Introductions - Who's in the cohort?

What a pleasure to welcome everybody in the June 22 cohort. Please kindly share a few details about yourself and/ or the OER work you envision to do as part of the Textbook Success Program.

Hello everyone. I am Karen Clark faculty with the University of Maryland School of Nursing. My clinical background is ICU, ER, and management positions. My faculty role with Maryland started in 2005. What I teach mainly is a broad version of Informatics to undergraduate pre-licensure nursing students and am versed in interprofessional education working with many varied professional faculty and students and am quite versed working in online environments. Simulation, virtual reality, and more along those lines of are interest. What I have noted in researching a bit is there is little or minimal information, such as in OERs in my area of Informatics for healthcare students. Looking forward to learning with and from everyone. Wanted to add we have Eric Belt an Academic Innovation Specialists as well.

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Hello! My name is Claire Thompson Mummert with the University of Houston Comparative Cultural Studies Department. Alongside my co-lecturer Laura Marshall Clark (Muscogee Creek), we teach a class on Native American Spirituality and look to increase the representation of Indigenous Knowledges within the department. My background has been primarily in Divinity and Ancient Languages in the past but my own dive into my ancestry led me to explore how the church has treated Indigenous People in the past and eventually led me to Laura. We continue to have the privilege of making relationships with different Indigenous groups and learning from them. There are very few OER (or corporate) textbooks that center Indigenous voices and that is what we seek to do with our textbook.

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Hi, I am Melody Li, faculty of MCL at University of Houston. I am passionate about teaching with technology and have worked on some projects with Office of Education Technology of CLASS at UH since I joined UH in 2018. I have developed some classes into online courses and have tried out quite some technological tools in my teaching. Together with two wonderful Instructional Designers, we will explore, share and create an OER textbook on education technology targeting at teaching cultural classes. Look forward to working with you all!

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Hello, I am Viola Green, Instructional Assistant Professor of French. Together with my colleagues from the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, French group, we are designing our OER textbook for 4 semesters of French. Our vision is to create a contemporary, interactive, fun, non-cost / low-cost French textbook, which aligns with the current research in SLA and our own teaching beliefs. Look forward to getting to know you all.

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Hello all, I am Ariana Santiago, OER Coordinator at the University of Houston Libraries. I have been in this role since 2018 - before getting involved in OER my work focused on information literacy instruction, and I have a background in instructional design. I will be supporting all of the UH groups as we participate in the TSP. Excited to learn from everyone in the cohort!

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Oki and hello everyone in the June 22 cohort! It was wonderful meeting your team representatives in the first session yesterday. I joined the the Rebus Community as Assistant Program Manager half a year ago, where my background in modern language teaching and educational development inform our curriculum planning and facilitation support.

I will be attending the first three live sessions as to get to know your teams and projects a little better. Please reach out to Bryan or me with any feedback or concerns you might have regarding the program and its delivery. We will gladly follow up on any input you provide.

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Hello you may not be the one to reach out to but I have a team member not included. Therefore, I cannot add him to my team. He is Eric Belt Eric.belt@umaryland.edu
He is included in my packet.

Respectfully, Karen Clark

Dear @karen.clark ,

Please invite your colleague to sign up on the forum using his preferred user name and creating a secure password. That way he can become part of the asynchronous cohort conversations. If he can please let me know that the set up is complete, I can add him to the cohort forum space. Kind regards, Joerdis

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Hello to all, my name is Laura Marshall Clark with the University of Houston Comparative Cultural Studies Department, and I co-lead our OER project with Claire Mummert at UH. I really enjoyed learning about your projects on Tuesday (I apologize, my phone did not show my name in the session). The course we co-teach, and subsequently, our textbook project in Native American spirituality, will provide tribal spiritual practices as understood through an Indigenous lens. Our text will do this through respected Indigenous voices. Our aim is to nest Native knowledges and practices (allowed to be shared publicly) within tribal historical and cultural contexts. I am an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma, educator, and an independent curator for Native American fine art exhibitions, among other pursuits.

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Hello! I am Eileen Harrington, I am the Assistant Library Director and the Health & Life Sciences Librarian at The Universities at Shady Grove (USG). USG is a regional higher education center that offers high-demand programs from 9 University of Maryland system schools. We only have juniors and seniors and graduate students on our campus. All of the undergrads on our campus are transfers students, mostly from local community colleges. The library on our campus is a branch of the University Maryland, College Park libraries, but we serve all of the students, faculty, and staff from the 9 partner institutions at USG. One of the various hats I wear is to promote and support the use of open pedagogy and OER on our campus. We are just starting this initiative at USG. I will be supporting the two Maryland groups as we participate in TSP.

Prior to coming to USG, I worked as a formal and informal educator in the U.S. and Latin America. I have an interest in increasing diversity in STEM, food systems, environmental education, and health humanities/narrative medicine.

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Hello, I am Fang Fang, an instructional designer in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS), University of Houston. I came from an instructional technology systems background and have worked in the field more than 15 years. A primary duty of my job is to help faculty improve learning through the integration of cutting-edge technologies. When we heard the OER grant, we believed it a great opportunity for students to get support and achieve better learning results. I have created multiple student resources but this is the first time to build a textbook! Look forward to learning more skills!

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Hi, my name is Sammy Hwang, an instructional designer in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS), University of Houston. I used to work at Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center and UT health science center before I came to U of H. I am assisting the faculty members on online learning and technology integration issue. My main interest is to create an accessible, engaging, and open learning environment.

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Hello! I am Bardia Yousefi, a faculty instructor in the Biocomputational Engineering program in A. James Clark School of Engineering and Fischell Department of Bioengineering at the University of Maryland College Park, at Shady Grove. My background is in Computer Science with more focus on data science and machine learning. We believe that OER can help increase accessibility and produce better science. Looking forward to working with you.

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Hello, I am Maura Pereira-Leon, Adjunct Faculty at the University of Houston, Human Development Department. I have taught Instructional Design for Human Resources Development at UH since 2018. My colleague LaTasha Bennett, UH Adjunct Faculty, and I decided to design an OER book to support learning of Instructional Design for HRD and the Design of eLearning Applications. My background is in instructional systems technology and research methods. I have developed undergraduate and graduate academic programs for face-to-face and online platforms. We are excited about this OER project and look forward to working with you all.

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Great to meet you Maura. I teach mostly online and have worked a a few different online platforms. Your background of working in support for e learning and more sounds excellent. Karen Clark

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Hi Joerdis,
My colleague Raymond has registered on Rebus site and I wanted to add him to my project, but I can’t find him. He is registered under his institutional email: rgnanwoh@central.uh.edu
Who do I contact to solve this problem?

Dear Viola @vvgreen , I will forward this request my team member @Apurva, since she’s the one with administration rights to the homepage software. She can quickly check why your colleague isn’t in the system.

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Good morning @vvgreen , we checked but cannot find your colleague either. Would you mind asking what his username is?

No worries, I found him. Looks like he just did not complete all the steps in his registration. From Viola and Raymond thank you!

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