It is Open Education Week, and St. Clair County Community College remains committed to its open education resources (OER) efforts, which have helped save students nearly $900,000 since 2016.
Started in 2013, Open Education Week is a global event to raise awareness and showcase the impact of open education on teaching and learning worldwide. OER include freely accessible, openly licensed text, media and other digital assets that can increase student learning and success while reducing the cost of higher education.
At SC4, OER advocates have led efforts that focus on providing faculty members the opportunity to utilize alternative textbooks that save students money. Faculty members in biology, business, criminal justice, earth science, English, health education, history, math, philosophy, physics courses and more have utilized the resources.
Additionally, many SC4 faculty members have received pilot awards for their OER innovation, including biology instructor Brandis Hubbard, who was recently recognized for a series of videos she developed for one of her courses.
“Embracing the creation and use of OER gives us the opportunity to encourage collaboration and creativity while also addressing textbook affordability to ensure our students have access to the resources they need to be successful,” said SC4 Dean of Library Services and Academic Technology Kendra Lake. “As the support for OER continues to grow across the state and the nation, being an integral part of the larger OER community will continue to benefit our students.”
Other OER efforts at the college include:
- Participation in Michigan Colleges Online’s OER Commons hub, an OER discovery and curation tool that’s free for faculty members.
- An OER team consisting of faculty, librarians and staff which aims to encourage and support open pedagogy across the college.
- Host to more than 200 open education practitioners and advocates from across the state as part of the second annual Michigan Open Educational Resources (OER) Summit in September 2018.
- A permanent OER textbook display available to faculty in the college’s library.
- A custom OER Library Research Guide, featuring a curated list of OER resources by discipline, open access content search with a list of OER repositories, links to open education research and much more.
