News

Professors Awarded Grants to Help Affordability

11/28/17

Once again Dalton State faculty members are helping hold down education costs by developing low cost and no cost alternatives to costly textbooks. Four Dalton State faculty and staff members recently received Textbook Transformation Grants from Affordable Learning Georgia.

Travis McKie-Voerste, lecturer in psychology, and Dr. Catherine Clinard, assistant professor of psychology, were recently awarded a $10,800 grant for a new OpenStax Introduction to Psychology textbook. The textbook is estimated to save each Dalton State student in the course approximately $200.

“The goal of the project is to locate no-cost-to-student resources for all sections of Introduction to Psychology courses taught by the grantees,” said McKie-Voerste who proposed the book. “The primary objective is to ease cost of attendance to students, most of which are drawn from the surrounding 10 counties in the northwest Georgia.”

Dr. Molly Zhou, associate professor of education, and David Brown, instructional technologist, were awarded a $4,800 grant to update an existing open source textbook used by the Exploring Teaching and Learning class. The update will include updated links and sources and adding interactive portions to the book.

“These updates will allow for the theories we teach in this class to be more engaging and fun to learn,” Zhou said.

The book is in high demand and has been downloaded more than 14,000 times, particularly in third-world countries.

DSC professors have previously been awarded grants for other open source textbooks including Introduction to Speech, Spanish, English, and calculus.