Dr. Barnes and Dr. Cotterell awarded $17,340 in grants from Affordable Learning Georgia

Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) has awarded Dr. Barnes and Dr. Cotterell each a Continuous Improvement Grant in the amount of $8,670 to update the textbook for CSCI 1302 Software Development and continue to offer it to students free of charge as an Open Educational Resource! Together, these two grants constitute $17,340 of the $445,000 in grants that were funded under the 26^th round of ALG’s Affordable Materials Grants program.

Each grant funds a project related to update the CSCI 1302 textbook in 2025. Dr. Cotterell’s project seeks to make the textbook more accessible and user-friendly by transitioning existing materials over to a new website environment that affords better searchability and cross-linking via support for open document formats and the integration of new and existing open-source software projects. Dr. Barnes’s project seeks to author additional examples, questions, and sample solutions to be included directly in the textbook. The overall goal of both projects is to reduce barriers to entry so that the content is more approachable and so that students can practice the material sooner and as they go.

These grants will also fund an external faculty evaluator to help contribute pedagogical feedback to the authors as well as 2-4 undergraduate student workers to help Dr. Barnes and Dr. Cotterell test changes, help review revisions, and other tasks related to completing the goals of each project. This will provide an excellent opportunity for those student workers to positively contribute to student success in UGA’s School of Computing and gain valuable experience by working on the projects.

Since the textbook for CSCI 1302 is an Open Educational Resource, any code developed to maintain and release the updated textbook will be made available under an open-source MIT license, and the text itself will be made available under a Creative Commons license. This will enable other instructors, both at UGA and other institutions, to use and adapt the textbook for their own courses free of charge.