OER PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DAY

Students use the familiar bookstore purchasing process to pay for printed materials, platform or other support fees associated with reliable, effective OER.

Host a professional development day for all faculty or individual departments to educate people about the benefits of OER. Begin with an introductory session highlighting 1) problems with traditional, fixed, high-cost educational resources, 2) research on OER impact on student success, and 3) how to adopt, adapt, and author OER. Include a hands-on workshop to introduce them to resources that make it simple to discover, adopt, and teach with OER.

Here are three examples that represent a wide-range of Lumen Learning clients.

Lansing Community College:

Here is an agenda from a focused one-day event by a seasoned OER champion who already has several OER initiatives happening on campus. We started with a keynote about Lumen Learning and OER to set the tone of the day. Then we had break-out sessions that were discipline-specific. Highly effective for faculty and administrators who are already familiar with open education and Lumen Learning.

Here is an agenda from a campus-wide event at the same institution. The day was organized around three morning keynotes, a student panel during lunch, and then breakout hands-on sessions in the afternoon.

Cochise Community College:

Here is an agenda for a workshop that features a kick-off event where we aimed to support the work of an OER champion. In this model, we invited upper-administrators to the keynote in the morning, and then held discipline-specific workshops for faculty in the afternoon.

San Jacinto College:

Here is a list of questions that we used at San Jacinto with a group of faculty who were involved with the Achieve the Dream Grant. We held a focus group with those faculty to get an understanding of their experience. Here are the questions:

Focus Group Questions

1. What has gone well with your course adoption? Tell us a briefly what you’ve changed about your course with the adoption of OER.
2. Tell us about what has been a challenge. What do you wish you had known before you started teaching with OER?
3. How can we reach more faculty on campus to get them interested in OER? What would you tell a faculty member interested in OER?
4. What was your students reaction to using OER? What can we do to support the student experience in your courses?
5. What would make the adopt/adapt experience easier for faculty?

Attributions:

Photo by Neisan Massarrat on Unsplash