OER in Practice

This week I was National OER Week, and although I was unable to attend the live sessions (and will patiently wait til they are published for viewing next week), I did get to access all of the pre-recorded sessions from the Idaho OER Week which was last week. It was so helpful to hear first-hand experiences of actual teachers a

nd librarians. I also got to hear my classmate, Lance Roe, present on H5P-a free, interactive, formative assessment level toolkit that are so easy to use but highly engaging. He had shared some about H5P in our class discussions, but this presentations really brought it down to practical usage.

In our readings this week, one study, when comparing studies done before their

own, commented that “neither study, however, focuses on how faculty are revising OER, and overall there is little research in the extant literature on the degree to which faculty or students are revising OER, how they are doing so, and what impact this may have on student learning outcomes.” That idea—the how faculty revise OER—caught my interest, and as I viewed the Idaho OER Week sessions, I found a lot of variety in how individual educators revise.

One of the sessions I viewed was hosted by ISU Art professor Amy Popa, who found and revised an existing OER Art textbook into one now used by several professors all teaching Art 1100 at ISU. Here are her unique ways of revising:

• Took only the pieces of the textbook that aligned with the course outcomes

• Turned those pieces into four, fleshed-out units

• Created powerpoints using pictures from the OER text

• Made it ADA compliant

• Incorporated videos that led to hands-on work for students

• Added class discussions

• Kept her “best practices” from the previous course, but added them to the new

• Added quizzes she and colleagues created

Ms. Popa said the main challenge was the time constraints (200 hours to

build), and that she could not have done it without the help of ITRC (ISU’s instructional design team), her willing colleagues, ISU’s library, and her own desire to help her students. She and her colleagues are excited to continue to tweak their creation as they continue teaching this class semester by semester.

I also watched a session hosted by librarian Catherine Gray of Idaho Falls. She

actually revised a previous text she had authored on information science. Here are her unique ways of revising:

• Moved the text from Microsoft Word to Pressbooks

• Added videos, including an introduction video she made herself

• Made Table of Contents interactive for ease of movement between sections

• Rearranged sections of text for clarity

Ms. Gray said her favorite part of using Pressbooks was that they were easily adapted year to year for changes in the content areas. For example, as scientists found new discoveries, or new presidents are added, or new music is created, instead of the faculty and students having to buy an entirely new textbook and curriculum, faculty can simply make a few adjustments to the texts and wha-lah, they are updated for free!

Questions: How could organizations who do not have their own instructional design team facilitate educators with building OER? Besides Pressbooks, are there other free or nearly-free ebook creators for educators to use?