Using open educational resources has freed me as a teacher to turn learning over to students as partners in learning, contextualize content, and provide up-to-date resources. Participants will leave this session with tips, tools, ideas and a plan for teaching in new ways using OER.
It is well documented that open educational resources (OER) impact affordability and access, and we’re just beginning to unlock the potential for OER to strengthen student success by applying principles of learning science and user-focused design to openly licensed content. A new generation of digital courseware blends OER with analytics and personalized learning tools engineered to foster effective learning. Its goals are to build better learners, deepen faculty-student connections and improve course completion rates.
Courseware can provide helpful learning data to pinpoint where students struggle and inform the faculty member and the student about how learning is progressing. It can also introduce nudges and interventions aimed to address common challenges in the educational experience, especially for disadvantaged or historically underrepresented students. These learning analytics act like a highly skilled teaching assistant, handling the day-to-day administrative duties, which allows faculty to focus on what we do best – teach!
This workshop will explore the impact of OER courseware on faculty and students in addition to highlighting how faculty can use OER to streamline course design, focus on areas where students tend to struggle, and incorporate high impact elements without the fear and guilt associated with not “teaching” every element of the course content.
Another benefit of OER is that we can now collaboratively create cutting-edge courses with integrated learning tools. Imagine the benefit of working with students to continually revise content to increase student engagement and understanding while also increasing belonging through representation of diverse perspectives and backgrounds. The presenter will share how their teaching has changed to incorporate more student voice and choice in online instruction. Examples of student contributions will be shared to highlight the immense value added by creating a collaborative online learning environment. Participants will also learn about engaging team projects involving book clubs, service-learning, and civic engagement, all of which were completed in fully online and hybrid courses.
Participants will be guided though a backward design process and encouraged to think through one of their upcoming courses. Using a structured format, participants will consider several key learning outcomes, discuss how those outcomes are assessed, and share their most engaging methods for achieving learning outcomes. The presenter will share how using OER courseware has changed their approach to teaching and student engagement and their observations about how using digital courseware impacts student behaviors and learning. They will also share the lessons they have learned along the path of converting to using OER as well as digital courseware designed using OER.