With the support of the Faculty Academic Center of Excellence at Towson University (FACET), an interdisciplinary group of faculty engaged in a discovery and review of Open Educational Resources (OER) for possible use in their courses. The goal of the FACET OER initiative was to provide faculty support with funds and mentoring to enhance the use and access of OER for students. Expanding OER use to address access and affordability provided faculty more opportunity to further contribute to curriculum development by investigating high-quality OER materials to support students’ educational needs. This connects well with the conference theme of equity and inclusion. Members of the panel worked in various ways to study practices aligned with the use of OER and reviewed available resources. The support and guidance from the Assistant Provost and the TU OER community enabled panel members to reflect on our learnings and share our work on OER. In this panel, we will present challenges and lessons learned in identifying OER materials for courses in Education and Occupational Therapy departments.
The Education faculty-librarian panelists will share experiences in finding and identifying OER for literacy assessment courses offered in the Elementary Education department. They will share how they planned, searched and examined relevant OER materials and databases. They will also share OER literacy assessment resources they found to help the audience find and determine their own open access materials. In addition to sharing their process, they will also discuss gaps between availability and demand so the audience will learn about ideas and strategies in finding and using open access resources.
Members of the panel from the Occupational Therapy department will also share insights regarding the identification of OER materials for occupational therapy and other healthcare students. They will present on how the Occupational Therapy department identified relevant OER materials from neighboring disciplines (e.g., sociology, psychology, and statistics), thereby improving the interprofessional education of our students and reducing the costs of their education. They will also present on their process of distributing and organizing OER materials for the department in hopes that faculty without training in OER may identify sources for their own courses.
Overall, this presentation targets audience who are interested in providing students with equitable and inclusive education through open education resources. We hope the lessons and the practical guidance we shared will help them avoid potential pitfalls in their own journey of exploring quality OER materials.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:
- Find and identify relevant open education resources and databases for use in literacy assessment courses
- Select and evaluate materials for use in occupational therapy and other healthcare courses
- Name practical strategies to use when identifying open education resources for use with students
