Final Week

Final Project Blog Post

1.        This workshop is offered through our Teaching and Learning Center as professional development for faculty. Administration on our campus is interested in supporting efforts to decrease the cost of instructional materials borne by students. While many faculty members are in favor of reducing the cost of materials for students, they remain skeptical about the quality levels of OER and/or the time investment required for incorporating OER into their courses. The learning expectations for this workshop for administration is that there will be an increase, however small, in the use of OER on our campus through an increase in knowledge and relevant applications of the resources presented in this workshop. Faculty must perceive a high level of utility for the information presented and be able to immediately apply the learning to enhance their courses with OER.

These learners are instructors at our institution and possess graduate-level education, master’s and doctorate degrees little or no previous experience or knowledge using OER repositories and a range from basic to advanced knowledge or interest in open educational resources. We anticipate that some participants may have a misunderstanding about what OER truly means, such as confusing OER with no-cost. During this session, learners can also expect to increase their knowledge and skill in locating interactive learning materials (ILM) to incorporate into course content and activities. Preferred learning styles will vary, and we will try to offer some varied activities to accommodate differences in learning styles.

The workshop, Exploring OER Repositories, will be conducted in a 2-hour session in a computer lab equipped with computers and software applications similar to those used by the learners at their work stations. Learners will have the option to use their own laptops instead of lab computers if they choose to do so. We anticipate a small audience, 5 or fewer, of adult learners will attend the session. The physical elements that might affect this class include the possibility that people may leave and arrive during different times of the session. Also, we anticipate that the learners will all be looking for different materials/subjects, which could pose challenges.

2.       At the completion of this workshop, faculty members should be able to:

1.       Identify major repositories of Open Educational Resources (OER) and how to use them to locate learning materials to enhance content for their courses

2.       Conduct a search in each of the repositories for discipline-specific materials, applying demonstrated search strategies

3.       Identify types of OER and their potential to support student engagement

4.       Utilize useful criteria to evalutate materials found in OER repositories

5.       Evaluate ADA accessibility of OER materials found in OER repositories

6.       Develop a preliminary understanding of applying proper licensing and attribution to OER

3.       Formative Assessment: Upon completion of the training workshop, participants will be asked to fill out an evaluation to identify their perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the training. The results of this evaluation can be used to revise aspects of the training that are identified as ineffective or lacking clarity.

For this training workshop, successful completion of the hands-on activities will be a measure of these goals. The workshop will offer opportunities to share search experiences and results, while receiving instructor/ peer feedback on improving search strategies.

4.       We will use aspects of all of the learning theories in our presentation, but the main theory will be Cognitivism. We plan to use a hook at the beginning of the session, which will also act as a motivation element for our learners. Ideally, we would like to find a hook that showcases an Interactive Learning Material (ILM) found in an OER repository. ILMs are any type of learning object which engages students and assists them in better understanding course content through interactive means, i.e. games, practice exercise, simulations, etc. Once we have gained their attention through these ILMs and show the potential that they offer for motivating students, we will get into the meat of our presentation – identify, search, and evaluate OERs.

Then, we will employ additional elements of Cognitivism in our instruction, specifically by presenting information in an organized and sequenced manner. For each OER repository, we will talk about the defining elements of each repository, do some sample searches, and allow time for the learners to do searches for discipline-specific materials for their course, then reconvene to discuss our results

5.      We plan to use an emerging education technology tool as a hook to grab our participants’ attention at the beginning of the session. Prior to the session, we are going to find an appropriate Open Interactive Learning Material (ILM) that will demonstrate how effective these ILMs can be in capturing students’ interest and facilitating learning. Even though our faculty participants are voluntarily attending this session, we thought it was important to demonstrate how ILMs can be great tools to encourage students to interact directly with the material, and therefore learn. We think this will serve as a great motivator for our faculty participants to explore what Open materials exist in their discipline. Hopefully, it will also demonstrate some of the many different options for incorporating games, tutorials, etc. into their courses.

6.     I think the thing I found most useful was how the course was structured, i.e. that we applied these Instructional Design principles to a real-life scenario. Going into this course, I had some familiarity with ID concepts, but I had never applied them to my own work. Having an end goal in mind made it easier to explore ID concepts in a practical way. I think the concept that will stick with me most is backward design; it has made me reconsider how I approach instruction, by making sure that I think first of the goals for the course, workshop, etc. before proceeding to how the material will be presented. I struggled most with learning theories, in this class. I think that I have a decent handle on them now, but I’m still not entirely sure of the intricacies of each theory.

7.    I did find my coursemates’ blogs helpful, especially in the first week. It was very informative to read about everyone’s processes, successes, concerns, etc. I will be honest that I found it harder to keep up with the blogs as the class progressed. Because there are so many people in the class, and we met for such a short period of time, it was difficult for me to keep track of people from week to week. So, although I did find some of the posts particularly helpful, I can’t recall which ones these were. Overall, I really enjoyed the class and I found the interactions between professors and classmates very helpful.