If you've been thinking about how to make your courses more affordable and accessible, this workshop is for you. Open Educational Resources are freely available online. However, finding and evaluating openly licensed educational resources (OER) requires a unique skill set. Research in adopting OER also suggests that, in order to improve student learning outcomes, educators need not only to replace proprietary educational resources with freely accessible open education resources, but also to re-align assessments, activities and resources with the course objectives: the content or skills to be covered in this course. In this workshop, participants will be taken through a step-by-step process for finding and evaluating OER that are aligned with learning objectives for a course they are or will be teaching.

This is Part 1 in a 2-part series of workshops. In this workshop, after a short presentation on OER Basics, participants will analyze their syllabus and idnetify learning objectives. They will then use several search strategies to find and document open resources aligned with learning objectives, using a tracking document. Once a list of resources has been generated, participants will evaluate the resources for content, learning objective-alignment, and quality.

Objective: By the end of this workshop, participants will be equipped with the tools and skills needed to find and evaluate OER that support learning outcomes for their courses.  

Audience: Faculty and Instructors at the University of Regina and its federated colleges. (No experience with OER necessary)

What to bring:

• Participants will need to bring your own device to use for the activities around finding and evaluating OER
• Participants will need to bring your own syllabus/unit plan to work from.

Format: In-Person. This workshop is designed for in-person delivery. However, if you are a University of Regina or its federated colleges member and can't make it in-person, please email open.textbooks@uregina.ca to request a Zoom link. This session will not be recorded.

Registration will close on June 12 @ 4:30 p.m.