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With the onset of COVID-19, colleges and universities moved to emergency remote teaching, and instructors immediately adjusted their curricula. Many instructors adapted or developed new online lessons that they subsequently published as Open Educational Resources (OERs). While much has been examined related to how entire course designs evolved during this period, the same attention has not been paid to how individual lessons were structured to meet online learners’ needs. As such, we evaluated OER lessons for the integration of universal design for learning (UDL) guidelines and active learning strategies. We evaluated OER lessons published in CourseSource, which is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that focuses on biology lessons implemented in undergraduate classrooms and provides the necessary details and supporting materials to replicate the lesson. We found that biology instructors used a variety of UDL guidelines and active learning strategies to encourage student learning and engagement in online teaching environments. This study also provides a collection of OER online lessons that instructors and educational developers can use to inform the practice of engaging biology students.
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How Do Undergraduate Biology Instructors Engage With the Open Educational Resource Life Cycle?
Open Educational Resources (OER) are widely used instructional materials that are freely available and promote equitable access. OER research at the undergraduate level largely focuses on measuring student experiences with using the low cost resources, and instructor awareness of resources and perceived barriers to use. Little is known about how instructors work with materials based on their unique teaching context. To explore how instructors engage with OER, we surveyed users of CourseSource , an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that publishes lessons primarily for undergraduate biology courses. We asked questions aligned with the OER life cycle, which is a framework that includes the phases: Search , Evaluation , Adaptation , Use , and Share . The results show that OER users come from a variety of institution types and positions, generally have positions that focus more on teaching than research, and use scientific teaching practices. To determine how instructors engage throughout the OER life cycle, we examined the frequency of survey responses. Notable trends include that instructors search and evaluate OER based on alignment to course needs, quality of the materials, and ease of implementation. In addition, instructors frequently modify the published materials for their classroom context and use them in a variety of course environments. The results of this work can help developers design current and future OER repositories to better coincide with undergraduate instructor needs and aid content producers in creating materials that encourage implementation by their colleagues.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1725130
- PAR ID:
- 10373910
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Education
- Volume:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 2504-284X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.835764
