Designing a Modular Statewide Open Education Resource for College Writing
Presenters: Liza Long, Amy Minervini, Joel Gladd
In this session, the authors of Write What Matters, OPAL fellows for the Idaho State Board of Education, share best practices for creating a modular open education resource in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. We used the state general education outcomes and partnered with the Idaho State Board of Education and Rebus to create a resource in Pressbooks that is open, accessible, and relatable to a variety of audiences including students in first year composition courses, dual credit students, and students in first year experience courses as well as more advanced students in literature and analysis courses. Rather than focusing on an institution-specific resource with a single “voice,” we chose to create a book that incorporated a variety of existing open education resources while also preserving the original authors’ voices. The book is enhanced with H5P exercises, ready-made essay and discussion prompts for instructors, and video resources helpful to students.
The book (still in beta form) is available here: https://idaho.pressbooks.pub/write/
We are excited to share what we learned in the process and to explain how OERs like the one we created can benefit students in rural states, especially in times of crisis.
Learning Outcomes:
1. Understand how the modular approach to OER adaption and creation meets a variety of stakeholder needs.
2. Learn about online collaboration tools that are important to successful OER projects, especially in the COVID-19 environment.
3. Appreciate the importance of including diverse voices and experiences in OER content, which benefits students and teachers.
Collaborative Creation between Librarians and English Faculty: Communication and Planning for OER Textbooks
Presenters: Kathy Anders, Sarah LeMire, and Terri Pantuso
Collaborations between libraries and academic departments can provide the synergistic energies needed to develop and adopt OER texts on a programmatic level. The key to success for such collaborations is to make sure that the interests of both parties are represented, and to understand that different groups may have interests that do not overlap. By identifying and acknowledging the variety of interests at play in collaborative OER projects, authors and creators can increase engagement with and adoption of OER textbooks.
This presentation explores how an interdisciplinary collaboration between an English department and university library resulted in a composition and information literacy OER that was successfully launched in a freshman composition course. By considering the needs and interests of both groups, the OER creators were able to achieve outcomes that their respective organizations found meaningful and which enhanced support for OER adoption.
In the English department the author was interested in creating a flexible and multi-formatted teaching text. In the library, the authors believed an OER textbook could be designed to support and reinforce efforts to embed information literacy into the composition curriculum. Authors from both areas wanted to lower textbook cost for students. Given that the text is used in first-year writing courses, the authors worked diligently to create a textbook that met each of these goals, and that was accessible to all and allowed for equitable access to the content material. Through that process, they discovered that cross-curricular collaborations improve both access and affordability.
This presentation will focus on the lessons learned through that collaborative process that inform the revision of the OER in future iterations. Audience members will learn about the planning and communication consideration that can positively impact collaborations across departments.
Audience member will:
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identify strategies for planning between departments in order to collaborate effectively to create OER textbooks
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recognize how to communicate about different goals for collaborators in order to increase departmental satisfaction and OER success
Student-created open educational resources in a first-year writing context
Presenter: Jason Godfrey
Several recent studies have investigated the great promise of student-created open educational resources (Randal et al. 2013; Azzam et al. 2017; Wiley et al. 2017). Often, these student-created items focus on developing “renewable” assignments that offer utility to future students. This study builds on previous research by reporting on a case-in-progress of first-year writing students adapting their research papers into public-facing, open-access educational resources. Specifically, this lightning talk will detail the struggles and successes of implementing literature-based best practices as well as present early stages of public perception to the student-created OER.
Learning Outcomes: Viewers of this lightning talk will be prompted to explore the following questions:
1. Does student-created OER content contribute to the popular perception that OER are “Not-high-quality”? (Allen and Seaman 2016)
2. In what ways are students uniquely capable of producing accessible OER?
3. How can assignments built to be thrown away after completion be adapted for open education?
Renewable Texts/Renewable Assignments: Interrogating Race, Gender, and Class Assumptions in OER
Presenters: Bonnie Robinson, Corey Parson, Lainie Pomerleau
This panel presentation will strategize methods for reimagining OER and open education/open enabled pedagogy, taking for its example an English literature anthology published by the University of North Georgia Press in partnership with Affordable Learning Georgia. Encouraging the interrogation of explicit and implicit racist, gender-biased, and classist assumptions in OER is necessary to support OER’s goals for equitable and accessible learning environments.
That racist, gender-biased, and classist assumptions can be found in already published OER is exemplified in the medieval section of UNG Press’s English literature anthology. That these assumptions can pass such peer reviewed texts as this should alert instructors to the need for interrogating OER, especially on its possibly outdated scholarship.
As OER is and should be always available to reuse, revision, and remixing, such gaps and assumptions in published OER need not be overlooked or passed by. Rather, they may provide objective sites for interrogation, critique, and recuperation. This process can be facilitated by revision and annotation as well as by strategic open enabled pedagogy assignments.
Lainie Pomerleau will exemplify such revision through her new introductions to the medieval era section of UNG Press’s English literary anthology. These introductions address the racist implications of identifying literature as Anglo Saxon, an anachronistic term that would be unrecognizable during the period it purports to represent and that has been used by white supremacists and hate groups. These revisions model how OER may work to avoid reinscribing canonical and systemic gaps while also offering sites for interrogating such gaps.
Bonnie J. Robinson will consider how interrogating OER, particularly through open enabled pedagogy assignments that encourage inclusivity, can engage collective efforts to address structural issues of racism, sexism, inclusiveness, and representation. Asking students to critique constituent elements of OER, for example, can provide insight on how scholarship shapes pedagogical tools like textbooks and can allow objective critique of OERs’ purpose and effect and the discrepancies that may exist between them.
And Corey Parson will consider how OERs’ online presence provides unique opportunities for audience awareness. This awareness stresses the importance of not equating open with neutral (Approaching Open Pedagogy in Community and Collaboration).
Learning Outcomes:
From this presentation, attendees will learn how and why to interrogate assumptions of OER as neutral; model such interrogations on recent revisions to an open access peer reviewed British literature anthology; frame such interrogations structurally and objectively to encourage respecting issues of gender, race, and class; match such interrogations with constituent element assessment rubrics and categories; and apply strategies of audience awareness unique to OER.
