduce course costs through a total of $53,600 in new grants from the University System of Georgia (USG).

The USG’s Affordable Learning Grant Textbook Transformation program provides an opportunity to incorporate current research in teaching and learning in order to engage students in new and innovative ways, while reducing students' cost to zero. 

Dr. Patty Wagner, assistant professor of mathematics, and Dr. Marnie Phipps, associate professor of mathematics, were awarded $10,800 to design a course that increases student achievement in using mathematics as a tool for problem solving and free course materials.

"Dr. Phipps and I intend to restructure the MATH 1101 course to reflect effective teaching and learning practices that are supported by research in mathematics education," Wagner said. "We hope to emphasize reasoning and sense-making and foster productive dispositions toward mathematics, and intend to structure the course so that students will not have to pay for any course materials."

Free course materials is also the goal of Dr. Donna Governor and David Osmond, assistant professors of teacher education, who were awarded $12,800 for their project "Authoritative Science Publications for Education Majors" which its primary goal is to design a textbook that contains a representative number of canonical selections.  This project will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Sanghee Choi, associate professor of teacher education, and Dr. April Nelms, associate professor and department head of teacher education.

The project will build a curriculum for the science methods course for future teachers primarily from online publications of the National Academies of Sciences. 

Additionally, faculty members from ºìÁ«ÉçÇø’s Department of English, Anita Turlington, Dr. Matthew Horton, Dr. Laura Ng, Dr. Laura Getty, Dr. Kyounghye Kwon, Dr. Karen Dodson, and ºìÁ«ÉçÇø Press Managing Editor Corey Parson, earned a $30,000 award for their project "Masterpieces of World Literature: The Age of Reason to the Twentieth Century – Development of an Open Access Textbook for English 2112."

"These prestigious awards reflect the high quality of the faculty members’ leadership and hard work," said Charles Wood, associate director of grants and contracts administration at ºìÁ«ÉçÇø.