Post by Susan Biro, Acting Manager of Online Learning, DoIT
In a survey of more than 900 students from fall 2020 who completed courses that utilized no-cost or low-cost Open Educational Resources (OER), UMBC students said they appreciated saving money on instructional materials and would recommend an OER course to others.
Nearly 90% of students said the quality of the OER course materials was of similar or higher quality than non-OER course materials. In the surveyed courses, faculty replaced traditional print textbooks with OERs and provided supplemental digital homework tools. Forty-five percent of students who completed the survey said they would be fairly likely or very likely to enroll in an OER course again, while 53% said they would recommend an OER course to others.
Instructors Sarah Bass (CHEM 101), Tara Carpenter (CHEM 102), and Maria Manni (SPAN 101/103) replaced traditional print textbooks with OERs and provided supplemental digital homework tools.
Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium (digital or otherwise) that are released under an open license that permits no-cost or low-cost access, use, adaptation, or redistribution (UNESCO, 2002). OER can include textbooks, syllabi, supplementary materials, quizzes, assessment rubrics, homework, or labs.
About 60 comments were provided about students' experience with OERs. The majority of written feedback focused on positive engagement with the digital resources and homework tools that supported students' ability to practice problems or equations and learn vocabulary.
Students offered additional comments about how they would use money saved from OER toward paying tuition or other fees (64%), covering personal expenses (55%), buying textbooks or materials for other classes (46%), or taking an additional course (19%). Some expressed challenges with the materials themselves, such as relevance to course content, impact on learning style, or ability to annotate online content vs. printed material.
Additional observations:
A total of 551 students completed the survey from the 917 invited to participate. The survey was distributed to students using Blackboard's native Enterprise Survey tool.
Explore how you can adopt OERs for your course:
Attend upcoming virtual events:
Contact OER co-chairs Erin Durham (edurham@umbc.edu) or Susan Biro (sbiro@umbc.edu) for more information on OER at UMBC.
]]>Last month, we kicked off our GO Chat series for 2021 with a dive into all-things-open, as in Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Pedagogy, and Open Science.
We started with a brief discussion about several recent articles that caught our attention:
Helping us understand this journey about all-things-open was UMBC alumni Dr. Karen Cangialosi, a Professor of Biology and Open Education Faculty Fellow at Keene State College (KSC) in Keene, New Hampshire.
Although she regularly incorporates open pedagogy in all her courses, Karen explains her journey started with an episode of the podcast, The Future Trends Forum by Bryan Alexander. During the episode featuring Gardner Cambell (2016), Karen recalled, "I'm a biology professor who used mostly traditional materials, but I did a complete 180 when it came to open education after listening to Gardner Campbell."
A proponent of Open Educational Resources (OER), Karen says OERs are an important gateway to open education in terms of people, practices, and content. Open pedagogy is about access, agency, and community. Karen describes a learning environment where her students can work with her to create content or learning outcomes, write an attendance policy, design self assessments, or determine how they will be graded.
While students can be unsure, or even resistant to this approach, Karen suggests that since most students will not know what this process can be about she still offers more traditional methods, content, or assessments. And what often ends up happening in those instances is that a few weeks after watching classmates create and share content, students will come to her and ask, "Can I change? I want to do what they're doing instead of this 25-page paper I said I'd write."
When it comes to students sharing content, Karen never requires them to create openly licensed work; however, she provides examples and opportunities that make it possible. For example, her BIO 318 students created a textbook -- A Student's Guide to Tropical Marine Biology that is utilized by other students across the open education community.
Karen acknowledges open education has been building slowly and she frequently guides colleagues to start with "your desire as a professor and what you want students to do and learn in your course." As higher education is changing dramatically now due to COVID-19, Karen sees faculty ideally positioned to shape those conversations and changes. Read more about Karen at her website: https://karencang.net/
In a survey of more than 900 students from fall 2020 who completed courses that utilized no-cost or low-cost Open Educational Resources (OER), UMBC students said they appreciated saving money on instructional materials and would recommend an OER course to others.
Nearly 90% of students said the quality of the OER course materials was of similar or higher quality than non-OER course materials. In the surveyed courses, faculty replaced traditional print textbooks with OERs and provided supplemental digital homework tools. Forty-five percent of students who completed the survey said they would be fairly likely or very likely to enroll in an OER course again, while 53% said they would recommend an OER course to others.
Instructors Sarah Bass (CHEM 101), Tara Carpenter (CHEM 102), and Maria Manni (SPAN 101/103) replaced traditional print textbooks with OERs and provided supplemental digital homework tools.
Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning, and research materials in any medium (digital or otherwise) that are released under an open license that permits no-cost or low-cost access, use, adaptation, or redistribution (UNESCO, 2002). OER can include textbooks, syllabi, supplementary materials, quizzes, assessment rubrics, homework, or labs.
About 60 comments were provided about students’ experience with OERs. The majority of written feedback focused on positive engagement with the digital resources and homework tools that supported students’ ability to practice problems or equations and learn vocabulary.
Students offered additional comments about how they would use money saved from OER toward paying tuition or other fees (64%), covering personal expenses (55%), buying textbooks or materials for other classes (46%), or taking an additional course (19%). Some expressed challenges with the materials themselves, such as relevance to course content, impact on learning style, or ability to annotate online content vs. printed material.
Additional observations:
A total of 551 students completed the survey from the 917 invited to participate. The survey was distributed to students using Blackboard’s native Enterprise Survey tool.
Explore how you can adopt OERs for your course:
Attend upcoming virtual events:
Contact OER co-chairs Erin Durham (edurham@umbc.edu) or Susan Biro (sbiro@umbc.edu) for more information on OER at UMBC.
]]>VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in several ways – text, voice, audio file, or webcam. VoiceThread is available to any instructor who would like to incorporate this engagement tool into their digital toolkit for academic continuity. With VoiceThread, faculty and students can:
Demonstrate procedures to help students prepare for a practical exam
Explain decisions when selecting subjects for a painting’s composition
Foster greater community in large, lecture-based classes
Debate the pros and cons of a controversial issue
Practice foreign language skills during role-play
Critique a classmate’s composition
To learn more about Voicethread and to expand your use of Voicethread in your teaching, please consider attending these webinars:
Using VoiceThread in Blackboard
Feb. 9, 2021 at 1:00pm ET - Register here
In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to create VoiceThreads and then add them to your Blackboard course as lessons or assessments.
New Assignment Features Workshop
Feb. 16 at 7:00pm ET - Register here
In this workshop, you will learn how to turn new assignments on for your courses and begin using them with your students. We will review all of the workflows, new features, and options for your VoiceThread assessments.
New Assignment Features Workshop
March. 9, 2021 at 1:00pm ET - Register here
In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to create VoiceThreads and then add them to your Blackboard course as lessons or assessments
As announced last semester, a redesigned VoiceThread (VT) assignment tool is now live. The new interface provides new features with streamlined workflows and enhanced options. Clear, dynamic checklist requirements, grading requirements, and submission status are all new features of the new VoiceThread assignment tool.
In addition to determining the playback and sharing settings for all VT assignments, instructors may now automatically have edit access to student-created VoiceThread submissions. A new Student Gallery option provides students with a central area to see all VoiceThreads for a single assignment, allowing them to view and comment on their peers’ submissions.
Faculty may set start dates and due dates for VT assignments, which hide activities before you are ready for students to see them. New grading features are also available including checking the status of student submissions as unattempted, in progress, or submitted. Automatic reminders to submit can be sent to students. Grading is done with the VoiceThread interface and will automatically synchronize with Blackboard’s gradebook. Grading is based on a percentage-based or pass/fail format.
Faculty who would like to learn more about the new VoiceThread assignment may wish to review these tools:
Review the new assignment features in this VoiceThread training recording
As always, if you have any questions about teaching, learning and technology at UMBC, please consider the following options:
PIVOT | Academic Continuity | Keep On Teaching | Student Technology Resources
Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups
Request a consult with instructional technology staff
If you do not have an account, QM will walk you through the process of creating an account.
If you have questions about Quality Matters at UMBC, please open an RT ticket to contact QM Coordinators: Dr. Mariann Hawken or Dr. Susan Biro. ]]>
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