The school year is drawing to a close, and some of you may have started creating a list of course resources for the next semester. Have you thought about teaching with Open Educational Resources? How do you go about choosing them?

Your institution may subscribe to many well-known OER databases that would help to alleviate the common issues of quality and to license when choosing OERs. Another way to look at OERs is to see them as a pedagogical tool. As DeRosa and Robinson write: “By replacing a static textbook — or other stable learning material — with one that is openly licensed, faculty have the opportunity to create a new relationship between learners and the information they access in the course. Instead of thinking of knowledge as something students need to download into their brains, we start thinking of knowledge as something continuously created and revised.” 

As many of you know, the Café Learn’s platform has at its core the dynamic Idea Exchange – a virtual space for instructors to add and curate course material sharing them with other instructors. Here you can discover activities and tips from your colleagues who may teach in the same discipline at another college. You can also add your own content. In addition, the design of the Idea Exchange allows you to use this material in a pedagogically sound way by integrating a piece of content into an activity that would appear in your students learning path linked to your particular learning outcomes, or based on your students’ progress in class.

We welcome your thoughts on the use of open educational resources in your classrooms. ​

Blog post by Tatiana Tatarchevskiy, Café Learn Community Engagement Manager
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A move to open and free education resources is now a trend; there’s even an official Open Education Week. Nonetheless, embracing and using OER (open education resources) is much easier said than done, and there are a few reasons for this.

There are two barriers to quick adoption of OER: 1. migration from comprehensive “textbook” to granular and disparate content, and 2. the lack of easy discoverability of non “textbook” content.

Today, the majority of publisher content and OER state initiatives focus on textbooks. But, many instructors are moving away for comprehensive textbooks-whether they be commercial or open--regardless of the OER movement as they are looking for content that is more modular and customizable to their specific curricula. The modular approach is just as desired when looking for OER, so  “textbooks” that are open and free are not necessarily improving teaching and learning.
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In order to make the use of OER more effective and efficient, instructors need:

• Better discoverability for granular uses of OER
• ​Easier ways to collaborate with other instructions in curation of OER
• Professional development, from digital literacy to integrating OER with best practices in teaching and learning
• Top down combined with bottom-up support/funding/mandates/structure

The highest quality repositories of OER are filled with first-generation OER that is comprehensive and similar to commercial textbooks. These include California State University System’s MERLOT the University of Minnesota’s Open Textbook Library and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges Open Course Library. The question is, how we help instructors and institutions access, create, and share content? How and who in the OER movement will facilitate ways to champion adopters of OER and mainstream it? Café Learn is certainly one such tool, and others are emerging.  We want to know what you’re doing and what you are using.
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Blog post by Carrie O'Donnell, Café Learn CEO and Co-Founder