Open Educational Resources (OER) reduce student textbook costs, provide instructors and faculty with increased flexibility, and increase the relevancy of course materials. At the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, there is a growing interest in and awareness of OER. Unfortunately, this desire to find health sciences OER, adopt them in classes, and share them with students is hindered by a lack of health sciences OER, the absence of a centralized database for searching all relevant OER, and faculty misconceptions around copyright of teaching materials.
To combat this gap and to increase access to specifically nursing OER, the Anschutz Medical campus OER committee awarded a mini grant to a nursing faculty member to create a MERLOT site called Teaching Future Nurses that includes OER teaching materials for nursing. The MERLOT site currently has twelve learning materials from nursing faculty on campus as well as a form whereby any nursing faculty member can submit an OER teaching material to be shared. This talk will walk through the process of creating a MERLOT site, soliciting teaching materials from nursing faculty, and review barriers to OER submission by faculty.
Teaching Future Nurses is helping to increase the accessibility of nursing OER as well as the findability of relevant nursing OER by creating a centralized site. It is currently helping the faculty on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus, but we hope that through MERLOT’s national and international reach, nursing faculty at other health sciences campuses will benefit as well.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Attendees will be able to identify the challenges of finding and sharing OER on a health sciences campus
- Attendees will be able to summarize the process of creating a centralized site for OER on a particular topic
