The Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education has issued a year-long extension for the remaining $509,650 of a $1,160,000 Open Textbooks Pilot grant to University of Houston-Downtown, Baylor University, and Houston City College for their project Experimentium: Inclusive by Design. For Experimentium, collaborators will continue to develop accessible chemistry experiments, prompts, courses, and supplementary resources in a uniform video-based format.
Faculty from UHD and HCC performed the demonstrations, and UHD staff recorded and edited the videos. Dr. Eszter Trufan, associate professor of Chemistry, and Dr. Elene Bouhoutsos-Brown, Chemistry adjunct faculty, lead UHD’s team.
“Students everywhere deserve a free, green, broadly accessible, high-quality curriculum that centers their learning, and instructors everywhere deserve access to rigorous, customizable, and consistently formatted curricula they can implement confidently as is or adapt as their teaching confidence grows,” Trufan said of the project.
Each video includes closed captioning, transcripts, and auto-translation into more than 150 languages to meet the needs of students with diverse abilities and learning preferences. Additional tutorials in technique, concepts, mathematics, and scientific writing further enhance student learning.
The program has already demonstrated measurable impact. UHD and HCC lab classes have implemented the program since Fall 2023, and results show reduced failure and withdrawal rates by up to 14% and GPA increases by up to 0.52.
All Experimentium content aligns with AAC&U rubrics, ensuring rigor while offering a flexible, accessible, and sustainable curriculum centered on student success.