Abstract: When costly commercial content is replaced with Open Educational Resources (OER), a barrier to participating in education is removed. In this workshop, an OER Coordinator, an undergraduate mass section faculty member, and an undergraduate student and academic support assistant offer tips, tricks, and walkthroughs to engage with OER. The presenters will describe possible avenues with OER, specific changes that can be made to coursework over time, then invite participants to find or map out the creation of their OER during the workshop. The presenters share their selection criteria for open data, open textbooks, and open assignments. Tools will be shared with and used by participants to systematically map out learning objectives from existing publisher content onto free resources, to develop assessment and evaluation questions, and deploy them through LMS.

Objectives

To workshop aims to walk participants through the OER adoption/authoring process from start to finish using a browser and participants' understanding of their course content and learning objectives. We offer tips, tricks, and possible routes for OER adoption or authoring presented by an OER Coordinator, an undergraduate mass section faculty member, and an undergraduate student and academic support assistant. This workshop will share lessons learned from changes made to a mass section coursework over the last three years as the presenters developed and deployed assignments and assessments based on open data and then using open textbooks they edited and also authored. Participants will be asked to engage with OER repositories using their browsers to map out possible titles, topics, assignments types and overall routes for adoption. Participants will develop action plans for OER adoption, use and share selection criteria, create process maps for supporting existing learning objectives using OER. After a walkthrough, participants develop assessment questions and assess the feasibility of deploying them through their LMS.

Topical Outline

Participants will be asked to examine the status of OER in higher education and at their organizations. The OER Coordinator will share repositories available and ask participants to engage with the contents of these repositories with regards to their content area. 1. Provide an overview of the status of OER in higher education (15 mins). 2. Show OER repositories for subjects relevant to participants after on-site brief survey to gauge the composition of the audience (Kahoot!) (15 mins). 3. Share existing models for OER adoption, authoring, publishing. Demonstrate own adoption and authoring process using Open Data and OER (30 mins). 4. Map out a process for OER adoption for a single assignment to a whole course for subjects relevant to participants using open tools such as Google Drive, Docs, and Sheets. Complete an OER concept/chapter map for their respective topic or subject (1 hour). 5. Process map to develop instructional content around the OER for face-to-face and in hybrid environments. Develop randomized assessment items for the OER to deploy through your LMS or platform of choice (1 hours). 6. Debrief and sharing of ideas, action plans, and process maps (30 mins).

Prerequisites

This workshop aims to leverage participants’ knowledge and skills of tools such as an internet browser, information, and computer literacy skills in order to find, adopt or author OER. No specific specialized skills are needed, however, an open mind for considering OER as an asset are preferred.

Experience Level

Beginner

Qualifications

Emese Felvegi, Ed.D. is a Senior Professor of Practice in the Department of Decision and Information Sciences at the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston. She teaches MIS 3300 Introduction to Computers and Management Information Systems to about 2000 student annually and has adopted and authored Open Education Resources for her course. Over the past three years, she has converted her course from using standalone open data projects to include a full open textbook. She is the 2019 recipient of the Office of the Provost’s Teaching Excellence Award in Innovation in Instructional Technology and the recipient of the University of Houston Libraries OER Grant with the largest OER rollout in the university’s history. Ariana Santiago is the Open Educational Resources Coordinator at the University of Houston Libraries. She leads the planning, implementation, and assessment of a UH open educational resources (OER) program. Her research interests include diversity and inclusion, undergraduate student success, and library instruction and outreach. She previously worked as the instruction librarian at UH and as an undergraduate instruction and outreach librarian at the University of Iowa. She was a 2017 American Library Association Emerging Leader. Robert McCarn is an undergraduate student with a background in the IT industry earning a BBA in Management Information Systems. He has served as an OER project manager and content development specialist for Dr. Felvégi’s MIS 3300 course for the past 18 months.