Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG) is a USG initiative to promote student success by supporting the implementation of affordable alternatives to expensive commercial textbooks, particularly Open Educational Resources (OER) and open textbooks such as OpenStax Textbooks, which are both free and customizable for exactly what a faculty member would like to teach within their courses. We also encourage the use of electronic resources made available through GALILEO.

ALG pursues these goals in a few primary ways:

• Awarding Textbook Transformation Grants to teams of faculty and professional staff to provide the time and support they need to transform their courses from requiring a commercial textbook to requiring OER, library, and other no- or low-cost resources.
• Working with the University of North Georgia Press to create new open textbooks for high-enrollment courses without an open textbook already available.
• Making all grant-created and UNG Press-created open materials available and searchable through GALILEO Open Learning Materials, an OER repository.
• Raising awareness of textbook affordability on each campus through our ALG Campus Champions and Library Coordinators.

ALG began as a GALILEO pilot initiative in 2013 addressing both Complete College Georgia and the USG 2013-2018 Strategic Plan’s Imperative 1. We were funded in 2014 by the state legislature.

For more information on grants, student success, and even peer-reviewed research done by USG faculty, please check our ALG Statistics, Research, and Reports page.