NCCC OER Librarians

I think that's a really great idea! In my experience, trying to tell faculty too much at once has led to them feeling overwhelmed and confused, so having very targeted short sessions should hopefully make each piece clear/

For OER searching, I usually just start the search with some of the major open textbook repositories. Textbooks are a format that instructors understand well and I think they can wrap their head around it and get behind adapting a textbook versus trying to string together multiple sources for a course. If I'm helping faculty, I try to keep the list of sources I share with them somewhat small -- 5-10 sources, and usually I try to provide some kind of annotation to help them know the scope of each one.

For the planning part, it helps if they have defined learning objectives for the course and individual modules. That way they can easily map any source they find to those outcomes -- and know what a particular source might be missing that's important to their course. That's also usually the part where I, as OER consultant, step back. That's where the faculty members have expertise that I do not.

I think your plan will work well.  I agree with Garrison on short, targetted sessions being better than providing too much at one time.  One topic that comes up repeatedly with my fauclty is dealing with outdated links or changes.  Some of them are reluctant to use OER materials because they are afraid the work will change or be removed.  They see the changable nature of  some items as a barrier instead of an opportunity.  I'm still working on helping them reframe that narrative.

Hi Angela.

I created a presentation for my faculty a couple of years ago. I treated it as if they didn't really know anything about this resource. I also included a brief discussion about why OER is important--the cost issue. 

I started with a definition and then included some myth busters. I used the following website and chose several to highlight in my presentation: https://tacomacc.libguides.com/oer/myths. 

I also talked about how to identify OER. This led to a brief discussion of creative commons license. I also briefly discussed the 5R's of OER. 

I hope this outline helps. 

Alisha Webb

Thank you Alisha! I love the myth-busting site! :)

Update: Three faculty registered for my OER Basics session yesterday and no one showed up - well one did, but she was 30 minutes late. Thankfully I went ahead and recorded myself "teaching" the session so when she popped in, I was just finishing up. It was great that she did, because she is wanting to convert her ENG 111 class and as far as I know, she would be the first to do so for that course at Pitt. 

At any rate, if any of you are bored and have nothing else to do (Ha!), I would feel better if someone would watch the session video to make sure that I am not leading anyone astray by anthing I've said that is wrong - esp. when it comes to creative commons. I am open to any and all suggestions and constructive criticism! This all still feels sort of new to me, so I'm learning as I go. For now, it's just posted in my Google Drive. If it passes muster, then I'll put it on our library YouTube channel and share it with our faculty.

• View the OER Basics Session Video [mp4 in Google Drive]
• OER Basics Presentation Slides [Google Slides]
• Notes Handout [Google Doc]
• PDF Flyer sent to Faculty

Angela

Angela, first of all, apologies for my lateness in responding! (My openNCCC email notifications were going to my spam folder for some reason.) That's great that you recorded your session and I am happy to take a look at the recording. Garrison and I had a similar number of faculty register for our OER sessions we recently conducted for new faculty - but the ones who did attend were very interested and motivated! And for you, converting ENG 111 would be a big coup! That faculty member would be a leader - and once it's successful (as I'm sure it will be), more faculty will follow! I wanted to say that I think your idea for short sessions is a good one - 30 minutes is easier to commit to than an hour. 

Just offered the second set of OER sessions, which were titled OER Search. Two faculty signed up and exactly 0 attended. But I did attempt to record it. Below are the session materials. Again, if you have nothing else to do and want to offer constructive criticism, I'm open to any and all suggestions. Thank you!

• View the OER Search Session Video [mp4 on Google Drive]
• OER Search Slides [Google Slides]
• OER Search Worksheet [Google Doc] - I made the worksheet, but then didn't really talk about it in the video.

When I went back to view the video I also mis-spoke at one point and say "copyright date" when I meant to say "publication date"... Is that worth a do-over? I was not really sure what to include in this session and I don't even know if what I'm sharing is even useful. It would have helped to have actual attendees so I could see what questions they had. 

So after doing some "real life" work searching for and then mapping OER to course objectives today, I want to update my OER Search presentation (see the earlier post). I guess it's good that no one actually showed up to those sessions! I found that I spent a fair amount of time using Google and YouTube (in addition to various repositories) - which I didn't spend any time on in the presentation about searching for OER.

Hi Angela - I think that's a great idea to incorporate searching for OER using Google and YouTube -  in the presentations I've done I just gloss over those options. I am with you, I want to redo my tutorials as well to better incorporate these tools that all faculty are familiar with. I really like your worksheet - and I havea similar one as well. I'm thinking now I need to redo my worksheet to focus more on Google and YouTube. I think using places like OTN and OpenStax are fine, but OASIS and the GMU sites are just too much for faculty. I think MERLOT is difficult for quick searches as well.