Open Western OER Fellowship Program

Welcome to the first OER Fellowship Workshop. This workshop introduces and covers the Project Planning phase of your OER project. It's designed to help you think through your end product and what will be needed to make it a reality. With the help of this workshop, we hope you will really start to lay the groundwork for your OER project.

Project Planning Templates

Instructions and Deliverables for the Project Planning Phase

• Open and save your own copy of the Project Planning Template, linked above.
• Follow the instructions in the template and use the resources on this LibGuide page to help you draft an initial Project Plan.
• Meet with your Project Manager to go over your initial Project Plan. They can help you refine your plan, resolve issues, or answer questions that may have come up. 
• Then, when your initial plan is "finished" and you are ready to move on to content creation, please submit a copy to library@westerntc.edu.

Learning Objectives for Workshop 1: Project Planning

1. Fellows will articulate underlying principles and values of their project, including openness, accessibility, and student-centeredness.  

2. Fellows will consider backward design and make initial decisions about their course materials to be created throughout their project. 

3. Fellows will consider their course outcome summary and use it to draft their OER project summary and basic outline of the content to be created, identifying any key features to be included throughout the materials (such as case studies, practice activities, etc.). 

4. Fellows will draft a rough timeline for their project, including a project completion date and tentative due dates for each section (e.g. Week 1, Week 2, Week 3...).  

5. Fellows will identify individuals available to assist them throughout their project, including a project manager and proofreader.  

6. Fellows will curate any existing open content that may be relevant to their project and understand how the license(s) of these materials may enable or restrict their reuse. 

7. Fellows will consider a variety of technology options (including word processors, publishing platforms, and multimedia recording technology) and select usable and appropriate tools for creating and publishing their work. 

What are OER and why use them for my course?

Open Educational Resources are teaching and learning resources (e.g., textbooks, powerpoint slides, activities, assessments, etc.) that are openly licensed and free to use. These resources can be adopted and used in the classroom as is or modified as needed to best fit the learning outcomes of a course.

There are many reasons to explore, use, and create open educational resources. Some instructors cite affordability, others are motivated by the simple and straightforward access it provides to students, and still others appreciate the pedagogical flexibility of having resources that can be easily adapted to the needs of students. 

Backwards Design: How will using OER improve your course and enable good teaching?

When integrating OER into your course, you have the opportunity to create or adapt materials to best meet your students' needs. 

We invite you to reflect on the following questions as we begin the project planning process:

• What do I want my students to learn? 
• How will I communicate to students that the concepts I present are valuable? 
• How will I assess my students’ understanding of core concepts? 
• How will I create checkpoints for students to recognize their growth? 
• How will students fail forward and recover from “mistakes” in helpful ways? 
• How will you ensure that your materials are student-centered and accessible to all students? 

Project Summary: What will I create?

Defining your project is really important!

A well-defined project:

• Provides important information and framing about your project 
• Helps outline as much detail as possible at the beginning of your project
• Explains why your project is important
  • It may be the first of its kind in your field
  • It may serves as a model for a new approach
  • It might just be exactly what you have been searching for in your own teaching

In your Project Planning Template, create a brief summary of your project (approximately 1 paragraph). To do this, imagine your project is finished and you’ve been asked to write an abstract to describe the materials, their audience, and what is distinctive about them.

This activity will help frame your project goals as you begin. This will also be the summary that the Project Manager shares with others (like the project team, grants, and the WTCS funders) about your project.

Project Outline: What will I include? (And what will I exclude?)

Now that you have the big picture in mind, you'll do some additional thinking about the contents you will develop. In your project planning template, draft a project outline of your OER which includes all parts or chapters that you envision.

This outline will include:

• A list of all the chapters, modules, sections, and/or units to be included
• The specific topics to be covered in each section
• The course outcomes addressed in each section
• A target completion date for each section

Remember that this is a starting point and it can change as your project develops.

Creating an open textbook is no small feat. It takes a lot of time and dedication, but you don't have to do it on your own!

With your input, we'll identify a Project Manager for your project. This is the person that will help you draft your project plan and this is who you'll reach out with questions. They won't necessarily know the answer to every question you have, but they can help you do the research and keep your project moving forward. 

Once the project manager has been assigned, they'll reach out to find a time for an initial project meeting. The focus of that meeting will be on getting up to speed on the project goals, plan, and timeline.  It can also be a good time to talk about your hopes for the project, what aspects make you nervous, and any specific assistance you might need or want as you move forward.

The Proofreader will come in later, but it can be a good idea to identify that person early on. This might be the same person as your Project Manager or it might be someone new. It could be a colleague in your program or department or another staff member. There are a number of Learning Commons staff members that are prepared to be Proofreaders and provide you with feedback to make sure the materials you create are as good as they can be!

Other people who may be able to support you in this work may include:

• Other instructors with experience teaching the course for which the resource is intended
• Other colleagues, experts, or mentors in your department or field
• Your Dean or Associate Dean
• Other campus staff including people from Academic Excellence, Access Services, the Instructional Media Center, and/or Learner Support
• Colleagues or collaborators from other colleges or workforce/industry partners
• Western Librarians - Ellen and Linda
• Anyone you know with experience publishing textbooks or open textbooks

While you will be doing the majority of the work, there are many people who can discuss ideas, provide suggestions, or help answer your questions. 

What OER already exists that you can use?

Now that you know where you are going, it is worth taking some time to research and review what materials already exist. One of the incredible benefits of OER is that they are reusable. Some existing OER may only require minor edits or additions to be appropriate for your course and why start from scratch if you don't have to?

A librarian would be glad to help you with this work, if you'd like. Just reach out to them and share (if you can) your course outcome summary, table of contents, and a list of any OER you've already found.

As you are planning your project, you will want to do some thinking about the tools and platforms you will use for drafting and publishing your materials. Your content area and project needs should influence the tools you use, and your project manager can assist you in choosing an appropriate platform or platforms.

Questions to consider when selecting platforms

• What kind of content will you be creating? (e.g. Text? Audio? Video? Interactive learning activities? Something else?)
• What other specific requirements do you have? (e.g. Do you need to be able to provide a version for printing? Will you need to display equations or diagrams of some kind?)
• What tools do you already know that could be used? Ideally, you can use technology with which you are already familiar. This is not always possible, but is a good place to start.
• Are you using any existing OER? In what formats are they available? This shouldn't necessarily determine your choice, but using a compatible platform can save you time during the adaptation process. (e.g. If you are adapting resources available in LibreTexts , it may be a natural choice to use the LibreTexts Remixer to create your own materials).

Recommended Text-Based OER Platforms 

There are many freely available online platforms that can be used for creating and hosting Open Educational Resources. But there's also no reason why you can't use a platform with which you are already familiar!

Here are three options that we would recommend for instructors developing their own materials:

• OneDrive or Google Docs shared cloud documents - Shared documents within the cloud provide an easy way to create and collaborate with others on OER projects, and they are likely tools with which you are already comfortable. Examples of OER created with Google Docs: Fundamentals of Electricity and Understanding the Whole Child
• Blackboard - Some instructors prefer to publish and share materials directly through Blackboard, so this is also an option. In this situation, you will likely want to draft the content in OneDrive or Google Drive so that it can be edited (and shared).
• LibreTexts - Libretexts is a growing online repository of OER with free built-in tools to streamline the work of OER (e.g., remixing content) and develop ancillary materials (e.g., student assessments). While Libretexts is not a tool for authoring entirely new OER, you can readily remix, combine and download available OER in an editable format to further develop and refine. Examples of OER created with LibreTexts: Business Concepts: Exploring Careers in Business (by Western instructors Jenny Parker and Mabel Gehrett), A Guide to the Principles of Animal Nutrition, Nursing Fundamentals (OpenRN), and Basic HVAC.

There are quite a few additional platform examples and explanation included in pages 10-16 of the WTCS OER Guidance pdf document by Hilary Barker, should you want or need to dig deeper. Your Project Manager can help you research and explore additional options based on the kind of content you will create and any special requirements you may have.

The content for this Project Planning workshop has been adapted from the following sources, which are openly available thanks to Creative Commons licenses.

and video slides are adapted from a template by Slides Carnival, CC BY.