You may have heard of the term Open Education Resources(OERs) and about the benefits of using OERs with your students. Knowing the benefits and creating an OER driven course, however, are two different things. This session will discuss and highlight how Coppin State University helped our Faculty evaluate and redesign their course materials with OERs.
Open Education Resources(OERs) are valuable in reducing the cost of textbooks to students. With OERs, students have access to their content immediately on any Internet Enabled device. Textbooks costs are a huge concern to our student population. The majority of our students are first generation college students who are working adults. As such, we had to find a way to reach our students in a different way.
According to a 2016 report, from the United States Public Interest Research Group, “The average cost of a textbook has risen by 73% since 2006, or four times that of U.S. inflation rates.” The cost of textbook and course materials causes a great amount of stress to our students. Most of our student population are first generation college students and most are working adults with families. As such, our students are renting, photo copying or not even buying the textbooks in order to participate in their courses. This causes our students to get behind on their course work which affects their student experience and impacts our retention of qualified students.
Given the benefits of OERs, our institution began pushing OER courses for our students. In this session participants will learn the steps Coppin State took to help our faculty start creating and implementing an OER course from scratch. Participates will discuss the evaluation process and will also be introduced to various online resources to help them start looking into using OERs with their students.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Describe the steps needed for OER implementation
- Identify three online resources to begin looking for OERs
- Identify 3 tools to evaluate the validity and reliability of OERs
- Identify 3 online sources for creating their own OER resources
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