Open Education 2016

Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) has built a large and robust nationally recognized OER program and is the first community college to openly share a full OER degree pathway in partnership with Lumen Learning. NOVA's award-winning zELI initiative currently offers two online OER Associate Degree pathways. A third OER Degree pathway at NOVA is currently being developed on-campus with support from the VCCS Zx23 project.

In order to establish a culture of openness to support sustainable growth of OER at one of the largest and most diverse institutions in the nation, key faculty and staff had to blaze the trail of accepting open education as a professional responsibility. NOVA's comprehensive OER program was built by pioneering faculty and staff, with resources and support from a vibrant OER community, but it hasn't been all rainbows and unicorns.

During this session a panel of NOVA administrators, faculty members, instructional designers, and a college librarian will discuss their roles in introducing OER into a broad college curriculum. We will give an overview of the challenges we faced, mistakes that were made, and the lessons we learned. We will talk openly about issues of college communication, cross-campus collaboration, technology infrastructure, and competing priorities. We will take a candid look at what was necessary to get us to where we are today and suggest ways to resolve these and other potential challenges, both internally and with the help of key external partners.

Finally, we will share the process that we developed and implemented to integrate OER into NOVA's institutional culture. We will invite participants to make use of our open degree pathway available on Lumen Learning's Candela platform, and provide a roadmap that offers suggestions for introducing, implementing, and expanding OER initiatives at virtually any institution.