By Julie Curtis, VP Strategy & Communication
As we work with colleges and universities across the country, a common request we hear is, “Can you make it easier for my faculty members to find and adopt your OER course materials?”
The campus leaders and OER champions we support are not alone in this request. In the Babson Survey Research Group’s 2017 “Opening the Textbook” report, fully half of all higher education faculty members identified “Difficult to find what I need” as an obstacle to using open educational resources.
We hear you.
With that in mind, today we’re introducing a new-and-improved OER course catalog featuring the following updates.
New Location: lumenlearning.com/courses
Many website visitors already look for our course catalog at this address. Bringing our catalog into our main website makes it easier to find.
More Search Options
Our catalog now invites you to search by subject, keyword, title, and Lumen courseware type (Waymaker, OHM, Candela).
More Information about Our Courses
When you click into any course detail page, you will see course descriptions and other helpful information. If supplemental materials or multiple versions of the same course are available, the course detail page explains your options to guide you toward the best fit.
With a Single Click
Our catalog’s course detail pages include buttons that make it easy to ask questions, request more information, and adopt a Lumen course. We’re working to make it as simple as possible to explore and teach with Lumen-supported OER.
Lumen Recommended Courses
Our updated catalog contains 50+ courses we’ve designated as “Highly Recommended” and “Recommended.” These are well-designed courses that provide a smooth transition to OER. Our course list further explains these designations and the effort we put into supporting and improving how students learn using these courses.
It’s worth noting that a variety of other community-contributed OER courses are also available in our platform, such as the Boundless OER Course Archive and the Achieving the Dream OER Degree Initiative Catalog. Lumen provides technical and platform support for these Community Courses, but we do not actively maintain the course content. We provide these course materials as-is, and adopters are free to customize and update them as desired. Our Community Course Directory points you to these course collections.
It’s a Beauty
Aside from all these functional improvements, there’s one more thing you need to know about our new course catalog. It’s beautiful.
Gorgeous (openly-licensed!) images and clean design make our new catalog a lovely place to visit and explore.
Please share it with colleagues who are interested in open, affordable, well-designed course materials that improve learning. You can use this flier to spread the news.
The year is young. Stay tuned for many more improvements to our catalog, courses, and platform technologies throughout 2018.