About this course

Learning Goals

Welcome to Open Practices for LBCC Faculty. This course is intended to provide a foundation in the skills and knowledge you'll need to create, remix, adopt, or update open educational resources (OER). Specifically, by the end of the course you'll be able to:

• Apply backward design in order to plan learning goals, assessment, and appropriate scaffolding/support, 
• Describe the meaning of open educational resources,
• Locate open educational resources relevant to course learning outcomes,
• Properly attribute works offered under a Creative Commons license,
• Identify and create works that are accessible to all students,
• Add a Creative Commons license to your own work and share back with your disciplinary community.

Format

The units themselves are concise, but you'll find videos, links, and further resources so you can explore concepts and skills that are new or intriguing. The interactives (built with H5P) are a quick way to check your understanding of core concepts. 

Use the discussion fora to ask questions and build connections with one another. In a survey, many past grant recipients said a cohort model would have been helpful to them. In the wrap-up unit, we'll plan some drop-in co-working times throughout the upcoming academic year. If you want to initiate other opportunities for collaboration and support, please feel free to use this space to do that!

I'll leave the course open for the whole year, so you can always come back to review concepts and continue conversations (your contributions are visible only to this year's grant recipients and support staff, though the course itself is openly licensed). You'll also notice embedded contact information for key campus units that support OER. Don't hesitate to ask for help throughout your project! You bring the disciplinary expertise, and people in these roles are partners to help you maximize your impact and be efficient with your time.

Unit Content

As educators, you're well aware that participants in a learning community possess a wide range of prior knowledge. Some of you are far more experienced in curriculum development than I am.  Still, I chose to include Unit 1 as a discussion-starter, since OER give instructors greater freedom in course design, often leading to pedagogical innovation. There are many ways to design education, and I hope you'll share what works best for you and your students.

The remaining units are more prescriptive, with important information to help you meet the terms of the grant--especially those related to copyright compliance, licensing, and accessibility. Even though open education and accessibility initiatives have existed for decades, I find myself continuously improving and refining my practice. Whether you're a total newbie or a seasoned OER creator, I hope the course is flexible enough to support you (and I'd appreciate your suggestions for improvement at the end).

To borrow a term from LBCC English instructor and OER creator Terrance Millet, "Onward!"

~Michaela