Open Educational Resources: OER Professional Development

In any given U.S. classroom, approximately twenty percent of our students have a documented disability. Still more may not have an official diagnosis, but face other barriers to accessing learning. Open Educational Resources (materials that can be freely shared, reproduced, and revised) provide educators with an opportunity to reach the greatest number of learners through its flexibility and support of inclusive design decisions. This webinar will briefly define OER and related terms and then delve into the nexus between these course materials and accessibility. We will also (re) consider our definitions of ‘access’ and seek to understand how using OER might help us to do so.

On campuses everywhere conversations and courses of action around diversity, equity, and inclusion are improving education. But why should textbooks and other course materials be diverse and inclusive? And how do we ensure that they are?
OpenStax Editorial Director, Anthony Palmiotto, and Communications Specialist, Symphonie Swift, will speak with Sabia Prescott, Senior Program Associate with the Education Policy program at New America; and Jason Lambert, professor of business at Texas Woman's University.

The OER movement is deeply rooted in ensuring equitable access to information; but there is more we can do to help increase equity, diversity, and inclusion in our resources and practices. Join us for this webinar to learn about the ways in which colleges can consider issues of equity when designing and delivering OER courses and degree programs.

Are you new to open educational resources and want to learn more? This webinar covers the basics:

Why high textbook costs are a problem for students
How OER differ from free resources
How Creative Commons licenses work
Where to find OER
What resources are available for customizing OER
How to incorporate open pedagogy into a class
Presenter Cheryl Cuillier shares a wealth of resources to help kick-start your adoption, adaptation, or creation of OER.

This webinar will focus on how to integrate anti-racist pedagogy into your course both through classroom practices and the selection and updating of instructional materials. Professor Alisa Cooper, co-author, of the Anti-racist Discussion Pedagogy Guide, will share how instructors can prepare themselves and their students to conduct authentic discussions that support perspectives from traditionally underrepresented voices. Professor Shawna Brandle, author of It’s (Not) in The Reading: American Government Textbooks’ Limited Representation of Historically Marginalized Groups will share her research on why and how to evaluate and update openly licensed instructional materials to be anti-racist.

During the summer of 2020, CCCOER created a five-week series of OER tutorials. The archives for these sessions are free and open for anyone to use.

These are ideal for faculty, librarians, and instructional designers who are new to OER or need a refresher on basic concepts related to finding, adapting, and teaching with open educational resources.

This is an evolving resource intended to provide inspiration for instructors who use Pressbooks and Open Educational Resources for their teaching.

This guide is currently in the open creation stage, meaning that it is in-progress, but openly licensed.[1] In other words, this is a resource in flux: we will be composing, revising, and reorganizing these materials over the course of the coming months.

The OER Content Sharing Template is a worksheet that can be shared with faculty to provide an overview of open access options for textbooks, articles & study aids, and multimedia resources.

Adaptability and affordability are two major aspects of what makes an open educational resource attractive to students, but there is another facet that should be considered when you are developing or adapting an OER for your course: perspective. In particular, you should ask yourself how the perspectives being represented in your OER might affect the inclusivity of your course environment.