OER Pursuit

Beth BeecroftBrooke HoffmanRowan College of South JerseyOne year ago, Rowan College of South Jersey started a grassroots OER initiative on campus starting with a small working group of librarians, faculty, administrators, and the college’s eLearning team. In this short time, RCSJ has explored and implemented an OER movement on campus. This workshop audience will be presented with a board game version of Rowan College South Jersey’s journey with OER.<<abstract was truncated>>

Opportunities to build momentum

Reward faculty for adopting an OER textbook
Reward faculty for reviewing OER textbooks
Have students create the covers (covers have different copyright than the content of the book)
Reach out to alumni foundation for funding (already cover student textbooks through scholarships – have them give you the funding to be able to fund textbooks for hundreds of students)

Ideas for OER content

Music class – create a Spotify playlist, have students create a (free) account to listen to playlist.

Hypothesis – tool that exists online (website, PDF, etc.), students can annotate document, and keep the annotations. Paid version (integrated with LMS) can allow all students annotate together.

Support for the Elusive Hybrid

Greg KaminskiMegan SavagePortland Community CollegeHybrid learning can be particularly challenging at the community college level where students might not be aware of the expectations and skill set required to be successful in this instructional mode. The hybrid modality is supported to various degrees and in a variety of ways at our institutions of higher learning. The road to supporting hybrids at Portland Community College has been fraught with bumps, detours and occasional dead ends, but positive steps have been taken in the past couple of years to firm up the foundation for this instructional mode. This session will focus on the journey PCC has taken in the quest to support hybrids and strategies that are helping to move this instructional mode into the mainstream. There will be some sharing of what has worked at other colleges as well.

Need to expand hybrid offerings

Enrollment decline
Building remodel – loss of physical classroom space
Friday Academy
Access[ibility]
Culturally Responsive Teaching
Student flexibility

Hybrid work group

Created a definition for students

A hybrid course meets in person and has online work that replaces some in-person class time. The amount of time spent in person and online varies between courses. The in-person time is noted in the schedule.An additional definition was created for internal (faculty/administrators)

Hybrid Faculty Mentor program

1 year President’s fund award ($24,000 for mentor work and materials
6 mentors selected
FT and PT faculty represented
Mentors designed a hybrid template

Hybrid syllabus highlights

PCC created a table that shows the comparison between instructional components and how those are delivered in hybrid vs. traditional face-to-face courses. This helps define what is homework vs. class work when both are delivered through the LMS/online delivery.

Best Practices Using OER for the Seasoned Instructor

Roxanne Haimann
Anna Laneville
Joshua Mitchell

Hawkeye Community College

Benefits to using OER

Cost

First day access

Portable

Accessibility built-in

Engaging
High quality
95% of students are doing as well or better using OER

Broaden ideas of what OERs are

e-Textbooks
Journal/magazine/newspaper articles
APR/NPR audio clips
Self-assessment quizzes
PowToons
Quizlet
Online reference materials
YouTube
TedTalks
Padlet

Creation/implementation tips

Ensure source permanence
Co-create content along with your students

Implementation matters

Acknowledge OER in the syllabus
Provide technical instructions on how to access OER resources

Other tips to consider

Consider changing PDFs to Word docs for accessibility – students can change font sizes, etc.

Using technology to personalize OER

H5P – Create, share, and reuse interactive HTML5 content in your browser

What other institutions are doing/using

Upload video to YouTube, make unlisted, have YouTube do auto-captioning, download caption, then upload caption file to streaming media service (Panopto, Mediasite)
Have students find content within the course (create a quest), that can be used in future courses.