Open Education 2017

Adopting OERs widely would help reduce the cost of attendance, while improving the quality of the educational experience students have by bringing better materials and digital literacy skill-building into every OER course. But getting faculty interested in adopting OERs can be challenging. Some fear the unknown, some are afraid of extra work, some are general technophobes, and some just need guidance to begin their own OER journey. This presentation will cover the work of the KCC OER Initiative, which began as an idea and runs on a shoestring budget, at Kingsborough Community College, an urban community college in the City University of New York. To increase adoption of OERs on campus, while maintaining the utmost respect for academic freedom and compassion for our more technologically challenged colleagues, we have focused on making the financial case to faculty and pointing out that as faculty, we all do the work of course design already. The presentation will also cover the different ways the Initiative tries to provide support to interested faculty to make it as easy as possible to open up to OERs using the SAMR approach, including OER Office Hours, Lib Guides, and grant and workshop opportunities. Finally, we are working on building a community and culture of open education. In tracing the OER Initiative at Kingsborough, this presentation will provide how-to resources for a variety of academic disciplines using the SAMR model, with examples of how OERs can be implemented with minimal initial efforts to improve teaching and learning and student engagement, while saving money.