Dr. Aselia Urmanbetova, Associate Academic Professional for the School of Economics, and Dr. Chaohua Ou, the Assistant Director of Learning and Technology Initiatives for the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) at GT, have been awarded a $30,000 grant from Affordable Learning Georgia. "What we plan to do is take the open source Introduction to Macroeconomics textbook from OpenStax and curate it to the needs of our students", said Dr. Urmanbetova. "By realigning some of the text, adding already created and publicly available educational videos to the learning materials, assembling existing open assessments tools and developing our own, redesigning the slides, we can work to fit the needs of our students in a more comprehensive, interactive, and multimedia experience." Dr. Urmanbetova, Dr. Ou and Economics Ph.D. student Xin Gu will work with three additional students on the content / media / website part of this project.

This project is set to launch during Summer of 2019 and will be finalized by end of Fall 2019. "Our goal is that starting from Spring 2020, we will make these interactive and engaging learning materials available online and students at Georgia Tech and other schools around the world can use them free of cost. We are hoping this technology-enhanced textbook will make learning economics more enjoyable and meaningful and thus help students learn more effectively."