Expanding possibilities with open educational resources (OERs) Katie Dawson, Director of ULM Online Megan Lowe, Director of the Library Noelle Prestridge, Director of Extended Learning University Week Fall 2019

Image taken from STEAM and Arts Integration Conference 2017. The panelists Dr. James Boldin – School of Visual and Performing Arts Dr. Jodi Bower – School of Allied Health Ms. Mary Elizabeth Bridges – School of Behavioral and Social Sciences Dr. Yiting Chu – School of Education Dr. William Rogers – School of Humanities Dr. Turner Steckline – School of Humanities Dr. Joshua Stockley – School of Behavioral and Social Sciences Image taken from STEAM and Arts Integration Conference 2017.

Critical Definitions AKA – what even are open educational resources (OERs) and their cousins affordable educational resources (AERs)? Why are they important? Why should we care about them? OERs are “are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them. OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation” (Federation University, 2019). Please note all the different types of materials that can be used as OERs – you might even be using OERs in your courses RIGHT NOW! AERs – sometimes called affordable course content (ACC) – are similar to OERs except that they may have a cost (hence affordable). Whenever possible, AERs cost students very little (our threshold for this project was >$75). Why are they important? Why should we care? Because 7 out of 10 students do not buy the textbooks/course materials they need for a course because they simply cannot afford it. Alternately, it may be a choice of paying one’s rent and/or paying for food versus paying for the textbook. Academic performance suffers in all of these situations – OERs/AERs represent a solution to help our students start a course with critical materials.

Why a faculty learning community (FLC)? Why not? But seriously...there were are good reasons to use a FLC to explore this topic, not the least of which is to create a community of support and a space in which faculty could learn, ask questions, and share their stories and experiences. We also thought that bringing together a group of individuals from across campus – that is, from different schools, representing different disciplines – would provide a cross-section of experiences to help us understand the concerns and challenges different departments and disciplines might face as they investigate, adopt, and implement OERs/AERs. We also wanted to explore the faculty’s different experiences adopting and using OERs/AERs in online classes and F2F classes to examine the differences in the concerns and challenges between those two contexts. There’s also a pretty solid body of research/evidence that highlights the many benefits of using faculty learning communities to promote excellence, facilitate collaboration, and enable participants to learn new skills.

Timeline Decided in summer 2018 First group put together for fall 2018, met for the first time at the end of Sept. Assignments and meetings throughout fall Closed fall semester with luncheon First group continued with spring 2019 Assignments and meetings throughout spring Closed spring semester with a luncheon Next steps!

Moodle THANK YOU, KATIE! While we had a remote participant, we recorded meetings and shared them through the Moodle course (Zoom). All resources, assignments, and helpful documents and links were uploaded through the course. Eventually, much of this material will be deposited in the institutional repository (IR) for all faculty/instructors to have access to!

Next steps For AY2019-2020, there will be two FLCs. One will be led by two of the former participants (Drs. Rogers and Stockley) that will focus on pedagogy. The other, which will be led by Dawson, Lowe, and Prestridge, will focus on external opportunities – this group will focus on grants, seeking and vetting OERs, and resources for creating OERs. We want to get all of the great stuff our participants found into the ULM Digital Repository so that the world can see what we’re doing at ULM with OERs/AERs and help other interested faculty/instructors see what their peers are doing. The ULM Library will continue to facilitate helping faculty/instructors identify resources within its holdings that could serve as OERs (e.g., eBooks which could serve as textbooks for classes or individual articles which could be uploaded to Moodle courses). The ULM Library continues to offer scanning services for documents that faculty/instructors would like to add to their Moodle courses (within the bounds of copyright). Remember: we’ll add coversheets that have citation information to ensure that they are fair use and copyright compliant! As a member of the LOUIS consortium, the ULM Library will also continue to participate in LOUIS’ Affordable Learning LOUISiana initiative.

And now, some more words from our panelists!

Final thoughts/questions

Thanks for coming! If you have questions, you can contact us: Katie Dawson: dawson@ulm.edu Megan Lowe: lowe@ulm.edu Noelle Prestridge: prestridge@ulm.edu