Located within the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS) at Penn State, the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute serves as the College's learning design unit and oversees the College's online offerings. Working in close partnership with the College's five academic units and Penn State World Campus, the Dutton Institute has helped create more than 130 online courses that are part of 18 fully online certificate and degree programs.
In 2008, the Dutton Institute launched the College's Open Educational Resources initiative as a strategic effort to make the College's online courseware accessible to teachers and learners around the world who are not be able to afford to enroll in its courses or who don't need to earn academic credit. Since that time, faculty across the College have voluntarily contributed the content of 71 online courses, 4 non-credit modules, and 9 additional sets of resources, all related to topics in the Earth and mineral sciences (meteorology and atmospheric science, energy and mineral engineering, geography, geosciences, and materials science and engineering).
Making the resources available to the public was actually the easy part! The hard work has been in the form of engaging faculty in the initiative, managing the resources, promoting the availability of the resources to others within the institution and around the globe, and making the OER truly "open" - providing the right to access, adapt, and reuse; ensuring such rights are non-discriminatory (i.e., provided to everyone, everywhere); and making no limits on their use or form.
In this session, we will share our story from the very beginning of our OER efforts, highlighting the challenges we have faced, the lessons we have learned, and the issues we still confront. We will also examine how our OER initiative has helped our own faculty and students and has contributed to our international reputation for accessible, quality education. In addition, we will discuss how the suit against Berkley's open content may affect our OER offerings.
