@june21-cohort Our first session will take place tomorrow, June 7, at 1 p.m. ET on Zoom (at our standard meeting link). If you have any problems with that direct link, refer to the calendar invitation.
We’ll start with what we think is one of the most important pieces of the program — introductions and getting to know more about each other, our projects, the platform, and the Rebus approach to publishing.
Each week, I’ll share links to the slides and handouts accompanying each session, which I hope you’ll find useful. This week, you can refer to:
Hi everyone, it was great meeting you all yesterday! I’m Apurva, the project lead at Rebus Community. I am also a TSP facilitator for other cohorts, and have supported a number of OER projects in varying disciplines. I look forward to supporting you all with your work, and coordinating with Bryan to make connections across cohorts!
Hello @june21-cohort! Thank you all for such a great introductory session yesterday! It was a pleasure to hear about your projects, and I’m excited to watch (and hopefully help) them unfold. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s great to see the wide variety of learners that your projects will be reaching and the important needs that you’ll be addressing with your work.
The main focus of our first session was to get to know one another, understand how our sessions will be structured, and learn about Rebus’ tools and approaches. We asked each other to share some information about our projects and aspirations. Over this week, please:
Respond below with your introduction, including your role on the project and the dream goal you have for it.
Create a project homepage for your project. As I mentioned, this will be updated over the course of our program, so it’s totally fine if it’s very basic at this stage.
We also spent a bit of time discussing Rebus’ collaborative approach to publishing, and how a larger community around a resource can not only make it stronger, but also help maintain it down the line. Our approach hinges on thinking about marketing (or “storytelling” if you feel more comfortable with that term), accessibility, formatting, and more at each stage to really harness the global potential of OER and what it can do. And these stages can be flexible, non-linear, and play out in different ways with your projects. We also discussed how being transparent about the process of creation can invite others to contribute and be involved in projects, whether in big ways or small. The project homepage is a great way to be public and reduce duplication of work and instead lets us combine our efforts.
The remainder of the session covered the Rebus platform (where this recap is posted) and the different areas that you will likely spend your time, namely, the cohort discussion space and your project home. We also talked about the cohort tag (@june21-cohort) and how this can be used to notify everyone in the cohort, and we looked at the Direct Messaging functionality on the platform. We ended our discussion with questions about the platform.
Next week, we’ll be discussing framing your project and project scoping. As reminder, all of our session handouts and slides are available in the Curriculum Hub. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them below or to send me a direct message. I look forward to seeing you all on Zoom next week and in this discussion space in the meantime. Thank you all for the important work you’re doing for your learners and for the larger open education community! Take care!
Hello! My name is Jessica Hertig. I’m a nurse educator in Milwaukee, WI working with the UW-Extended Campus team to create OERs for our RN-BSN students.
Jessica, you and @randerso1979 may be interested in exploring some of these OER Nursing resources to get a sense of what’s out there and what can be built on a tool like Pressbooks: Five OER for Nursing Students | Pressbooks!
Hello,
My name is Andrew. I am the lead instructor in our colleges Machine Tool program and our Apprentice Millwright programs and I also teach welding. There seems to be very little OER that cover the trades so have begun working on a few OER’s. This one specifically I hope will serve all three disciplines I teach in an OER that encompasses Sheetmetal and welding / fabrication.
My dream goal is to complete a quality project by the end of the year.
Thank you and have a great weekend.
Hello everyone,
My name is Nicholas Madamopoulos. I am an associate professor at the department of Electrical Engineering at the City College of New York. My fled is optics and photonics systems and applications. My project is the development of an OER book in electromagnetics, which includes applications to extend the understanding of the students on the concepts covered in an basic electromagnetics class. I hope I can finish this within a year, although I believe it will be extremely challenging.
Hello everyone! My name is Lauren Mantlo and I am part of the Learning Technology Department at Alpena Community College in northeastern Michigan. I am supporting Andrew P. with the creation of welding and fabrication OER. My ultimate goal would be to eventually see other schools using the OER we create.
Hello everyone!
My name is Jessie Curell, and I am the ED of Hands On Media Education.
I am the Project Manager for our HOME @ HOME TSP Project – a Student Workbook to complement our Parent and Youth Digital Literacy Education Program.
With this OER project we are really excited to help bridge the digital divide by providing media education to all families that are interested, regardless of their financial situation.
We are also planning to develop videos to include in our TSP project.
Hi All! I’m Jen Fandel at UW-Madison, and I’m writing at the moment in my volunteer role as a poetry workshop facilitator for the Wisconsin Prison Humanities Project. (My day job is as an administrator in the UW-Madison Writing Center, and I’ve also worked as a tutor and tutor coordinator for the last few years for the Odyssey Beyond Bars program.) After giving this some thought, in addition to working with Lauren on the Odyssey assignments, I’d like to put together a guide for facilitating a creative writing workshop (perhaps poetry specifically) in the prison setting.
Hi everyone, great to meet you all last week and hear all about your projects.
My name is Lauren Surovi and I’m working with the UW-Madison higher-ed-in-prison group, which is made of up team members from two different programs (Odyssey Beyond Bars and the Wisconsin Prison Humanities Project). I’ll be working on a project for Odyssey, developing an assignment for our Intro to College Composition course that focuses on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I’m especially excited to learn how OER can help us with our efforts in expanding access to higher education in prison.
Hello everyone, I would like to echo what others have said and it is nice to meet everyone. This is a new learning experience and adventure. I am from UW-Milwaukee College of Nursing. I teach in the RN to BSN program. Interested in OERs that focus on resources that are helpful for our nursing students.
Hello everyone - it’s good to hear about your projects, which I have a little bit of envy for! They sound like fun challenges. My name is Václav Paris and I’m working on a textbook for a general education course at CCNY called “World Humanities.”
@Andrew_ACC, if you haven’t already, you and @mantlol might want to check Skills Commons to see if there are any existing OER that you might be able to borrow from. It includes materials in the trades and other areas of workforce development. It looks like there might also be some health informatics resources in there too, @hertig, @NicoleSimonson, and @randerso1979 .
@nmadamopoulos, I think it’s great that you have a specific timeframe that you’re aiming for but are also recognizing that it might be challenging to accomplish everything within that time. It’s been my experience that these things often take longer than anticipated, and that’s okay! As we’ll talk about in our Week 2 session, it’s good to dream big at the start, and then you can adjust accordingly as you continue to work through your project.
Morning folks, I’m Ryan Specht-Boardman from the University of Wisconsin Extended Campus. I’ll be serving in a support role to our content experts with the nursing OER team. Nice to meet everyone!
Hi everyone! I’m Megan, the volunteer coordinator for the Wisconsin Prison Humanities Project, and a current PhD candidate in Slavic languages and literature at UW Madison. Was great to meet everyone! In addition to working with Lauren on Odyssey’s project, I think I’d like to develop a Russian literature syllabus/assignments for prison teaching!
@megan.marianne, it’s great to have you in the cohort! If you haven’t already, you might want to take a look at the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning. They have regular events as well as resources for open education with a focus on languages. It does skew a bit toward language learning, but I’ve also seen content with more of a focus on literature and culture too. A few months ago, they also co-sponsored a Foreign Language OER Conference. Maybe something to get involved with next year!
