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As the fall semester approached, Asbury Park resident Sam Gue took to social media in a quest for an alternative method of obtaining textbooks needed for two Brookdale Community College courses.

Working toward an associate degree in applied science, Gue was falling short of money needed to purchase Health Information Management Technology textbooks. A call for advise on a neighborhood forum for more affordable used copies, Gue also sought odd job opportunities to help raise the $233 needed to cover the the tab for the remaining two textbooks.

“I do receive financial aid but, being a full time student, my refund was close to none,” he wrote in a social media post.

And while members of the community rallied to provide Gue with odd jobs in order to raise the money needed within three days, more and more college students are finding it difficult to meet sundry college costs.

Now through a close to $900,000 National Science Foundation [NSF] grant Brookdale Community College will take a closer look e-book alternatives.

Brookdale faculty will work with its staff and students to create a suite of interactive learning materials for educators, officials said.

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

Graphic design, computer science, physics, chemistry, and students in other subjects will work with faculty and subject matter experts from across the nation to create new interactive learning content for contemporary college students, he said.

“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,” Qaissaunee said. “We have seen that interactive content delivered to mobile devices increases learner engagement and positively impacts teaching and learning.”

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

Another goal of the project will be to create an online training course and host face-to-face workshops to provide more than 300 American educators with the resources needed to deploy interactive learning content.

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, officials said.

For more information on Brookdale’s engineering and technology programs, visit www.brookdalecc.edu/stem-institute or email mqaissaunee@brookdalecc.edu.

[Photo courtesy of Brookdale Community College Facebook page]

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