Harper College/OER Community of Practice

This page provides background and supporting information for the Open Educational Resources (OER) Community of Practice formed in Fall 2017.

Questions

1. What OER content is available?
2. How can OER be interactive?
3. How can we generate content?
4. What Harper courses are using OER?
5. What are faculty concerns regarding OER?
6. What is the future of textbook publishing?
7. Could Harper become 100% OER?

Goals

1. Reduce textbook costs without sacrificing quality
2. Find OER
3. Create OER
4. Evaluate OER

Deliverables

1. Orientation Week Session?
2. Workshops?
3. Explore designating courses as OER-based in the schedule?
4. List of OER resources?
5. Information on copyright and licensing (free vs. open)?
6. Tutorial on finding, creating, and using OER?
7. Create a graduate-level course on using OER, creating OER, and/or having students create OER?
8. GEC course designed to be in person, blended, online, or self-paced?

Teaching Practice Enhancements

1. Greater flexibility in course materials
2. Learner-centered content and approach
3. More thorough evaluation and selection of materials requirements
4. Enhanced collaboration within disciplines
5. Knowledge of / experience with creating free and open content
6. Enhanced understanding of content licensing

Student Learning Impact

1. Improved student engagement and student success
2. OER encourages higher order or deeper learning (Bloom's taxonomy levels)
3. OER can support more learning styles than typical textbooks
4. Students using OER have their textbooks when courses start
5. Students using OER can keep their textbooks after the course ends
6. Students are able to reduce overall educational costs

Concerns

1. Students who don't have or can't use technology to access OER. (Need to support printed or printable alternatives.)
2. Maintain support for academic freedom so instructors are able to choose the resources they believe are best for their courses and students.

Shared Learning

• Harper College/OER Adoption
• Guidebook to Research on Open Educational Resources Adoption
• Open Textbook Network (OTN) webinar, Sarah Cohen sfcohen@umn.edu, February 7, 2017
  Consortium of Academic & Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI), in conjunction with OTN staff, will coordinate full-day “train the trainer” workshops to be offered to CARLI member libraries, including the Harper College Library, in 2018.
• ILCCO: Growing Online Learning Conference 2017 Recorded Sessions
• ECampusNews: Faculty want more OER - here’s why
• Project Gutenberg - Free ebooks
• Perseus Digital Library - Classical texts and translations
• Educause: Exploring the Use of E-Textbooks in Higher Education
• CCC OER Mailing List
• Bay College OER Website
• Pima Community College OER Website
• Lumen: Adopting Open Educational Resources in the Classroom
• Slideshare: AtD OER Degree Initiative
• OER Authoring Tools List
• SAIT: Open Educational Resources Policies and Procedures
• OpenWashington: How to use Open Educational Resources

See Also

• Open Educational Resources/Introduction