@July22-M-1-cohort - thanks to everyone who was there today! If you missed the session (@ivasu, Raul, Idoia), please read the summary and/or meet with someone on your team to get a recap! I think @mbilling might be available to meet. You can also watch the recording once @BAmbos shares it in the ROTEL grant LMS.
Session Summary
Content creation is one of the most important stages in the publishing process. The work you do in this phase can make the next phases of editing, review, and formatting much easier. It’s also a phase that brings together the narrative and goals that you started to articulate in the TSP so far!
OER + Pedagogy = Transformed Student Experience
Throughout TSP, we emphasize how your work as OER content creators and contributors to your project teams can change the status quo in education. As Robin deRosa puts it, “when you use OER, you change the relationships among you, your students, and your course materials.” Robin places relationships before materials because content alone doesn’t drive student learning. The ways in which you use your content matter. Well-structured content helps your students identify what matters to the discipline, but when you consider how your OER can foster student inquiry, you are also enabling your students to identify what matters to them as well.
With your student audience at the core of your efforts, you can develop both OER and specific pedagogical methods that in synthesis will work to support accessible, equitable, and inclusive learning.
Textbook Elements
We looked closely how specific elements in textbooks/ OER can work to represent and support your diverse learners. We started on the book level (frontmatter, body, backmatter) and then moved into the chapter level (openers, pedagogical devices, closers). We highlighted how a well-thought out and communicated structure helps students focus on absorbing and applying information more efficiently.
Thinking through the structure of your OER will take some time and dedication, which is why we created two homework activities to help you work through the steps of in your planning the layout for your materials as well as consider specific pedagogical devices to include in your chapters.
Drafting an outline is only the first step to help you align your overarching OER goals with the content you want to create. Thinking about how your chapters can best guide and/ or measure student learning is best done in a team or with support from instructional designers or teaching development facilitators within your institution. Discussing your goals with each other will help determine the missing parts that will enrich your OER and make it stand out within your discipline in unique ways.
Please take the time to complete the first Homework Activity in your Handout.
Authentic Assessment
In the latter part of our session, we looked at authentic assessment as a means to measure student growth and progress. Authentic assessments often require higher thinking skills than “traditional” tests. As such, the work that students are prompted to produce is often more indicative of individual academic growth and success. You can see how your content and assessment deeply inform each other, and how important it is that they align well with your overarching OER goals. Push yourselves when you’re thinking about how to challenge and engage students in your book and course!
More than the textbook
Finally, we spoke about supplementary materials and how they can provide even more flexibility with regards to different teaching styles. Much like your major OER, they can be openly licensed and shared with the open community. They can include anything that assists in the instruction of the material covered in the book, such as syllabi, slide decks, test banks, manuals, etc. Explain why your course is designed the way it is in your syllabus.
Resources
Homework
- Post a link to your Project Summary (if you haven’t yet!) in response to this thread. See template here.
- Start your own version of the Plan OER Structure document. See template. Be prepared to share this with the cohort next week; as we’ll spend our first 20 minutes reviewing each other’s documents!
Next Week
Next week, we will dig into the logistics that support more efficient authoring and editing!
