Recipes for Success: Cooking with Open Educational Practices

Concurrent Session 3
Streamed Session

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Brief Abstract

Open Educational Resources are like the ingredients for cooking but without a good recipe, without Open Educational Practices (OEP), you will not produce the educational transformations at the desired speed and scale.   This session will review how to institutionalize open educational practices with ePortfolios and help participants develop their own strategies.

Presenters

Gerard L. Hanley Ph.D. is the Executive Director of MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, www.merlot.org) and SkillsCommons (www.skillscommons.org) for the California State University, the Director for the Center for Usability for Design and Accessibility and Professor of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach. At MERLOT and SkillsCommons, he directs the development and sustainability of the international consortium and technology strategy to provide open educational services to improve teaching and learning and continues to development the US Department of Labor's open repository of educational resources for workforce development. Gerry's previous positions include Assistance Vice Chancellor for Academic Technology Services at the CSU Office of the Chancellor, the Director of Faculty Development and Director of Strategy Planning at CSU, Long Beach.

Extended Abstract

MERLOT (www.merlot.org) has recently created a portal showcasing open educational practices for redesigning courses with technology, adopting OER, innovating career and technical education programs, using virtual labs, and moving online at https://oep.merlot.org.   The collection of over 1,000 eportfolios captured faculty's "know how" to adopt and adapt a wide range of technologies in transforming their teaching and their students' learning.   The ePortfolios are OERs that can be reused, revised, remix, retained and redistributed within the process of scaling the innovative practices.   The workshop will briefly review the IDEATE virtual event strategy designed by MERLOT and the Online Learning Consortium to openly share practices for teaching STEM Labs online.  

The workshop will guide participants through the extensive collection that covers many academic and CTE disciplines as well as explain and discuss strategies for leveraging the portal for their local use.  The workshop will include the presentation and discussion of institutional implementation strategies which have been successful in engaging faculty in open educational practices and adopted in multiple institutions.  The workshop will also demonstrate the use MERLOT's Content Builder application to create OER ePortfolios for capturing open educational practices at their own institution.   MERLOT provides templates for ePortfolios with scaffolding questions that guide users through the comprehensive reflection and documentation of their educational practices as they create OER that are hosted for free within MERLOT.

After a few introductory PPT slides providing the context for Open Educational Practices and MERLOT,   the workshop will involve a number of screen sharing activities, directed tasks, and use of chat to share reflections on their learning.  After each of the major sections, discussion via chat and video conference will be used to engage participants in the learning activities.   The workshop will end with people sharing their learning outcomes in the chat and verbally as well.

OER without Open Educational Practices will not produce the educational transformations at the speed and scale that is possible.   This session will provide models of how to institutionalize open educational practices with ePortfolio and should help participants develop their own local strategies for supporting OEP.

MERLOT's OER/Affordable Learning Solutions strategy and OEP services have been implemented as part of the HBCU Affordable Learning Solutions initiative.   See http://hbcuals.org to explore the HBCU AL$ Community Portal.   The workshop will showcase how a number of HBCUs have adapted the Affordable Learning Solutions "practice" into their own institutions.   The California State University System is composed of 20 HSIs and 16 ANAPIs and has been implementing the Affordable Learning Solutions Initiative successfully for the past 10 years with over $70 million in student savings for course materials in 2019-20 due to campus activities focused on the adoption of OER and library resources.

Participants will acquire the knowledge and skills to:

1. Explore MERLOT's portal showcasing over 1,000 eportfolios capturing open educational practices for redesigning courses with technology, adopting OER, innovating career and technical education programs, using virtual labs, and moving online,

2. Use the open educational practices captured in OERs to support their own initiatives and professional development programs

3. Use MERLOT's Content Builder to create their own OEP templates