Dr. Carlos Goller receives the Faculty Open Education Resources Award

The Libraries congratulates Dr. Carlos Goller on being honored with NC State’s inaugural Faculty Open Education Resources Award. The annual award, presented by Student Government, recognizes a faculty member whose usage of, and advocacy for, open educational resources (OERs) substantially reduces the financial burden for NC State students. 

Goller has worked closely with the Libraries over the last several years on open education projects. He is a recipient of a Libraries Alt-Textbook award, a member of the first cohort of our Open Pedagogy Incubator, and the 2020 recipient of the Libraries Faculty Award.

An exemplary faculty partner, Goller approached the Libraries with a proposal for a campus-wide hunt for the Delftia acidovorans microbe that lives all around (and on) people. The “Where’s Delftia?” Wolfpack Citizen Science Challenge engaged hundreds of students in introductory environmental science classes and was incorporated into numerous university courses.

“I love working with the Libraries!” Goller says. “The Libraries has helped me design assignments in which students create artifacts that live beyond the course. The OERs students create have value to the course itself and, most importantly, the learning process of the students.”

“The Libraries have made me aware of the importance of openness in terms of the pedagogy and transparency with students,” he adds. “I now have rich conversations about citation, reliable sources, and sharing of their exciting intellectual contributions.”

Goller has also taught visualization workshops at the Libraries and given a talk in the Coffee & Viz seminar series.

In addition to Goller’s selection for the Faculty Open Education Resources Award, all of the other finalists are also graduates of the Open Pedagogy Incubator. 

The Libraries has long been a leader in the field of OERs (open educational resources), led by our team at the Open Knowledge Center. Our Alt-Textbook program saves NC State students hundreds of thousands of dollars in textbook costs through the development of online teaching resources from freely available materials. Our Open Pedagogy Incubator helps faculty to fully implement multiple Open Pedagogy approaches in their courses. Our OPEN (Open Project Engagement Network) Incubator uses open principles to advance projects from idea to proof-of-concept. And our partnership with NC LIVE on the Open Education North Carolina (OENC) initiative helps spread OERs across the entire state.