About the HBCU AL$ Program

In 2017, MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching www.merlot.org) and SkillsCommons (www.skillscommons.org)  partnered with the leadership at Southern University (Moustapha Diack) to launch the first annual HBCU Affordable Learning Solutions Summit at the MERLOT-Online Learning Consortium INNOVATE Conference in New Orleans, LA.  Each year the HBCU AL$ Summit has grown through the efforts of the HBCU AL$ leadership team at Tennessee State University and with the support of a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.  With the COVID pandemic in 2020, the transition to free, online, and open educational resources and practices became an imperative.   

In 2020 and 2023, the Hewlett Foundation awarded Tennessee State University additional grants to expand the community of HBCUs developing and implementing their campus-centric Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) initiatives and strengthening the organizational infrastructure of the HBCU community to grow the successful adoption of AL$ to all the HBCUs who wish to participate.

Our Purpose: The HBCU AL$ community will be sharing our resources and exemplary practices as well as conducting research on how best to serve the needs of the HBCUs in making higher education more affordable by reducing the cost of course materials.  The HBCU Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$) Community is planning and conducting a number of activities to:

• Strengthen the collaborative relationships between HBCUs
• Share exemplary practices for reducing the costs of course content for students
• Support leadership of HBCUs in the management and shared governance of the AL$ program

A critical goal of this project is to also facilitate the sharing of Open Educational Resources (OER) developed by HBCUs for their own academic programs. Building a collection of culturally inclusive curriculum that is free and open for teaching and learning will benefit our diverse students.

• Explore the SHARE tab to learn about the different ways you can contribute to the MERLOT collection with HBCU resources.
• Explore the HBCU Cultural Collections to find free and open educational resources for programs in Africana/African American/Black Studies as well as for programs across the disciplines.

Founded October 3, 1887, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) is a public, historically Black university located in Tallahassee, Florida. What distinguishes FAMU from other universities is its legacy of providing access to a high-quality, affordable education with programs and services that guide students toward successfully achieving their dreams. FAMU is part of the State University System of Florida and is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.

In addition to the main Tallahassee campus, FAMU has several satellite campuses across Florida. These include the College of Law in Orlando and the College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, Institute of Public Health, which has sites in Crestview, Tampa, Jacksonville, and Miami.

In 1997, The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT, www.merlot.org) is an international cooperative formed for the purpose of aggregating and making freely accessible high quality online resources to improve learning and teaching within higher education.  MERLOT’s organization and services are administered by the California State University and connect higher education systems, consortiums, and institutions, professional societies and organizations of academic disciplines, corporations, and individual members to form a community of people who strive to enrich the teaching and learning experiences with technologies.

MERLOT provides: 

• An open, online catalog of thousands of online learning materials.
• Quality assurance processes for the evaluating the learning materials
• Open community tools for its members to manage and personalize their use of MERLOT resources and services
• A directory of people with common interests in teaching and learning with online materials across a wide range of disciplines
• Technologies for customizing services for our partners
• Professional development services for our partners
• User-friendly authoring tools to create open educational resources
• Leadership opportunities for individuals and institutional to put educational innovations into practice

Visit MERLOT and its Programs

Funded by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2014, California State University and MERLOT designed and implemented the national, open library of workforce programming and training materials called SkillsCommons at www.skillscommons.org. The SkillsCommons library is open for educators, workforce development staff, human resources staff, and individual workers and provides free and easy access to the innovative training materials across a wide variety of industry sectors that can be adopted and adapted for the local use. Learn more...

Partner with SkillsCommons Programs | Visit the SkillsCommons Repository