Ela Castellanos-Reyes, an assistant professor of learning, design and technology at NC State College of Education, first came to the United States in 2017 as a graduate student at Purdue University. PoRTAL was launched in the fall of 2019 and exploded in popularity when remote learning became standard in early 2020. Now, a paper outlining the creation of open educational resources has been selected to receive the Best Research Paper Award by the American Educational Research Association.