Enabling Faculty Experiential Learning through Authoring Open Educational Resources

Virginia Tech faculty are increasingly engaging in creating, adapting, and sharing open educational resources, with 24 open textbooks or other substantive open educational resources published since program inception in 2016 (https://guides.lib.vt.edu/oer/grantees). Nationally, faculty exhibit motivation for engagement because of lack of relevant course materials, a desire for more control over the process, and cost reduction for students. This trend requires faculty attention to the complexities of writing for student learning rather than discipline-specific research formats, openness to learning new processes on publishing sharable, openly-licensed resources, and commitment to dedicating time on task. Throughout these processes, faculty expand their skill in time management and setting of reasonable writing goals, knowledge regarding copyright and Creative Commons licenses, development of accessibility features for readers with visual and/or print disabilities, assessment and incorporation of student and peer-reviewer requests, book publication processes, and attention to presentation and design elements that reinforce learning -- including figures, examples, self-assessment tools, learning objectives, and so on. Some faculty develop expertise in WordPress-based publishing software, such as Pressbooks. Others explore integration of non-traditional media such as podcasts, virtual reality, code-environments, embedded interactive graphs, and assessment tools such as gradebook-passback quizzing options.

Such projects benefit from the expertise of a third-party project management team -- in our case from the University Libraries’ Open Education Initiative -- which has expertise with open educational resource publication processes, student and external peer-review management, software platform options, print-on-demand services, copyright and open licenses, and provides access to graphic design, copyediting, accessibility, and editorial services.

Building on the process-related themes from a 2021 poster presented at CHEP, “Collaborating to Build, Adapt, and Evaluate Open Educational Resources (OER),” (http://hdl.handle.net/10919/101980) this moderated panel discussion explores faculty motivations for undertaking open educational resource creation and adaptation projects, preliminary impacts on students, impacts on the authors’ other work, changes in the way authors view their contributions to higher education, and success factors, both realized and unrealized. Interactive exercises throughout the session will engage audience members in reflecting and sharing realized or perceived success factors and challenges related to undertaking similar projects at their home institutions.