Open Education 2016

While there seems to be increasing acceptance by individual faculty and institutions of open practices and open resources, there are still many considerations and challenges for course developers who wish to use OER in a course, as well as create OER for reuse by others. There are several factors that should be considered at the design and development stages as faculty experiment with OER use and reuse. The manner in which OER are designed and presented involves many critical considerations and decisions on the part of the development team, including the instructional designer, subject matter experts, media team and Production personnel.



As part of my job as an instructional designer at Thompson Rivers University Open Learning in Kamloops, BC, I was the pedagogical coach and project manager of a major revision of a popular first-year English course, ENG 1101: Introduction to University Writing. After having worked previously on two OERu projects (ART 100: Art Appreciation and Techniques and PSYC 2111: Introduction to Research Methods in Psychology), with fellow open champions such as Dr. Irwin Devries, Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani and Dr. Frahd Dastur, I was successful in "selling" the idea of using an open text and other OER to a campus faculty who was hired as the subject matter expert for the project. We decided to make the course as "open" as possible and also create some OER ourselves as supplementary resources to the open BC Campus text we adopted.



This presentation focuses on some of the challenges we encountered and lessons we learned in our attempt to be OER adopters, adapters and creators e.g. designing OER in such a way that they can be easily mixed and matched by others at a later date to suit their individual needs, fitting OER creation into a traditional workload job structure, and changing our thinking about the way we use learning materials as educators.