Creating and Hosting OER using LibGuides: Background

Spring 2018 

Center for Teaching & Excellence along with OER Librarian hosted a six-week Faculty Learning Community on Open Educational Resources. 

The Main Topics:

• Sources of OER
• Copyright
• Accessibility
• Remix/Reuse
• Pedagogy and OER

The Learning Objectives: 

• Faculty will be able to define OER in the context of Higher Education
• Faculty will explore possible OER options to at least one course
• Faculty will develop a plan to replace course materials with OER in at least one course

The Capstone Project:

Faculty will create a proposal that can be adapted to fit the application criteria for Affordable Learning Georgia's (ALG) Textbook Transformation Grants. 

Team of chemistry faculty completed a proposal for Round 14 of ALG Grant Cycle. Their goal, beyond affordability, was to create course materials more in line with the focus of the course and more engaging for students. They were specifically interested in adding new images, videos of processes, and problem sets. 

"While student savings is one of our goals for this project, our motivation for creating transformed textbook materials come from the need for material that focusses on engineering chemistry in the “Comprehensive General Chemistry course (CHEM 1310), a required one-semester general chemistry course for Engineering majors. A majority of the general chemistry textbooks are not written from the perspective of teaching Engineering Majors and there is no open educational resource (OER) on general chemistry for Engineering Majors. Many students lack motivation to excel when the course objectives do not appear applicable to their academic majors. Also, the layout of traditional general chemistry textbooks designed for a two-semester schedule is not compatible with a condensed one-semester course."-- Beulah Narendrapurapu   Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Georgia Southern University