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IntroductionOpen educational resources (OERs) provide instructors access to no-cost lesson materials they can incorporate into their courses. OER lessons can promote the use of innovative and evidence-based educational practices in biology education. Prior research suggests that teaching strategies are often implemented in different ways which can impact student learning. However, few studies have explored how OER lessons are modified to fit their local context. MethodsWe used the teacher-curriculum framework to understand how and why instructors modify these materials. Additionally, we explored how these materials supported instructors in enacting national priorities from Vision and Change. We surveyed 139 instructors who implemented lessons published inCourseSource, a peer-reviewed journal specifically designed to share OERs. ResultsWe found that the majority of instructors who used the lesson materials (e.g., slides, worksheets, assessments, protocols) did so without making substantial modifications, in contrast with prior research. Furthermore, we found that these materials were particularly helpful in incorporating student-centered teaching practices, like group work or discussions, sometimes for the first time. DiscussionThese insights into what instructors value in lesson materials can inform OER publishing guidelines so that these materials best meet instructional needs.
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Sustainability and Justice: Challenges and Opportunities for an Open STEM Education
Open educational resources, or OER, are teaching materials that reside in the public domain and are available under an open license. While the creation of high-quality materials and cyberinfrastructure to share these resources is important, OER are much more than static resource repositories. Vibrant OER communities function as collaboration hubs and often include librarians, instructional technologists, instructors, education researchers, funders, open-source software developers, and college administrators. Together, these individuals work as a community to respond to changes in the education landscape, support student learning impacts both in terms of cost savings and student retention, and solve issues related to broadly sharing open resources on the web. This essay provides general information about OER, describes communities developing OER for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education, and presents insights about sustainability challenges. The sustainability challenges are organized according to multiple dimensions: cultural and social, economic and financial, and technological and environmental. In addition, OER provide important opportunities to address and promote social justice and open and accessible education philosophies. Knowing more about the OER landscape, sustainability challenges, and educational justice opportunities can help instructors use and contribute to this growing movement to reshape the landscape of undergraduate education.
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- PAR ID:
- 10373911
- Editor(s):
- Barnard, Daron
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CBE—Life Sciences Education
- Volume:
- 21
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1931-7913
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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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.more » « less
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Fisler, Kathi; Denny, Paul; Franklin, Diana; Hamilton, Margaret (Ed.)Background: Prior work has primarily been concerned with identifying: (1) how Open Education Resources (OERs) can be used to increase the availability of educational materials, (2) what mo- tivations are behind their adoption and usage in classrooms, and (3) what barriers impede said adoption. However, there is relatively little work investigating the motives and barriers to contribution in OER. Objectives: Our goal is to understand what motivates and dissuades instructors to contribute to and adopt OERs. Additionally, we wish to know what would increase the likelihood of instructors contributing their work to OER repositories. Method: We conduct a 10 question survey with computing instructors on OER, with a heavy emphasis on what would lead to OER contributions. Using thematic analysis, we mine the broad themes from our respondents and group them into broader topical areas. Findings: Novel contributions include discussions of what faculty are not willing to share as readily — in particular, exam questions are of concern due to possible student cheating — as well as discussions of different views on monetary and non-monetary (e.g., promotion and tenure value) incentives for contributing to OER efforts. With respect to the kinds of OER faculty want to use, findings line up with prior literature. Implications: As course materials become more sophisticated and the range of topics taught in computing continue to grow, the communal effort required to maintain a broad collection of high quality OERs also grows. Understanding what factors influence instructors to contribute to this effort and how we can facilitate the contribution, discovery, and use of OERs is fundamental to both how OER repositories should be organized, as well as how funding initiatives to support them should be structured.more » « less
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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.more » « less
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Sustainability is a vital interdisciplinary concept to address within engineering education. Furthermore, the natural connections that exist between sustainability and social justice provide an optimal opportunity to integrate both into curricula. We argue that engineering curricula ought to include sustainability and social justice so future engineers are trained to understand both societal and technical implications of their work, while acknowledging the challenges engineering faculty may face in conceptualizing social justice or social sustainability. We then highlight how new sustainable design rating systems, such as Envision and The Living Building Challenge, embed inclusion and social justice into their ratings and how these sustainability rating systems can help engineering faculty bring social justice into their classrooms in ways that meaningfully link to engineering content. Finally, we present two examples of how sustainability and social justice can be incorporated into the civil engineering curriculum through inclusive pedagogy and new curricula: 1) a semester-long effort to document, design, and improve the inclusive pedagogical practices in a first-year engineering course that included the theme of sustainability throughout much of the class meetings; and 2) a new assignment about the Envision rating system and the societal implications of rebuilding a major component of regional infrastructure. We conclude with recommendations that other instructors can use to begin incorporating social justice in their courses.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.20-08-0180
