MCO 11th Annual Conference on eLearning

This presentation explores why and how an instructor would use Open Educational Resources--both open textbooks and interactive OERs--in their online and hybrid courses to engage and retain students. The presentation will identify the benefits (as well as challenges) and best practices for using OER/iOER; outline a process for implementing OER/iOER; and provide some faculty examples of online and hybrid courses that incorporate OER/iOER from four community colleges. We will also talk briefly about the Massachusetts Community College statewide OER initiative and how your campus can get involved.

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Open Educational Resources (OER)--both open textbooks and interactive OERs--provide opportunities for students to dive right into the course materials as well as be engaged with the course content. They also allow instructors more flexibility in selecting their content. This is important in an online course where using the traditional textbook or even the publisher’s course site represent a number of barriers (cost being a major one) that can be hard to troubleshoot online among students and faculty. This presentation highlights the various benefits and opportunities (as well as challenges) available to faculty by moving to OER/iOER and provides some useful materials and guidelines to help faculty prepare for and use OER/iOER materials in their online and hybrid courses. The presentation will also illustrate different approaches to integrating open, free, or affordable content into an online and hybrid course. In particular, we will highlight some of the successful practices by faculty who have made the switch to OER/iOER at North Shore Community College, Northern Essex Community College, MassBay Community College, and Middlesex Community College. We will also showcase some of the work in OER/iOER by our faculty and discuss their unique approaches to reducing the cost of learning materials while engaging and retaining students. The overall goal of the presentation is to provide attendees with a strong introductory exploration of using OER/iOER in an online or hybrid course and how they might begin to move towards more open and interactive course content. We will also talk briefly about the Massachusetts Community College statewide OER initiative and how your campus can get involved.