Press release from Brookdale Community College

The faculty, staff and students of Brookdale Community College will team up to create a suite of interactive learning materials for educators across the country, under a new $899,899 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The grant program, running through August 2019, is designed to address the rising costs of traditional college textbooks and provide new, more interactive resources for faculty and students, according to Brookdale engineering and technology professor Michael Qaissaunee.

“In my 20 years of teaching, I’ve seen the rapid evolution of students, spiking textbook prices and significant changes in college course materials,” said Qaissaunee, who will lead the grant program.

“This project is driven by our observation of students’ powerful connection to their mobile devices and the growing difficulty in getting students to engage with traditional textbook content. We have seen that interactive content delivered to mobile devices increases learner engagement and positively impacts teaching and learning.”

As part of the grant program, Brookdale students studying graphic design, computer science, physics, chemistry and other subjects will work with faculty, staff and subject matter experts from across the U.S. to create new interactive learning content for contemporary college students.

The content, which can include web-based learning modules, interactive charts and graphs and other teaching aids, is designed to help students navigate particularly difficult concepts in a variety of courses. The content will be accessible via web and mobile devices.

The Brookdale project team will also create an online training course and host face-to-face workshops to provide more than 300 American educators with the resources they need to deploy interactive learning content in their own classrooms.

The project follows a similar NSF grant program hosted at Brookdale from 2012 to 2015, in which students, faculty and staff published two new “e-textbooks” and created a publicly available “blueprint” for educators to build their own, low-cost digital course materials.

For more information on Brookdale’s engineering and technology programs, go here or email mqaissaunee@brookdalecc.edu.