The 2021-23 and 2022-23 OER grant cohorts have saved over 7200 students an estimated $1M since July 2021. The cohort represents 48 different projects to adopt, adapt, and create OER for courses at 27 institutions. Congratulations grantees!
Taryn Oakley, Portland Community College, ESR 171
Taryn has been working on increasing the accessibility of the OER reading lists that she has created for her non-majors lab series. She is currently spending time updating broken links and doing a basic accessibility check on each included link. Additionally, next term she will be asking her students to review and contribute to the reading list for their class. She hopes that by including more direct student involvement, these lists will become a more collaborative effort; increasing relevant content and more feedback on potential accessibility issues.
Mary Ann Woodman, Rogue Community College, PSY 219
I was awarded a grant for developing a new curriculum in Abnormal Psychology at RCC. I reviewed Fundamentals of Psychological Disorders, 3rd edition in 2021, and completed the change by fall of 2022 at which time I offered the course with approximately 40 students. The main advantage for our students was changing from a $260 textbook to a no cost textbook. The learning objectives for this course were to expose students to a wide range of psychological disorders, with particular emphasis on symptoms, causes and treatments. The OER provided content for several of the major disorders but left out categories of neurodevelopmental disorders, sexual, sleep disorders, child and adolescence, psychopathology and law. I upgraded content in these areas, filled the course with audio-visuals that were not previously offered, brought all lecture slides to accessibility standards and modified the assessment tools to meet the learning objectives that RCC had stipulated for the course.
I worked with the library to produce hardback copies of the OER for students who were challenged with reading a textbook online. While working on the project, I communicated with OER, library staff and authors of the book often. I shared this project with the authors at Washington State University, other faculty in our Social Science Department, particularly with the instructor teaching the same course spring term. Since the class was full with a waitlist, the course may be offered twice a year in the future.
Kiri Simning, Amy Wheary, Breah Bollom, Carmen Ingulli, and Melinda Gesuale, Central Oregon Community College, NUR 106, 107, 108, and 206
Fall term of 2021 the Central Oregon Community College (COCC) Nursing Department adopted Nursing Skills to replace our Clinical Nursing Skills textbook. This was a part of the grant project to determine if it would meet the needs of our program. It has been wildly successful!
We have two cohorts of up to 56 students each, which means up to 112 students can be using the OER in a given term. Offering this OER saved our students up to $100 each.
While the cost savings has been very appreciated, there have also been other advantages to making this change. Having an online skills book works perfectly in that we are able to post direct links to skill checklists for our students to access. They can bring copies of these to their practice labs, but most students pull them up on their laptops and are able to follow along without any printing – saving on both paper and ink! Other perks are the embedded skills videos that students can access. It’s so nice to have the texts and videos in one place. In the past, students would have assigned reading in addition to online videos to go back and forth between. There are also interactive quizzes and other activities to test their knowledge. The other thing that this style of text offers is that it is editable. When a student discovered a typo in one of the OER tables, I was able to contact the OER Program Director who passed on this information for the correction.
While not all of the skills that we teach are addressed in the OER, the vast majority are and we greatly appreciate how it has complemented our teaching methods!
Tim Krause, Portland Community College, ESOL News Oregon
Tim was was invited to write an article about ESOL News Oregon for the WAESOL Educator Journal. Here is the abstract of Tim’s article, Local news teaches students about their new language and their new home:
Tim’s article describes a regional OER website that grew out of one teacher’s desire to find additional uses for the news stories he created for his ESOL classes at a publicly-funded community college. This small project is now a statewide resource that generates multi-level, multi-modal local news stories (including self-correcting H5P exercises) to help students practice English while learning about Oregon.
Julie Weise, University of Oregon; Jennifer Macias, Oregon State University; Claudia Holguín Mendoza, UC Riverside, History 248
Teach in Spanglish showcases a bilingual pedagogical approach and an OER set of instructional materials that explores Latinx History with context in English and interpretation of original primary sources in Spanish and Spanglish. The site launched in 2022 with support from Open Oregon Educational Resources. Since then, PI Julie Weise (History, University of Oregon) and her collaborator Claudia Holguín Mendoza (formerly UO, now UC Riverside, Hispanic Studies) have been busy sharing their materials at virtual conferences and workshops around the country, including the Organization of American Historians, the Modern Languages Association, and the University of Miami.
Sara Packer, Portland Community College, and Penny Jahraus, Oregon Institute of Technology, ESOL 10 and ESOL 20
For Literacy, we have dropped in a beautiful 200-page “Phonics for Literacy” project by Jen Sacklin from Lane CC, in printable book form (available at Adult ESL Phonics: Literacy Level Units 1-4 and Adult ESL Phonics: Literacy Level Units 5-8). I dropped all use of a commercial text, as of Fall Term, and am continuing to pilot the completed draft version of Level 1 in my current class, improving, and adding to the materials as I go along. My materials are accessible online, in a number of Google docs folders, with lesson plans and guides for using them – to be organized and put in a more “book-like” format by the end of June 2023. Penny’s Level 2 materials are complete in final draft form and already look like textbook chapters that can be printed as whole units. She is also tweaking and improving as comments come in.
All the materials have been advertised many times to the PCC ESOL listserv and also to everyone from around Oregon and beyond who attended our state professional ORTESOL conference last fall or who have otherwise shown interest. I send out portions of the supplemental materials (general skill development topics not directly related to our main themes) as appropriate (e.g. for upcoming holidays, or when we added the Literacy materials or other new things). I always include a link to the whole curriculum and an offer to shepherd people through it, in person or on Zoom. I would estimate that about 100 students are benefitting from the curriculum in some form at present.
After I piloted part of the Level 1 curriculum during Fall Term, I put together a sampler binder – hard copies of about 100 pages of materials I had used during the term. This was in response to some teachers needing something to hold and leaf through. (Other users have been very happy with the flexibility of the print-as-needed online folders). We have also formed a small group of ESOL teachers into a Professional Learning Community based in our OER curriculum, as required by the state OACCRS standards. It will meet once a term, starting in February, and discuss how the curriculum relates to the standards and how it could be improved in that regard.
David DeRoche and Alishia Huntoon, Oregon Institute of Technology, ART 220
Through the Open Oregon Educational Resources grant program, a new textbook created by David DeRoche and Alishia Huntoon has been developed for a course in drawing (link will be available very soon!). This textbook starts with an introduction to drawing materials. From there, it takes the reader from seeing the world through the eyes of an artist to applying drawing techniques and creating individual works of art. It has been successfully piloted in university drawing classes, especially in an online setting. This has positively impacted students by providing a no cost, electronic textbook immediately available for student use.
Teryk Morris, Linn-Benton Community College, MA3.432, MA3.433, MA3.434
Mastercam Instruction at Linn Benton Community College is now lower cost and available to all thanks to a grant from Open Oregon Educational Resources. Teryk Morris received a grant to create OER video tutorials to train students in the use of Mastercam CAD/CAM Software. The videos are captioned in both English and Spanish. There are currently 30 videos that have been created, totalling over 12 hours of instruction. Captioning and translation are in progress and there are more videos to come. You can see the current state at: https://teryk.com/oer/Open_Mastercam_Tutorials.html.
The tutorials are created primarily using free and open source tools and released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Teryk is working with Samuel Studach and Luis Garcia who are handling the caption editing and translation. The captioning process starts with computer generated captions. However, because of the technical nature of the topics, there is often a significant amount of editing to be done. The tutorials have already been used for two classes at LBCC and one community education class.
Chris Wrathall, Blue Mountain Community College; Michele Claasen, Mt. Hood Community College; Carmen Curtz, Chris Hamper, Holly Edwins, Jamie Kennel, and Kristin Whitman, Oregon Institute of Technology, State EMT Lab Manual/Textbook
We were awarded a grant to develop an EMT lab manual/textbook with a focus on addressing some gender and racial issues have been left out of previous texts. Ultimately it is our hope that this lab manual/textbook will be made available to Oregon EMT students via the Oregon Health Authority Trauma website. Currently there are changes being made at the national level regarding EMT testing and it is our belief that this will help bridge some gaps regarding those changes.
The project team has roughly 95% of the text written and through an initial review phase. This term we have 14 students using the completed portions, with subjective feedback being extremely positive. We are also working on completing required IRB paperwork for a poll and have begun an accessibility review.
We are in the process of recruiting physician reviewers to verify and critique the work and add applicable photos for the manual. In order to entice or thank reviews for their time we are offering a $25 gift card as a “thank you” for taking the time to review and help improve our work.
Michal Young, CIS 210/CS 161 and CIS 211 and Dyana Mason, PPPM 280, University of Oregon
Two grantees are being awarded OER Oscar awards by the University of Oregon OSPIRG Students at an OER Oscars Event (event details: Oregon Celebrates Open Education Week, March 6-10, 2023). Michal’s award is for his work on Introduction to Computer Science Part 1, and Dyana’s award is for her work on Introduction to the Nonprofit Sector. Both were nominated by one or more students for this award, which recognizes outstanding professors and teaching instructors who utilize Open Educational Resources and promote educational accessibility in their courses.
