Open Education 2017

The California State University - MERLOT was awarded a cooperative agreement with the US Department of Labor to create and support the national open repository of OER for workforce development being produced by over 700 community colleges funding by about $2 billion in grants from the TAACCCT (Trade Adjustment Assistance for Community Colleges and Career Training) program.

SkillsCommons is the open online repository for the TAACCCT OER (www.skillscommons.org.) SkillsCommons has captured and preserved the OER developed by grantees and enables easy discovery of the OER for reuse. Adoption of TAACCCT OER beyond the people who developed the OER and sustaining the TAACCCT OER collection and community after the funding ends is being addressed by supporting the community of creators and users of SkillsCommons and TAACCCT resources by leveraging the CSU-MERLOT strategy.

The presentation will demonstrate how to use SkillsCommons by browsing through the collection by industry, by type of credential (associates degree, certificate, latticed/stacked credential, etc.), by type of materials (e.g. online course module, fully online course, tutorials, simulations, etc.), by institution and grant project. The requirements for the instructional materials and program support materials included the content having a Creative Commons license (CC BY), being accessible (section 508 compliant) and being developed with principles of universal design for learning. SkillsCommons SUPPORT SERVICES Center provides any institution guidelines and resources to fulfill these requirements and the SkillsCommons CONNECT Center provides a range of online community and social media tools to help faculty and staff connect with the right people and resources easily. Finally, participants will learn how to efficiently customize online educational content for reuse, revision, and redistribution and accelerate the development and implementation of online programs.