Dr. Patrick Shamberger, assistant professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, has received the first Open Education Champion Award from the Texas A&M Student Government Association in partnership with the Texas A&M University Libraries. He was recognized for demonstrating a compelling and positive impact through open access materials.
Shamberger has developed an entire course lecture for MSEN 201: Introduction to Materials Science, on his YouTube channel. His online videos have more than 2,800 current subscribers and have been viewed more than 350,000 times, or a cumulative 1.3 million minutes. This lecture series has a global impact, having been viewed from 187 countries on six continents.
In addition to YouTube, the lecture series is currently under production to be adapted as a course on nanohub.org – a website for open access lectures, tutorials and demo modules.
Shamberger has actively promoted the adoption and creation of open access resources among his peers. He has presented workshops discussing video analytics to improve the effectiveness of open access resources among students at events such as the annual Texas A&M Teaching with Technology Conference and the Mid-Year Engineering Education Conference.
Open Educator Awards were created in 2016 to reward and promote a culture of utilizing free academic resources and knowledge sharing in order to broaden the scope of scholarship available as well as to lessen the financial burden on students.
According to the university library website, the plan for these awards was born at the 2015 SEC Academic Collaboration Workshop. The workshop paired librarians from all 14 SEC universities with representatives of their own student governments to build strategic plans advancing open access and open educational resource initiatives at each SEC university.