Capturing Open Educational Practices with ePortfolios

MERLOT (www.merlot.org)  has recently created a portal showcasing open educational practices for redesigning courses with technology, adopting OER, innovating career and technical education programs, using virtual labs, and moving online at http://oep.merlot.org.   The collection of over 1,000 eportfolios captured faculty's "know how" to adopt and adapt a wide range of technologies in transforming their teaching and their students' learning.   The ePortfolios are OERs that can be reused, revised, remix, retained and redistributed within the process of scaling the innovative practices.   The workshop will briefly review the IDEATE virtual event strategy designed by MERLOT and the Online Learning Consortium to openly share practices for teaching STEM Labs online.  

The workshop will guide participants through the extensive collection that covers many academic and CTE disciplines as well as explain and discuss strategies for leveraging the portal for their local use.  The workshop will include the presentation and discussion of institutional implementation strategies which have been successful in engaging faculty in open educational practices and adopted in multiple institutions.  The workshop will also demonstrate the use MERLOT's Content Builder application to create OER ePortfolios for capturing open educational practices at their own institution.   MERLOT provides templates for ePortfolios with scaffolding questions that guide users through the comprehensive reflection and documentation of their educational practices as they create OER that are hosted for free within MERLOT.

After a few introductory PPT slides providing the context for Open Educational Practices and MERLOT,   the workshop will involve a number of screen sharing  activities, directed tasks, and use of chat to share reflections on their learning.  After each of the major sections.  discussion via chat and video conference will be used to engage participants in the learning activities.   The workshop will end with people sharing their learning outcomes in the chat and verbally as well.

OER without Open Educational Practices will not produce the educational transformations at the speed and scale that is possible.   This session will provide models of how to institutionalize open educational practices with ePortfolio and should help participants develop their own local strategies for supporting OEP.

MERLOT's OER/Affordable Learning Solutions strategy and OEP services have been implemented as part of the HBCU Affordable Learning Solutions initiative.   See http://hbcuals.org to explore the HBCU AL$ Community Portal.   The workshop will showcase how a number of HBCUs have adapted the Affordable Learning Solutions "practice" into their own institutions.   The California State University System is composed of 20 HSIs and 16 ANAPIs and has been implementing the Affordable Learning Solutions Initiative  successfully for the past 10 years with over $40 million in  student savings for course materials in 2019-20 due to campus activities focused on  the adoption of OER and library resources.

Participants will acquire the knowledge and skills to:

1. Explore MERLOT's portal showcasing over 1,000 eportfolios capturing open educational practices for redesigning courses with technology, adopting OER, innovating career and technical education programs, using virtual labs, and moving online,

2. Use the open educational practices captured in OERs to support their own initiatives and  professional development programs

3. Use MERLOT's Content Builder to create their own OEP templates