UTA Team creating a new Textbooks for Transportation Certificate
UTA Top Story
A postbaccalaureate certificate in transportation planning and policy will include open textbooks created by a multidisciplinary team from The University of Texas at Arlington. The program will be offered through the UTA College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs (CAPPA).
The University is the lead institution on a $582,322 grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education to support the development of six open textbooks, known as open educational resources (OER). OER are free resources licensed to allow for revision or reuse so they can be available at no cost to students.
UT Arlington will design three of the textbooks. Collaborating institutions Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo and University of South Florida (USF) will design the other three.
The grant will operate through CAPPA’s Center for Transportation Equity, Decisions & Dollars (CTEDD). Ivonne Audirac, CTEDD associate director for education and associate professor of planning in CAPPA, is the lead investigator on the project.
“Several UTA faculty have used OER to bring down the costs of textbooks and reduce the overall cost of higher education to students,” Audirac said. “In transportation planning, there is still little OER content.”
The goals of the project include eliminating textbook costs for students enrolled in certain transportation planning courses and expanding OER resources for transportation planning programs at the three partner institutions and beyond.