Rob Nyland, Muffet Jones and Jonathan Lashley presented at the Open Education Conference Oct. 10-12 in Niagara Falls, NY.
Their presentation was titled, “Who Designed this Course? The Trouble with Being Open to Online and Closed to Content.” They discussed the challenges of ensuring stable, meaningful access to content in online courses and how open educational resources (OER) is the most capable solution they have thanks to the five Rs of open licensing – retain, reuse, revise, remix and redistribute. While Lashley and Nyland covered more of the technical considerations of unbundling open content across an online learning environment, Jones spoke to the ways in which an OER text can be successful in an online Art 100 class specifically. All offered strategies for finding and integrating openly licensed course materials that are appropriately rigorous and align well with their course and university objectives.
The panelists fielded challenging, nuanced audience questions for much of the session and the panel’s answers demonstrated how well-resourced Boise State is for supporting OER use in terms of technical infrastructure and faculty/staff know-how.