Open Education 2017

This presentation will briefly introduce the Word Generation program, describe its design features, and share teachers' and students' experiences, with a focus on those that give us hope by better preparing our nation's students as informed citizenry.

At a time in which rhetoric that challenges the norms for civility in public discourse has become commonplace, students in middle schools across the country ”from New York City to Salt Lake City to rural North Carolina ”are reaching for a higher standard. The Word Generation program developed by the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) offers freely available materials and web-based supports to bring evidence-based debate about important civic issues into the classroom, while at the same time promoting mastery of academic language.

Each Word Generation unit focuses on a challenging issue (e.g., What makes an American? Is the death penalty justified?) and culminates in a debate in which students use textual evidence to argue for their position. Design features such as discussion prompts and argument outlines guide students to develop and support positions and respond to each other's reasoning.

Engaging middle school students in civic debate is not an easy sell to time-strapped teachers. But the program is designed to develop academic vocabulary ”a high priority in middle grades. And teachers who initially doubt their students' capacity to discuss complex social issues at all ”let alone from multiple perspectives ”frequently express surprise at the depth of their students' thinking.

By using academic language as a vehicle, embedding supports for teachers and students, and offering the curriculum as an OER, students from disadvantaged backgrounds at the toughest schools are being given the opportunity to share and strengthen their voice, to respect and build on others' ideas, and to become expert in gathering and presenting evidence ”skills needed for the sustainability of a strong democracy.

Montgomery College's commitment to developing OER (z-degree) options is a desire to increase access, affordability, and success for Montgomery County's diverse population, particularly students who are marginalized or underrepresented. Montgomery College's mission and vision emphasize empowering students to change their lives and being an model of educational excellence, opportunity and success. Through a collegewide initiative MC Open, Montgomery College is providing students with the ability to save money on instructional materials while at the same time decreasing the time to degree completion. The first full semester of promoting z-courses through MC Open resulted in more than 3,400 enrollments in about 200 course sections. In concert with MC Open, Montgomery College is developing General Studies A. A. degree options with funding from Achieving the Dream. The initial General Studies OER degree options focus on two transfer paths with in the program, Psychology and English although students are not limited to those transfer options. The General Studies degree typically serves 9,000 students each semester, but courses within the z-degree impact over 25,000 students each semester because the majority of the selected courses meet General Education requirements for any student.The College hopes that the General Studies OER Degree project will help more students complete degrees by increasing access to affordable, quality material; by using open materials and instructional strategies which target a diverse range of learning styles and interests; by decreasing overall student costs, and by providing model paths for students to complete a General Studies A.A. degree.

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.