Each semester, we in the A&S Office of Teaching Excellence & Innovation grow more impressed by the dedicated efforts of our faculty. One of the most recent examples comes from Adam Penenberg in the American Journalism Online (AJO) program. AJO is A&S’s first and only fully online graduate program.
Over the summer, Adam dedicated significant efforts to overhauling the materials in his Law & Ethics in American Journalism course. Throughout these efforts, Adam cultivate an Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook. OER materials are freely available for students. This means that students enrolling in this course do not need to pay for a textbook. Efforts to provide students with OER materials have been steadily increasing with rising costs in tuition across all of higher education. By providing an OER textbook to students, their financial burden is lessened.
Further, Adam has incorporated his OER materials throughout his Brightspace site to make for a more seamless experience for students. Each chapter and section from his OER text stands as its own accessible PDF, including images and links to outside media, that are clearly organized in the course Content tool. Rather than opening up their textbook separately from their course, students are able to navigate to the specific readings/videos/resources as they are needed week-by-week.
If you’re interested in creating OER materials or using more OER content in your course, feel free to reach out to your Office of TEI liaison. There are also several repositories of OER content freely available for you to incorporate into your lessons/activities.
Here are some of these repositories: