Calling All Faculty...Get Onboard with OER
Tracks
Pedagogically Speaking
| Friday, May 31, 2019 |
| 9:30 AM - 10:00 AM |
| HUM 2043 |
Speaker
Dr. Lenore Horowitz
University at Albany
Calling All Faculty...Get Onboard with OER
9:30 AM - 10:00 AMFull Abstract
SUNY was given $4 million by the state of New York for fiscal year 2017 – 2018, to implement Open Educational Resources (OER) in high-enrollment, general education courses. All six-four SUNY campuses were eligible to receive these funds. This is our story.
The University at Albany received funding for a Provost’s OER Fellowship which provided support and funding for individual faculty who were passionate about OER and the movement to increase their availability and use. Four faculty members from varied disciplines, Philosophy, Chemistry, Political Science and Information Science, were selected and led by the University’s Director of The Institute of Teaching, Learning and Academic Leadership. We were also extended, part time, a PhD student in the Educational Theory and Practice Department who was an experienced faculty instructional designer with considerable knowledge and enthusiasm for OER. The OER Fellows were tasked in 2018 to provide an increasing awareness, adoption, and use of open educational resources across the campus with a goal of making UAlbany more affordable and accessible to all students.
Our goals were to:
• research OER materials in our respective disciplines
• advance the adoption of OER in large enrollment courses and in our own courses
• evaluate suitable OER platform options for our campus
• reach out to and support faculty through offering information-sharing sessions and workshops about OER
This session will highlight our journey from defining OER to engaging and enthusing faculty across the University to increase their use of OER in their courses. The discussion will include our often times frustrating, but eventually rewarding, search for high quality and usable OER in each of our disciplines, the struggle to offer limited options for enumerating OER resources, pertinent research, and user-friendly platforms campus wide, and how to best reach out to faculty and support them without scaring them away, and overwhelming them, with our OER fervor.
I will share our progress, successes, challenges, best practices and more, inviting participant’s to jump in and join the conversation.
The University at Albany received funding for a Provost’s OER Fellowship which provided support and funding for individual faculty who were passionate about OER and the movement to increase their availability and use. Four faculty members from varied disciplines, Philosophy, Chemistry, Political Science and Information Science, were selected and led by the University’s Director of The Institute of Teaching, Learning and Academic Leadership. We were also extended, part time, a PhD student in the Educational Theory and Practice Department who was an experienced faculty instructional designer with considerable knowledge and enthusiasm for OER. The OER Fellows were tasked in 2018 to provide an increasing awareness, adoption, and use of open educational resources across the campus with a goal of making UAlbany more affordable and accessible to all students.
Our goals were to:
• research OER materials in our respective disciplines
• advance the adoption of OER in large enrollment courses and in our own courses
• evaluate suitable OER platform options for our campus
• reach out to and support faculty through offering information-sharing sessions and workshops about OER
This session will highlight our journey from defining OER to engaging and enthusing faculty across the University to increase their use of OER in their courses. The discussion will include our often times frustrating, but eventually rewarding, search for high quality and usable OER in each of our disciplines, the struggle to offer limited options for enumerating OER resources, pertinent research, and user-friendly platforms campus wide, and how to best reach out to faculty and support them without scaring them away, and overwhelming them, with our OER fervor.
I will share our progress, successes, challenges, best practices and more, inviting participant’s to jump in and join the conversation.
