At our suburban community college outside Seattle, a student population largely composed of refugee, immigrant, and international students forces equity issues to the surface. We believe OER offers hope for our students, making education more affordable and inclusive of their many cultures. We will discuss a set of small, practical strategies we use to enhance equity through OER, piggybacking on existing equity discussions happening at our college.
Since we don't have a single person coordinating OER on our campus and we lack a dedicated funding source for OER implementation, we will show what can be done using creative methods of evangelism and funding. Luckily, we have a strong collaboration between the library, instructional design, the bookstore, and the faculty at Highline College.
Because many of our students don't have reliable access to the internet when off campus, it's important that we also make inexpensive print versions of OER available to students. We will discuss a project in which we compared printing costs from various sources to identify the most affordable and adaptable method for our faculty and bookstore.
We will also discuss department projects, such as how the mathematics department uses a free textbook they provide to students to remove the cost, and how they use it to teach students to be effective and efficient learners. Students scribbling in the book inspired instructors to rethink the curriculum; in effect, blurring the line between OER and open education pedagogy.
OER projects on our campus encompass a wide variety of disciplines such as English, adult basic education, ESL, and philosophy, so all of our librarians are versed in OER and assist faculty with implementing OER. We'll talk about resources we've developed to help us with this de-centralized work.
Our goal is to provide session attendees with ideas they can implement on their own campuses, and we want to hear their ideas also.
