Hello everyone. I’m Colby Moorberg. I’m an assistant professor of soil science in the Dept. of Agronomy at Kansas State University. I got interested in OER through work on my open textbook, the Soils Laboratory Manual. It was published by New Prairie Press, and we published a student survey about it in Natural Sciences Education.
I am an Open Education Group OER Research Scholar. As part of that program, I’m doing a follow-up study on the lab manual by surveying the instructors who have adopted the lab manual in their soil science courses.
I’m also working on an open textbook for another class, Soil & Water Conservation: An Annotated Bibliography. (See the “Tell us about your project” post here: Soil & Water Conservation: An Annotated Bibliography - 3 PM EST)
My discipline, soil science, has very few OER available. I think my lab manual might have been the first such resource. There’s interest in our discipline of developing open textbooks and other resources. However, it’s not a very large discipline, so getting a critical mass of OER developers is difficult.
Outside of work I enjoy cycling, homebrewing, sports, camping, DIY projects, and hanging out with my family.
