Open Educational Resources (OER) offer the promise of more affordable, more current, and accessible learning for our students. This unique session, itself an Open Educational Resource, is for those who want to better understand and promote the most effective and research-based use of OER at their own institutions or in their own courses. Participants will learn how to identify, find, evaluate, and implement OER, and will walk away with workshop materials, enabling them to adapt and deliver a faculty development program at their own institution and start integrating OER into their own courses.
This unique session, itself an Open Educational Resource previously piloted with faculty at a large public institution, is for those faculty and staff who want to better understand and promote the most effective and intelligent implementation of OER at their own institutions. Participants will learn how to identify, find, evaluate, and integrate OER, and will also take away a draft plan and resources for delivering or adapting a faculty development workshop at their own institution. The facilitation will be provided by the co-presenters, both experienced faculty developers with expertise in online and open educational resources.
Affordability, inclusion, and college completion are three issues at the heart of higher education concerns today (Allen & Seaman, 2016; Annand & Jensen, 2017; Hilton III, 2016). Open Educational Resources (OER) offer the promise of more affordable, more current, and accessible learning as students are equipped with up-to-date, faculty-curated resources, all available to students from the very first day of class (EDUCAUSE, 2011; Ozdemir & Hendricks 2017; Wiley, 2017).
Faculty development as represented by this session presents a scalable and sustainable strategy for implementing OER on a course, program, institutional, or system-wide basis. By exploring OER together, and working on an implementation plan, faculty and institutions can rapidly progress toward implementing OER.
An outline of the session is:
Part 1 (10 mins)—Intro and Defining OER: definitions of OER, the various types of permissions, underlying research supporting its use, and a discussion of controversies and concerns surrounding the adoption of OER.
Part 2 (10 mins)—Finding OER: a focus on resource collections, and discipline specific sites. Activities include searches and comparisons of OER resources. Sample cases will also be provided.
Part 3 (10 mins) —Evaluating, Selecting and Integrating OER: focusing on criteria and standards with reference to course design. Activities will include analysis and discussion of course planning.
Part 4 (10 mins) -- Action Plan. We will present a workshop website, share lessons learned from its implementation and how to use it on one’s own campus to deliver professional development for faculty and course development staff in OER.
Participants completing this workshop will
- Define the various types of OER, and permissions for adoption, attribution, and reuse.
- Identify the major research findings supporting OER.
- Identify collections of resources that provide OER relevant to different disciplines.
- Evaluate OER using appropriate standards and criteria.
- Select and provide a rationale for implementation of OER.
- Become familiar with the content, worksheets, and resources to deliver or adapt an OER workshop on their own campus.