Inspired by her students’ feedback and commitment to their education, Amber Surmiller, a collegiate associate professor of history at University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC), was motivated to develop resources that met their unique needs as busy adult learners. Often on-the-go and balancing multiple responsibilities across their personal and professional lives, students needed easily accessible and digestible supplemental resources. “Their feedback left me wondering, if I could create my own learning resources for this class, what would I do?”
With a goal in mind to develop resources for her students, Surmiller received a Maryland Open-Source Textbook (M.O.S.T.) Initiative Grant from the University System of Maryland’s William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation. The award allows recipients to create and customize open educational content for specific learning populations. M.O.S.T. initiatives embrace innovative educational resources as a tool for increasing access, affordability, and achievement for college students in Maryland.
As part of UMGC’s effort to reduce financial obstacles for students, the majority of the university’s courses provide students with either low-cost or no-cost digital resources in place of expensive publisher textbooks. These Open Educational Resources (OERs), available in the public domain or released under open licenses, provide teaching and learning materials to both instructor and student. OERs can be reused, revised, and redistributed for various teaching and learning purposes at no cost to the student.
Such resources not only address access and affordability, but they can also be adapted to specific learning experiences. The M.O.S.T. grant supports long-term, statewide scaling and sustainability of OERs for students throughout Maryland’s higher education system. “Securing the M.O.S.T grant presented a way to take a perfectly fine classroom OER textbook and revise it to better fit the needs of our non-traditional learning population at UMGC,” Surmiller said. Through her M.O.S.T grant, known as the “Create, Revise, and Publish Initiative,” she drafted module summaries for the program’s American history survey course, United States History since 1865 (HIST 157). Surmiller was part of a cohort of grant recipients who learned, step by step, how to create and design an OER.
For the second phase of the grant, she focused on research and writing the OER while working closely with subject matter expert Shalon van Tine, an adjunct associate professor of history at UMGC. Van Tine was Surmiller’s sounding board and helped her locate ancillary materials, such as videos, maps, and images. “There is support from all sides, whether that’s here at UMGC, or through M.O.S.T or Rebus,” Surmiller said.
The third phase of the grant began in March 2025 with a pilot program that saw current history students use the OER product. Surmiller tested the OER in her summer course. “The opportunity to learn more about the teaching and learning community and the development process for OER, from conception to publication, has been incredibly informative and inspiring as I continue to work on this current project and develop new ones,” Surmiller said, adding that “the knowledge I gained over the last few months has been invaluable.” She said she was excited about sharing these new resources with her classes, program, and the teaching and learning community involved with Open Education, the movement to remove barriers to education.
The final version of the OERs will launch in fall 2025 with her HIST 157 course. Surmiller plans to share her OER experience and encourage colleagues to apply and pursue future grant opportunities. The OERs will be housed on https://most.oercommons.org/. “The lessons learned from working on the M.O.S.T. grant will help us expand our efforts to create innovative OERs in all history and African American studies courses,” said Damon Freeman, portfolio director of UMGC’s history program. “We expect that this will be a new model for other academic programs at UMGC and other universities in creating OERs to meet the needs of their students.”
Freeman said he and Surmiller also hope to get students involved in OER development. “By going one step further, we can teach students to think about how to design an OER, which helps to reinforce critical thinking skills and equips them to rationalize between what they’re getting, what they are seeing, and what they’re reading,” Freeman said. “These are highly transferrable skills that all students need and employers want, regardless of the student’s academic discipline.”