By Sheriann Stanton, M. Ed.
My background with Open educational Resources (OER):
My experience in teaching students study skills has taught me a lot. It is interesting to observe how the students approach their studies when I meet them for the first time and see how their understanding and application of strategies evolves over the duration of the course. Once the course is complete, students are more prepared for academics.
Students who purchased a physical textbook, ideally would have this book for future reference as they work their way through college. In reality, the students might have opted to sell the book back to the book store or give the book to incoming college students who need to take the course. (Students who participated in the STEM Starter Academy were given a book free of charge.) I can imagine that students who received a free copy of the textbook might still have to sell the book in the future in order to purchase other books for their courses. I think that offering an Open Educational Resource (OER) would be ideal for students because they do not have to buy it, or sell it, thus keeping access to it for years to reference it, as needed.
During the pandemic, the physical textbook was on back order, and the students did not have it on time to complete their reading assignments, as I had hoped. If I had been using the OER textbook, my students and I would not have had this added frustration during an already frustrating pandemic experience. After looking at the current OER offerings that I was aware of at the time, I decided to starting writing my own OER Student Success Textbook. I was determined to offer a textbook that students could have easy free access to in the future. After writing several pages and creating an outline, I decided to put it on the back-burner because the world was changing so rapidly, and much of what I wrote about navigating college during the pandemic felt dated rather quickly. Writing one textbook alone is a large undertaking. Most of the OER books concerning student success are collaborations with several professionals. Fast-forward to one year later, I found the OER textbook that checked most of my boxes. I am gladly using it now for a second year. But never fear, because I uploaded my very rough draft to Merlot.org for your viewing pleasure. Here’s the link to my work in progress: https://merlot.org/merlot/viewSite.htm?id=9164797
Exploration Goals:
It is my goal to encourage students to contribute to an OER document and learn more about the rules in using others’ contributions to OER books, documents, etc.
I created an account in a learning community (Merlot.org) and am exploring exactly what can be done with other professionals and students in hopes of sharing my experience with others so that they can make informed decisions. Ideally this OER would be useful for all instructors at all levels in all disciplines because student success skills are not just for first year students.
So far, I am finding that the formatting of my website is a bit off; I will work on it (But you can look now; I don’t mind). I am assuming that it could be because I created the content in google docs and pasted it to my BCC email, then pasted it in the Merlot site. The content builder is pretty user friendly in my opinion but I must say that I am a bit disappointed that the content creator features are not available on my iPhone. The photo of my dog, Branch, was easy to upload.
My questions:
How would the licenses work when involving students’ and other professionals’ contributions the an OER that I create? I would want people to use our work, modify it, as long as we are credited.
Photo credit of studious dog: Sheriann Stanton
CC License: Through Merlot CC0