Ensure Equitable Access to Information

Alternative Textbook Grant Program

The Open Educational Resource team seeks to sustain the Alternative Grants Program program, which has become an important pillar of FSU’s textbook affordability initiative since 2017 and supports instructors in their efforts to replace commercial textbooks with open alternatives that are available at no cost to students.
Initiative Leads
Camille Thomas, Scholarly Communications Librarian
Updates
2023
Three of the five applications this year were projects to create and publish new open textbooks at a higher award tier. The deliverables are expected over the course of the next year, likely Fall 2023.

2022
In the past six months, eight applications for the Alternative Textbook Grant were received, including a large course with over 400 students total per semester. No publication projects were received, which was the original intention of piloting a tiered model. However, there were several inquiries and the increased, flexible funding will allow this project to continue in the spring.

ADA Accessible Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The main goal of this pilot project is making incoming Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) and Honors Theses more ADA accessible. This will involve collecting data and developing templates, style guides, instruction materials, and workflows in collaboration with the Graduate School and Honors in the Major program. Addressing accessibility issues in historical ETDs is out of scope for this initiative but may be worth exploring in the future.
Initiative Leads
Rachel Smart, former Digital Scholarship Repository Specialist
Updates
January 2022
The final set of data on honors theses submissions is collected. With all data collected, a final report on the pilot project with analysis will be compiled and shared.

July 2021
*New accessibility guidelines are added to the Honors in the Major Handbook
*Honors Theses submissions for Spring 2021 are reviewed and data collected.
*Initiated conversations with the Graduate School about updating ETD submission requirements to include captions and transcripts for audio/visual content.
*Started analyzing accessibility compliance data from Spring 2021 Honors Thesis submissions.
*Approval obtained from Honors in the Major program to update their program handbook for Summer 2021 with new accessibility information.