OER Vision to Reality
by Megan Simmons 3 years, 5 months agoWhat next steps do you plan to take to move your OER work forward?
What five people will you reach out to and share what you have learned during this training?
What supports do you need to continue advancing your Open Educational Practice?
As I create resources within my teaching, I plan to share them on eMedia. I especially plan to search for resources that I can remix and use within eMedia. I plan to share what I've learned during this training with my family members that are all teachers (my sister, my brother, my sister-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my mom). I think it can be extremely beneficial to them. The support that I need to contuinue using OER are more resources. I'm not the type of person to recreate the wheel. I am always searching for ideas from other teachers that I can use in my teaching so I'm hopeful that as words spreads about eMedia there will be more resources that pertain to my area of instruction.
Currently, my efforts with the work of OER in the future is development. There are three major projects that I plan to be apart of in this direction. The first one is to continue to develop my open source textbook for Linear Algebra (Math 2270), entitled "Linear Algebra Done Openly" (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KQ7dbLXI4x39VwZovTL0DKRsZwt_i3Vt/view). The textbook is still very early in its development and not ready yet for wide distribution. The difference between this project and simply just an open source textbook on Linear Algebra is that this textbook is developed, modified, and improved each semester by my students at Southern Utah Univeristy. As part of their regular assignments, students submit "contributions" to the textbook, such as writing new homework exercises or other content they believe could be added to the textbook. It is an ever evolving project.
The second project I am working on in OER is my YouTube channel. As my teaching went online because of COVID-19 in 2020, I started recording videos for my lectures for students to watch asynchronously. These lecture videos are posted on YouTube with an individual "playlist" for each of the courses. Currently, I have completed the lecture series for Calculus II (Math 1220) and Linear Algebra (Math 2270). By the end of Fall 2020, I will have also finished College Algebra (Math 1050) and Abstract Algebra I (Math 4220). I plan to complete Calculus I (Math 1210) during Spring 2021. After that, I plan to work on my Modern Geometries (Math 3130) and Abstract Algebra II (Math 4230) courses. All of these videos will be posted on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKzEdLMdKIVs7FQucbz48bQ) under a CC-BY license.
My third project will be to get involved in OER projects external to my institution. If things go right, I should be involved with a research project with UTMOST of teaching undergraduates using math OER and should be involved in an authoring project with OpenStax College. Here's crossing my fingers.
As an elementary librarian, I am planning to add a set of library lessons to emedia's OER database. I am excited to share this with other librarians and get them to collaborate and add to it as well. I will also add searching for OER to my go to list of resources when I am looking for materials to supplement library lessons. The curriculum tags will be very helpful in developing content that ties to Utah curriculum standards. I am planning on creating a Loom video demonstartion on how to navigate through the eMedia resources and how to remix or create an original lesson which I will share at one of our monthy District meetings for elementary librarians. That will allow me to share this resource with over 60 librarians. I've also had an out of state friend ask me about eMedia. Could you tell me if eMedia access is available in Arizona?