Since 2023, Open Oregon Educational Resources has offered four Modifying and Creating OER Workshops. This professional development model is adapted from a presentation by Ariana Santiago, Workshop Demo: Modifying & Creating Open Educational Resources, and includes elements of the Open Education Network’s OER Review Workshop.
Here’s how it works:
- Participants attend a 1-hour workshop in order to be introduced to copyright, open licenses, tools/platforms, and EDI concepts in the context of modifying and creating OER – in other words, the nuts and bolts of how to creatively leverage open licenses to tailor your course materials.
- After the workshop, participants receive a recording, slide deck with links to more info, and a time-limited invitation to practice modifying or creating OER for a $300 stipend.
- Participants who opt to practice modifying or creating OER for a stipend submit an openly licensed work sample that is uploaded to a folder in OER Commons. The folder is a showcase of “small-batch innovation” examples.
Work Samples
All work samples are collected in an OER Commons folder. In addition to the examples below, here are a few highlights:
- A website by Nanci Leiton, Portland Community College, collecting materials for instructors and English language learners in a welding career pathway: Essential Skills for a Welding Career
- A revised openly licensed slide deck by Dana Nelson, Oregon Institute of Technology, that explains SOLID, an acronym for five object-oriented programming principles: SOLID
- A series of recorded lecture videos by Patrick Kennelly, Central Oregon Community College, with new human-edited captions in English and Spanish: OER Modifying Workshop Report 2023, GEOG 265, Introduction to GIS
- Two lab assignments by Wayne Hung, Southern Oregon University, on identifying metal composition in modern pennies and assessing heavy metals in the soil of an area school: Instrumental Analysis Laboratory Manual: XRF Analysis of Metals in Coins and Soil
- Four assignments by Gregory Zobel, Western Oregon University, to practice adding closed captions to videos: Closed Captioning Assignments
Kevin Smith, Department Faculty Coordinator – Arts, Humanities, and Communication and Professor – Film Arts and Writing at Chemeketa Community College created a custom edition of an open textbook for his courses FA 255 Understanding Movies: Film Styles; FA 256 Understanding Movies: Great Film Directors; and FA 257 Understanding Movies: Themes & Genres. His modified OER is available via Moving Pictures: An Introduction to Cinema by Russell Sharman, modified by Kevin Smith. Kevin writes:
While I found the original book to be excellent already, I wanted to adapt it for use in my film studies classes. My approach to film history and aesthetics is informed by the industrial context of film art, and I wanted to emphasize that. I also study and teach film from a neoformalist perspective, so I wanted to inject that into the text. I also updated the multimedia content in the book to include more recent films, including some that represented women and people of color. Some of the information regarding studio ownership needed to be updated as well due to recent changes in the industry. I added approximately 15% more content to the book.
I addressed accessibility issues by adding structured headings throughout, removed two tables that contained content, removed some decorative images, and added alt text to all images. I struggled with formatting issues, especially with the multimedia content, and would seek out help from someone with layout experience if and when I work on further revisions. While I focused here on the Introduction and Chapter One, I hope to revise the entire book for my courses, so that students won’t have to pay anything for the primary textbook in my classes moving forward.
Having a quality, customized OER will be extremely beneficial in terms of saving money (at a community college where some students struggle financially with basic needs) and having high-quality curricular content. Working with Open Oregon Educational Resources, and Russell Sharman, has allowed me the opportunity to modify an already existing text that will achieve both of these goals.
Peter Kazarinoff, Faculty, Engineering and Engineering Technology at Portland Community College, added image attributions to a chapter of the book Manufacturing for Mechanical Engineers, which is used in ENGR 262 Manufacturing Processes. Peter made an 11-minute video showing how to use the image metadata fields to automatically generate a list of media attributions at the bottom of a Pressbooks page.
