Fostering Inclusive Classrooms with Open, Free & Affordable Course Materials

(Photo credit: Kimberly Farmer on Unsplah)

In Spring 2021 the OER Working Group successfully applied for a Center for Teaching & Learning Instructor Learning Community (ILC) grant. Working group members Ashley Morrison, Hannah Chapman Tripp, and Lydia Fletcher created the content and facilitated the ILC, which focused on open educational resources (or OER) -- learning materials that carry open licenses and allow anyone to freely read, share, and modify them -- and how adapting courses to incorporate OER can enhance inclusivity in classrooms. The affordable nature of these materials allows students to have immediate access, and open licenses enable instructors to improve cultural responsiveness, accessibility, and innovative pedagogies.

Our goals for the ILC were to enable participants to:

• Understand the spectrum of affordable learning materials available openly or through campus services, with an emphasis on OER

• Search for OER relevant to the courses they teach in repositories and evaluate them using open rubrics

• Evaluate course materials for basic accessibility best practices and cultural responsiveness; identify opportunities to enhance these aspects of OER and self-created course materials

• Identify and interpret open licenses associated with OER created by others and those they wish to apply to their own materials

We were pleased to receive more applications than spots were available in the cohort, which was capped at 10 participants to enhance the discussion experience. Selected participants included Dr. Mansi Bajaj, Dr. Zuzana Baranova, Dr. Amanda Bush, Dr. Jennifer Ebbeler, Dr. Joshua Frank, Dr. Lee Ann Kahlor, Dr. Silvia Luongo, Dr. Luisa Nardini, Dr. Joel Nibert, and Marylise Rilliard. We hope to offer the experience again to meet campus demand.

The structure of the six-week ILC introduced the core topics and themes through a combination of lectures, in-class activities, and assignments. Each week the cohort met for 90 minutes (via Zoom), with an optional meeting scheduled to offer office hours and co-working time. The topics were chosen to build on previous weeks, offering a high-level overview and enabling participants to develop confidence in evaluating and selecting OER for their classes. While we drafted an outline for the ILC, we maintained enough flexibility to shift topics around or include new topics requested by the cohort. This enabled us to respond to the requests of the cohort and shift the focus of the presentations as necessary.

There were four main assignments for participants to complete: the use of a rubric to evaluate an OER; the use of a rubric to evaluate the accessibility of an OER; a sharing activity, either by applying an open license to something they created or writing a blog post about their experience (see Dr. Luisa Nardini’s blog post); and the completion of a course mapping exercise. This last assignment asked participants to evaluate OER and other no-cost options that they might choose to replace commercial learning materials for one or more learning outcomes for their course. Participants were required to complete the course map and sharing activities to receive a small stipend at the end of the ILC.

Throughout the ILC, organizers and members collaborated on community notes, where attendees were invited to keep track of resources and discussions. Participants can return to this document to revisit ideas and best practices as they revise or develop their curricula. This practice demonstrates one of the strengths of OER: the ability to involve students in the creation process as an element of active learning pedagogy.

At the completion of the ILC, the organizers met to assess what worked and what might need to be tweaked in future iterations. We asked participants to complete a survey and give feedback on their experience, and we used this as the basis for our evaluation. One takeaway was that there were two distinct “tracks”: OER adoption and OER creation. By attempting to give a broad overview of OER, we were unable to dig as deeply into the detailed components of these two processes. For example, in discussing copyright we attempted to cover both how to interpret licenses when choosing OER and how to apply licenses to something you’ve created. These are each intensive topics that could have consumed the entire week’s class time! In the future, we may seek to create two parallel communities to cover topics in more depth.

OER Instructor Learning Community template in Canvas Commons

One of our objectives after the conclusion of the ILC was to make the content we created available for other institutions interested in running a similar workshop series. To accomplish this, we reviewed the developed materials and applied open licenses to them. We also created a Canvas course template for Canvas Commons allowing other institutions to copy and modify for the needs of their local projects, or so any user can pursue self-paced learning.

The ILC syllabus is also available for review and adaptation. We hope these materials will enable us and others to easily offer workshops or self-guided programs that introduce key OER concepts.

For more information on OER, the OER Working Group, and our activities to promote OER on campus, see our OER guide.