Open Education 2017

With great gratitude to the NEH we propose to share a new OER learning resource obtained for our community college during a two year …Bridging Cultures' NEH grant. Fifteen Ivy Tech teachers from 8 disciplines created 150 one-page Teaching Modules (TM) on five world religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism & Buddhism. These TM are publically archived by IUPUI, our four-year partner school on this grant. Thus, this OER resource is readily available for community college teachers across Indiana and (may we propose) across the USA.

We will report the measured response and interpret the results we get in a six month campaign of advocacy for these TM as an OER actively used by teachers at Ivy Tech campuses across the state. We will recruit selected teachers at the Central Indiana Region (the largest in the state) and engage them in adopting and using at least one TM in one of their classes for summer and fall terms. Simultaneously, we will recruit teachers in three other Ivy Tech regions who will also …adopt and use' the TM during the same period. Our findings will give us data to report on the practical aspects of OER advocacy and support when we present a splendid new OER resource. We will set metrics to report on teacher and student interest and engagement, metrics on student learning results, metrics to measure the ease of use for this set of new OER materials. We will interpret our findings to permit judging of the enthusiasm for and even skepticism about the adoption and use of OER resources.

As part of our presentation we will propose to actively recruit teachers from our audience who we hope will be inspired by our advocacy such that we can continue our conversation and possibly plan to use the TM at their school during the next year. We will propose that our findings for this …national' roll out of our TM would be a wonderful …adoptions and use' story we can report findings on at the 2018 OER conference.