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     With the essential support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the leadership of Tennessee State University, the collaborative community of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are designing and deploying strategies to make college more affordable by reducing the cost of course materials.

     The HBCU Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) Portal for Virginia State University provides free access to the tools, technologies, and services to initiate its own AL$ program and learn from their HBCU colleagues. As a land-grant university, Virginia State University strives to provide an affordable, high-quality education to all students. Having free and immediate access to course materials removes student barriers to enrollment, retention, and success. Adopting Open Educational Resources (OER) is one way to achieve those outcomes. Faculty resources and training will soon be available to those interested in supplementing or designing their courses with OER.

     Tennessee State University has partnered with MERLOT (www.merlot.org) and SkillsCommons (www.skillscommons.org) for many years to deliver the free and open educational resources to faculty, staff, students, and their families.

Use and share the free and open MERLOT Library.

WHAT IS MERLOT?

Become part of a worldwide community of online educators and learners and take advantage of the FREE member services from MERLOT.

MERLOT is a free online library with over 100,000 learning materials at your fingertips. You can find MILLIONS of other FREE learning materials.

Explore the HBCU Cultural Collection

Create your own personalized library with MERLOT's Bookmark Collections tool.

 The goal of MERLOT-HBCU Ambassadors is to empower everyone to develop their talents with the use of the free learning resources in MERLOT.  HBCU faculty, staff, and students can become MERLOT-HBCU Ambassadors by learning to use and share with others, how they can use MERLOT to meet their teaching and learning needs with free educational resources, practices, and services.

The HBCU AL$ Community has developed a library of planning templates, training materials, and tools to help your campus develop its customized AL$ program aligned with your campus culture and capabilities.