Join us for this webinar to hear how colleges are transitioning from individual faculty OER course adoptions to entire departments and OER degree pathways. OER leaders at colleges who have reached critical mass in their implementation will share best practices for sustaining faculty engagement, student involvement, project funding, and institutional commitment to OER adoption for the enhancement of teaching and learning.

Our featured speakers are both longtime community college leaders in the OER movement at regional and district levels. They will engage each other in discussions on the themes mentioned above and invite questions from webinar attendees.

Faculty who are new to OER may experience difficulty finding an open textbook or other openly licensed materials to adopt for their courses. Searching on your own is time consuming and the choices can be overwhelming. We will hear from a college librarian who helps faculty find and adopt high quality OER to match their course outcomes and the creators of the award winning OER Commons, a freely accessible online library that allows teachers and others to search and discover open educational resources (OER) and other freely available instructional materials.

Please join the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) for a free and open webinar on Designing for Open Pedagogy. Open Pedagogy was first introduced by Lumen Learning co-founder David Wiley, as a way to capture how the use of OER can change educational practices. He relates that using OER in the same way as traditional textbooks is like driving an airplane down the road – it is missing out on what open can provide for student and teacher collaboration, engagement, and learning.

Open Education Week is an ideal time to hear from our community members who are leading open education initiatives on their campuses and across their states to reduce costs for students and empower faculty to enhance learning in their classrooms. We will hear from two OER librarians and a faculty member who are successfully growing awareness and adoption of open educational resources. They will share the successes and challenges of coordinating statewide efforts and influencing their colleagues to adopt OER in their courses.

OER programs provide an opportunity for students to earn a certificate or associates degree without incurring the cost of textbooks for their courses. This can dramatically reduce the cost of attendance and has been estimated at 25% or more savings*. Most OER programs are developed to serve the neediest students who may otherwise have to defer college or take fewer courses due to prohibitive cost. Reaching the students who could most benefit most from enrolling in OER courses can prove to be a challenge in of itself. We will hear from speakers who have developed successful strategies at their colleges to create awareness and encourage underrepresented students to enroll in OER degree programs targeted at their academic success.

Finding and selecting OER to adopt at your college can raise questions about both the quality and accessibility of the content for your students. Join us for this webinar to hear about best practices and rubrics developed to ensure that OER content meets instructional material standards, accessibility guidelines, and open licensing policies established at your institution. These rubrics assist faculty, librarians, instructional designers and other staff to select and adapt open educational resources that meet student needs regardless of disability but are also culturally relevant and engaging for students at your institution and can be freely re-used, re-mixed, and re-distributed.