OEP@TWU Conference | 2024

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11274/16036

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Experiential Learning Credit: SGA's Guide to Finding OER Courses
(2024) Canales, Beatrice
Do you want to promote experiential learning credit to students who develop OER? San Antonio College’s Experiential Learning Credit is utilized by staff and faculty to give students post-graduation credit for their OER awareness projects. The process is based on a marketable skills rubric that allows students to document the work they do in open education on campus. Listen to a San Antonio College’s Student Government Association (SGA) open education student champion who developed an OER guide for other students to find OER courses in the registration portal. This student leader created a resource for their peers to find OER courses and the importance of OER courses to students. Learn from the experiences of an open education advocate who collaborated with the open education student champion to receive experiential credit for their work during the Spring 2024 semester. This collaboration bridges how student leadership work in open education could qualify for experiential credit on their AlamoExperience non-academic/co-curricular transcript. Leave the presentation with a quick guide to see what kind of marketable skills are created when a student leader develops an OER for a community college campus.
Experiential Learning through OER: Insights from a Student-Written Essay Collection on Identity
(2024) Shelton, Sarah A.
In Fall ’23, I designed my Advanced Exposition class as an experiential learning course where students worked together to produce an edited collection of essays that would be published as an OER book through our university library’s Pressbooks platform. Students collaboratively conceptualized the collection theme and crafted a Call for Papers that they each responded to with an abstract proposal. From there, they wrote their accepted chapters, and the class was scaffolded with workshops, peer reviews, and revision sessions that emphasized the real-world iterative and processual nature of the writing process. Through student reflection and frequent check-ins, it became clear to me that the reality of a publicly accessible published product at the end of this process provided unanticipated productive and unproductive pressures that opened up time and space for students to think about their writing processes in ways that wouldn’t have been possible without the publication aspect—which wouldn’t have been possible without the OER options our library offers. This presentation will delve into the context of the course, the organization and scaffolding strategies employed for the OER published product, student takeaways from working with OER, and both successes and struggles with the project as a whole. Attendees will gain practical insights into implementing similar experiential learning through OER projects in their own courses.
Getting Started with OER Adoption
(2024) Zerangue, Amanda
How to be Open: Advancing OEP through Professional Learning Communities
(2024) McClean, Jessica; Magruder, Karen; Chatterjee, Karishma; White, Joyce; Wigley, Shelley; Breuer, Kimberly
Even as Open gains popularity as a means of providing equitable access to high-quality learning materials while empowering students to take an active role in their education, many educators lack the knowledge and expertise to effectively utilize OEP in their teaching practices. A Professional Learning Community (PLC) for faculty dedicated to “All Things OPEN” is an effective means of addressing this challenge. This roundtable will discuss our PLC journey over one academic year as we collaborate to develop and improve open resources and pedagogy whether we are new to the topic or have dedicated many years to OEP. Utilizing co-facilitators representing both faculty and library perspectives is key to the program’s success. From a faculty perspective, the PLC provides a platform to learn about resources and best practices, share knowledge and expertise, troubleshoot existing projects, and collaborate on new projects. From a library perspective, working closely with engaged faculty provides valuable insight into the current state of OER at the university, leading to shifts in the library’s service model to better address local needs. Also, PLC participation supports faculty in securing grants for their projects' development/ implementation. Outline Segment 1 Discuss individual open projects: overcoming barriers; OER content; tools/technologies; and/or OEP (varies among participants) How the group works; the importance of being housed in the Teaching Center as opposed to being a library initiative Q&A Segment 2 The learning journey – how we got started Mutual support/collaboration Changes in pedagogy, course development, and library support: our next steps forward Q&A
Keeping Current in Contemporary Social Problems with an OER
(2024) Swink, Nathan
In this PowerPoint-aided session, I will discuss efforts made toward keeping course content current despite an aging OER. In my once-a-week, 3-hour long, face-to-face Social Problems class we draw on the textbook for foundational material like general theories and historical data. Students are required to read the chapter before each class. We then begin class with a 20-minute news round-up. In the first half of the semester that round-up comes from Reuters. In the second half of the semester students (individually or in groups depending on class size) select a news source for each class period. Next, students write about what they learned in the chapter and make connections to the news of the day. After having time to organize their thoughts in writing, students share what they learned in a group conversation. Once that conversation fizzles out it is time for a quiz using Plickers Cards. Students are partnered with one other student (one group of three if there is an odd number) and given a series of 10 questions, one at a time. First, they provide an individual answer, I tell them how many have it right, then they talk it over, then they have a chance to change their answer before I give the answer and a bit of lecture on the topic. By incorporating current news and educating students about bias in reporting we are able to keep Contemporary Social Problems contemporary.
Exploring Emerging Dimensions: What Is Openness in Open Education in an AI World?
(2024) Robertson Hornsby, Elizabeth
As open education promotes access and participative pedagogies, artificial intelligence (AI) innovations present opportunities for engagement and sustainability. In this keynote, Dr. Elizabeth Robertson Hornsby will discuss the ethical integration of AI to expand open education's impact. Guiding this discussion is a conceptualization of openness that works towards creating collaboratively designed systems that shape digitally-enabled education futures. Through this lens, AI holds the potential to enrich rather than replace human ingenuity. Dr. Hornsby's presentation will outline this symbiotic vision between emerging AI ideas and open education advancement and set an aspirational yet practical tone for responsible innovation.
Mentoring Undergraduate Women to Diversify Wikipedia: An Evolving OER Opportunity
(2024) Stvan, Laurel
Wikipedia is an amazing crowd-sourced OER resource, but research has repeatedly shown that it needs tweaking to include more diverse voices. In both its topics and its contributors, many perspectives are left out: women, people of color, younger generations, the LGTBQ community, and folks with disabilities. It’s a familiar refrain. Fortunately, several organizations are working to remedy this. Taking just the under-representation of women as an example, I lay out where efforts already exist, where they overlap, and where there is more to be done through student contributions to open educational practices to better enable marginalized students to succeed. This talk highlights the intersection of existing work on improving the number of women as Wikipedia subjects (Women in Red); increasing the representation of women in specific fields; training students as new editors (WikiEdu); and creating a network for mentors of undergraduate women as editors. The latter aims to streamline the coordination of existing resources when editing training is an add-on task for full-time instructors. I discuss how instructors can better succeed at these projects without burning out by deploying existing networks and tailoring them to our students, leading to procedures for openly sharing successful teaching practices. These can assist in generating more varied Wikipedia content that incorporates more diverse, enthusiastic voices. Two long-term goals are balancing the alignment of on-wiki and off-wiki discussions to ensure that editor consensus is maintained and building the pipeline of young female editors through a network of instructors who work with them.
OER at UTA: Lessons & Directions
(2024) Allen, Lainie; Rowe-Morris, Morgan; Mekala, Tejavardhan; Misba, Asfiya; Streeter, Samantha; Zara, Megan
The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) has published 26 open education resources (OER) to date and that number is still growing. UTA’s dedicated OER department provides financial support to faculty creating, adopting, and developing OER; educates faculty and students on the value of OER; and maintains a robust publishing infrastructure for open educational resources. Beginning in 2017 with one full-time staff member, UTA’s OER service has grown from an idea to a dedicated department with first-in-class resources. This presentation will examine the voyage of OER support at UTA. Using quantitative data like budgetary and publishing metrics as well as qualitative data from interviews and internal documents, we will describe the steps and missteps of UTA’s program. The lessons learned from our investigation can help libraries looking to start or grow their own programs.
OER Collaboration: Texas Digital Resources OER User Group
(2024) Davis, Sabrina
Community is vital for librarians and advocates of OER and open educational practices. At many institutions, advocating for usage and creation of OER is a solo endeavor, which can lead to loneliness and in the worst cases, burnout. In 2023, the Texas Digital Library (TDL) established the OER Users Group. This group not only provides resources and support for the whole of Texas, but its members also provide additional support for one another. During this presentation, I will discuss how the OER Users Group came to be, the group's charge, and my overall experiences facilitating the group as chair. I will also briefly discuss how groups like this can provide the sense of community and support that is needed for those working in the world of open education.
Open Pedagogy in Course Design for Art of Mathematics Course
(2024) Musolino, Larry
At Penn State University, ART197 (Art of Mathematics) is a recently developed General Education course that asks students to explore and investigate the intersection of mathematics and art, music, dance, nature, architecture, and other fields. The course is intended to counteract negative perceptions about mathematics and illustrate the beauty and elegance of mathematics in diverse fields. As part of the course design, students are asked to explore new connections in mathematics and art and generate their own new knowledge which has not been published or documented to date. The students conduct their own research on a topic of interest and use this new knowledge to edit, revise, and update appropriate Wikipedia pages with their new knowledge, including citations and references. The proposal will demonstrate how to engage and motivate students in active learning aimed at the development and creation of this new student knowledge. The examples used will be focused on synergies between art and mathematics In this talk, I will review this aspect of the design of this student open pedagogy initiative which engages students and converts the course from teacher-centric to learner-centric focus. In particular, I will discuss the research methods used by students, the creation process, the editing process, and finally the publishing aspect of Wikipedia. Students use various technology tools such as visual editors and tools to tools to include images, links, and other dynamic content. The presentation will also review various technologies available to any faculty interested in including student Wikipedia-related editing and authorship in their courses. Feedback from students has been extremely positive. Students have indicated that the course activities expanded their knowledge outside of a traditional textbook and engaged the students as active parts of the learning center. The course was switched from a teacher-centric focus to a learner-centric focus. If possible, I would like to conduct several polls during the session to engage and ask attendees if they use active learning components in their courses if they have any examples of open pedagogy where students generate their own new knowledge, and if any faculty have used Wikipedia authorship as part of course assessments.
Student-Generated OERs in the Art History Classroom
(2024) Ishii-Bear, Sara
This presentation shares the experiences and motivations of Dr. Sara Ishii-Bear, Art History and Visual Culture professor, in guiding undergraduate students’ creation of open educational resources (OERs). The construction of OERs reflects her interest in feminist pedagogy and open educational practices, which aims to create a learner-centered classroom that values accessibility, equity, and cultural responsiveness. Ishii-Bear will discuss a scaffolded assignment that guided students in researching and writing open-access lesson plans, which resulted in the students’ work being published on the OERTX Repository website. Student-generated materials also give students the opportunity to focus on the topics that interest them the most. Such a move is especially valuable given TWU’s diverse demographics. Due to the historical marginalization of women’s and people of colors’ voices in art history, the inclusion of women students of colors’ research is valuable to art history pedagogy. Ishii-Bear will also discuss the results of an anonymous student survey to reveal the students’ opinions on working with a group to author an OER. In the last portion of the presentation, Ishii-Bear will reflect on how the project might be tailored for future iterations of the course.
Students as Partners in the Development of Open Education Resources for Teaching Human Anatomy, Physiology and Pathophysiology
(2024) Kong, Jennifer; Soon, Zoë
In creating a cost-free Open Education Resource (OER) textbook for required Pathophysiology courses in Health Care programs, we strove to implement many useful tools for both students and instructors. We are incorporating multimodal, Universal Design Learning (UDL) features in order to be accessible to all learners. The etext includes closed-captioned video clips, images, and a range of different types of interactive, repeatable student practice questions with auto-feedback answers. This provides students affordable access to engaging, up-to-date content that can be accessed at any time. The user-friendly reflowable layout allows for readability on multiple devices including screen readers and follows all accessibility guidelines. The project has benefited from collaborations between 3 faculties as well as grants allowing for student assistants to be hired and instill their feedback. To promote inclusivity in education and healthcare settings, the instructor and student resources contain patient narratives, a language inclusivity guide, case studies, as well as scientist spotlights, highlighting contributions to the field by individuals that have been historically overlooked. Although this OER is still a work in progress, the portions that have been completed were delivered to students this year with a mix of over 1000 practice questions for both instructors and students to pick and choose from. In order to gather feedback and incorporate it into the OER as it is being completed, reviewer focus groups and student satisfaction surveys are being conducted. Student satisfaction results and tips for creating OER and OER assessments will be shared in this presentation.
Using ChatGPT in Open Pedagogy: Two Professors Share their Experiences
(2024) Kelly, Alison; Clinton-Lisell, Virginia
In this presentation, two professors will discuss the open pedagogy AI projects they collaborated with their students. One project addressed the lack of materials centering contributions from minoritized scholars in the history of psychology. In this project, students used ChatGPT to assist them in developing chapters about diverse pioneers in psychology and critically evaluated the accuracy of their ChatGPT output. These materials will be incorporated into future history of psychology courses. In the second project, students used ChatGPT to develop fictional vignettes about children with psychological disorders. The purpose of the assignment was to address the lack of materials beyond what is considered typical development in childhood. Students had the option to Creatively Commons license their vignettes for use in future child development courses. Both projects involved students providing reflections about their experiences using generative AI (or why they did not use generative AI if that was their choice) in creating these projects. For the chapter development assignment, feedback on the use of ChatGPT was mostly positive. Most students were fearful about using ChatGPT due to faculty bans in other courses, or not being aware of ways to use ChatGPT responsibly. All students had at least one piece of inaccurate information in their ChatGPT output, and many appreciated the assignment being an exercise in information literacy. For the fictional child vignette, feedback on the use of ChatGPT was mixed. Some students appreciated the opportunity to learn how to use a labor-saving tool. Other students indicated that the process of editing and fact-checking ChatGPT was more time-consuming than writing the assignment themselves would have been. In the presentation, we will share the logistics of how the assignment was structured, scaffolded, and graded. We will also discuss student feedback on the assignment and how we plan to revise the project in future courses.
Using OER Reading Guides to Help Students Read the Textbook and Improve Exam Scores
(2024) Shaffer, Justin
While textbooks are used ubiquitously in college biology courses for content dissemination, studies have shown that students frequently do not read the textbook or have a difficult time understanding the content within. To address these issues, course and textbook-specific reading guides can be used to provide students with a way to actively engage with the required readings for class. The OER reading guides direct students to read specific textbook passages and to define terms, explain concepts in their own words, summarize information with tables and drawings, and answer in-chapter questions. Examples of reading guides will be shown from different STEM disciplines (including biology, anatomy and physiology, chemical engineering, and biomedical engineering), and best practices for developing OER reading guides will be presented. Additionally, data and results from a prior study on the efficacy of using reading guides in a large introductory biology course will be presented. The results suggest that optional, no-stakes, OER reading guides which assist students with reading their textbooks may help students acquire course content in a transparent fashion which results in improved exam performance.
Using OERs to Flex your Professional Development Muscle
(2024) Marshall, Sophia
In higher education, the implementation of OERs is often associated with textbook costs. However, this cost has varied implications for students and faculty. Students often enjoy a cost-saving benefit, while for faculty there is the cost of time. Many faculty members are not able to engage in the publishing process, which may be critical to gaining promotions within their field. OERs have been missing from this discussion and can be posited as having value within the promotion process. Therefore, advocating for the use of OERs and highlighting its role in faculty professional development should be discussed simultaneously. After all, for faculty, there are multiple benefits to the process of implementing OERs. This session will highlight the research supporting this and discuss how faculty can use OERs to flex their professional development muscles.

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