Wisconsin Open Education Symposium

Step into the role of an OER creator, designing and developing open resources that reflect your educational vision and expertise. Hear from faculty experiences developing OER from across Wisconsin.

Embrace Open Pedagogy, involving students in OER tasks to enrich their learning journey while optimizing teaching efforts.

Continue refining the art of OER adaptation, focusing on innovative ways to tailor educational resources for diverse learning environments.

Dive into the creative process of customizing and modifying OER to better suit your educational needs and objectives in the LibreVerse.

Unravel the complexities of copyright and Creative Commons Licensing, empowering educators to share and use content responsibly.

Embark on a journey to master the art of locating and assessing Open Educational Resources (OER), laying a robust groundwork for future educational adventures.

In this presentation, I will share my experience with several OER textbooks I've used successfully in my English Composition courses. I'll focus on how OER textbooks can center student experience and serve as an important tool in applying diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom.

This lightning session will introduce ideas for open education advocates to highlight ways OER are already embedded in teaching and learning at their institutions, often in ways less visible than textbooks, and how these examples might serve as counterpoints to common concerns and myths about OER.

Hear from a group of open education experts from across the Wisconsin Technical College System discuss their experience working on projects, creating OER, and more.

OER comprise the entire gamut of media—this should include tabletop roleplaying games (RPG)! Countless instructors have experienced the benefits of simulated scenarios as a pedagogical medium to make abstract concepts tangible, but this can limit access to quality scenarios to those associated with expensive publishers or to materials crafted or purchased by well-resourced instructors or institutions. Meanwhile a host of highly accessible RPG exist under open licenses—many encouraging a sixth R: “Reskinning.” Reskinning is the game design practice of keeping mechanics of play while modifying narrative and theme. For us, this can mean repurposing an RPG for classroom use. This presentation highlights the pedagogical value of RPG, makes the case for RPG OER, and provides some practical considerations for “Reskinning” for instruction.

What if you were given the opportunity to build a new academic program at your college? How would you incorporate OER into the course design process from the beginning of a program? That is the question we are wrestling with at Martin Luther College. As we develop two online asynchronous competency-based programs to support our growing returning adult learner population, we are committed to leveraging OER and AER throughout our curriculum. Our presentation will share the roles of our faculty support team – the program director, instructional designer, and library director – as well as the resources we are using to educate our faculty on OER. We’ll also discuss how we are managing the exponentially growing catalog of OER materials we are uncovering and creating.

Learning road maps are a great visual way to organize unit content and OER resources. They allow the instructor to visually scaffold all the assignments, rubrics, examples, resources, and review materials on a single document. This empowers students to self-pace, differentiate, and easily access materials, supporting student ownership over the learning process. This also facilitates absence learning recovery for students who miss class. Join this session to learn best practices on how to construct and use a learning road map in your courses.

ADAPT is a new online homework system being developed by LibreTexts to serve the Open Education community. This workshop will showcase the ADAPT online homework system which incorporates LibreStudio for building H5P questions and sophisticated learning analytics. We will demonstrate how to use ADAPT to augment existing and newly constructed OER textbooks and embed them in LMSs, LibreTexts textbooks, as a standalone application for summative testing and to use with cell phones as in-class clickers. Access is free to all verified instructors at https://ADAPT.libretexts.org.

In this presentation we will have an intentional dialogue centered on moving our respective organizations forward in our equity work. How are we collectively making space for our most vulnerable and marginalized stakeholders? How are we developing systems of support for them? And what do leaders need to know to sustain and drive the work forward?

The need to support faculty who are adopting or creating OER is tantamount to growing an Open Education program. Two schools within the University of Texas system, UT Austin and UT Rio Grande Valley, take varied approaches on assisting faculty with their OER efforts. At UT Rio Grande Valley, faculty are offered mini-professional development stipends to explore, review, and adopt OER. At UT Austin, faculty apply for a stipend-supported fellowship in which they adopt or create OER intended to render their course cost-free for students. In this presentation, attendees will learn about both approaches, each of which provides targeted methods to support and engage with faculty. Attendees will leave the presentation with concrete ideas and resources to begin or grow similar programs at their own institutions, including ideas on how to market those programs, how to support participating faculty, and how to overcome potential obstacles.

During a summer fellowship at UNC Charlotte, I created a website for the library that promoted textbook affordability by providing information on OERs, providing helpful/relevant links to students and faculty alike, and contact forms that are sent to librarians to continue the conversation on textbook affordability. In order to ensure I created the best website for the library, I did plenty of research by interviewing librarians at other schools promoting textbook affordability and looking to other schools' websites to see what worked and didn't. For my presentation, I would discuss my process of finding the perfect elements of the website and walk people through the website and the importance of different aspects.

For the last several years, the Milwaukee Area Technical College Open Access Team has worked diligently to share with MATC information about the international open education movement through regular email announcements, campus flyers, and presentations at campus events. Furthermore, each OER Facilitator is responsible for communicating with faculty in their assigned pathway, and an OER Facilitator was hired to be a college-wide OER Marketing Coordinator, publishing a newsletter each term with a faculty feature showcasing OER successes alongside OER opportunities and publications. This person also coordinates the regular campus-wide announcements, assists with the MATC OER website development alongside our library liaison, and recently led an OER communications team to create OER flyers for students, lead faculty, and the bookstore. Furthermore, the whole Open Access Team has led Open Education Week events each year, presented at MATC Day, and more. This marketing along with the creation of no cost/low cost OER courses has helped MATC students save over a million dollars. In this session we will share our marketing materials with other colleges and then offer an open discussion to brainstorm more ways we can promote OER in our colleges.

Witness how Renton Technical College (RTC) spearheaded a groundbreaking OER Mini-Grant initiative, igniting positive change across Washington State's educational landscape. RTC's OER Mini-Grant program innovates education by fostering faculty-driven explorations of OER. Dive into our journey as we share the triumphant tale of saving students nearly $400,000 in textbook expenses in 2022, all while harnessing the potential of OER. Engage with our esteemed faculty 'OER Heroes,' who've seamlessly integrated OER into ESL, math, computer science, welding, and biology courses. Gain firsthand insights into our faculty's experience—ranging from discovering, adapting, and creating OER to observing transformative pedagogical outcomes. Explore the diverse perspectives and innovative best practices that emerged, with student feedback echoing the resounding success.This session offers a toolbox of strategies to cultivate institutional support for instructors, nurture a culture of Openness, and transcend traditional educational boundaries.

Since its founding, Lumen Learning has set industry benchmarks through its commitment to increase equity, access and affordability in education. To fulfill our mission, to enable unprecedented learning for all students, we curate and create OER to develop sets of course materials aligned with learning outcomes for general education courses. The result is a quality, low cost course package that faculty members can use to replace expensive textbooks. Janet Lara and Erin Farrey are the Regional Sales Directors that cover the central region, including Wisconsin. We would love to share information about Lumen Learning and how we support efforts in adopting OER to keep costs low and increase student success.

I will discuss how to teach basic writing and composition courses that focus on student texts rather than textbooks. I will also talk about student centered ways to use open source resources like Purdue OWL and writingspaces.org, as well as freely available videos like Do You Speak American? and Talking Black in America. These resources provide sociolinguistic grounding, as well as discourse/instruction about common writing issues. I have been teaching composition courses without a textbook for nearly 20 years, and I will share key components of how I accomplish all the course objectives for a writing course at varied two year college levels, as well as how focusing on student texts increases student engagement and investment in the writing process.

From a CreateFest to a finished product, this cross functional workgroup (faculty, instructional designers, librarians) from across the WTCS will share their process and insights from adapting and publishing a Medical Terminology textbook, creating a printable student companion guide, and developing a course shell for Canvas Commons for faculty to adopt. Learn how this workgroup thoughtfully picked a textbook that would not only benefit their students but dual enrollment students as well. They also proactively addressed many of the issues that we commonly hear about open educational resources: lack of instructor resources, low-fi/printable options, and non-LMS dependent quizzes.

We see the question on the reg - “How much does it cost to create an OER?” It would be great if there was an easy answer, but it just doesn’t work that way. This panel will speak about their experiences developing no-cost healthrelated courses or resources with a variety of dollar amounts - from a $0 allowance to a $2.5 million budget. Hear their journey from start to finish.

This presentation will showcase the free ADAPT homework system with LibreStudio sponsored by the California Education Learning Lab. We will demonstrate how to use ADAPT to augment existing and newly constructed OER textbooks with summative exercises and embed them in LMSs, LibreTexts textbooks, in a standalone application and in-class clickers.

You’ve picked your OER. Now what are some advantages? Social annotation allows students to annotate alongside their peers. It promotes memory retention, engaging conversations, and community building in any classroom format. Perusall is a tool to embed into the LMS that allows the instructors to use an array of options between self grading, adding questions, quizzes, read aloud for students, and many more features. This session will teach the Perusall basics along with testimony of student experiences. Students like this tool!

Faculty are knowledgeable, passionate experts in their content areas, often with all the skills they need to use and create OER resources. However, given their own educational histories or the way institutions are structured, diving into the new, rich, and exciting world of OER can seem to be an unnecessary drain on time and mental energy and a project beyond their capacities. Taking a different approach to introducing and/or expanding OER initiatives, the Selfish Professor Approach, we can empower faculty in a new (and comical) light to really impress upon them the power they have to make a difference by harnessing the excitement and deep understanding they have for their content.

Covering necessary information literacy (IL) topics in a one shot session can be difficult. To address this challenge, the Marquette Raynor Memorial Libraries developed a suite of modules focused on discrete IL topics. These interactive Articulate Storyline modules can be pre-loaded into a Learning Management System (LMS) 7 providing flexibility in teaching IL concepts beyond the one shot session. Learn about the development, implementation, and evaluation of these modules, then join us in helping to improve them by downloading the source files from the project GitHub - http://marquetterml.github.io/information-literacy-modules/

In this session, panelists will describe efforts led by the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC) under a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and in collaboration with the National Consortium for OER (NCOER), a partnership between the four higher education regional compacts to increase access, affordability, and equity using OER. MHEC’s focus has been to expand and strengthen capacity in the 12 MHEC states (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin) to scale up and implement a sustainable OER infrastructure and open education practices. Attendees will learn about promising practices in organizing and supporting grassroots regional and statewide collaboration, as well as gain insights from the research underway.

In Fall of 2021, the University of Wisconsin-Superior designed and deployed our first Textbook Affordability Survey for students. The survey was voluntary, but even so we saw a surprising turnout, even without incentive. In this lightning talk, we will discuss the survey, the results, and implications for future survey instruments on this topic.

What do students say about these kinds of processes and pedagogical approaches to teaching, specifically in classes that are writing-intensive? This presentation will showcase student responses to OER/OEP and Ungrading from specific semesters in first-year composition courses as well as an introductory creative writing course at the North Dakota State College (taught by Sybil Priebe). If necessary, and if time allows, the presentation will include the presenter’s background with OER, OEP, and Ungrading, as well as how these elements are used in her classroom and any tweaks for her future plans.

What does OER sound like? We will discuss our experience producing an OER audiobook for Political Science. Specifically, we created an audio adaptation of an OpenStax textbook, American Government 3rd Edition. In this presentation, we will discuss the initial concept, funding source, equipment needs, planning, production process, finding and creating audio resources, and strategies for publishing. We will further explore how to utilize platforms such as Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts for distribution.

Creating a textbook involves more than writing content. There are logistics and perspectives to consider, such as the platform, imagery, universal design, diverse perspectives, and dissemination. However, this does not need to all be a solitary endeavor. There are many skilled experts to turn to throughout this process to make the development more fruitful. This talk explores the collaborative process of creating an open drawing textbook by professors that teach in different disciplines - art and psychology. Both successes and challenges of the experience will be discussed.

OER and OP promise much for education, but they cannot replace an instructor or make tired teaching better. This presentation will explore how to design active, student-centered use of OER and OP into every class we teach, emphasizing the social sciences classroom.

This poster session will provide an alternative to OER through the use of LibGuides created by library staff and faculty. The purpose is to supplement the OER text with a variety of interactive resources and links to advance access and equity to educational resources. LibGuides have evolved into supplemental open education materials that have been incorporated into the classroom like Gateway to Success, the College’s First Year Experience course. In addition, LibGuides have been utilized to enhance programming such as the 21-Day Equity Challenge, Crucial Conversations, Diversity 365 programming and the GLOW leadership and diversity experience.

WTCS published the OER and Antiracism Teaching Guide in Summer 2022 in collaboration with the Open for Antiracism program co-led by the Community College Consortium for OER (CCCOER) and College of the Canyons. The guide provides resources for faculty to learn about antiracist pedagogies and how OER and open pedagogy can support their implementation in the classroom with students. It encourages instructors to transform at least one aspect of their teaching by creating an action plan with a timeline and steps for immediate implementation.

In this session, participants will explore the connection between equity, accessibility, and open educational resources (OER). OER have the potential to offer more equitable and accessible learning experiences for students because they can be tailored to meet the needs of the students, including learning outcome alignment, accessible formatting, diverse learning materials, and diverse assessments. Participants will have the opportunity to view resources and apply their learning

The WTCS OER Repository is a growing database of open educational resources aligned with WTCS courses. Within this Repository, you can find (1) your college’s OER point-person, (2) examples of OER that have been adopted across the WI Technical Colleges, (3) a database of available OER organized by instructional area, and (4) funding opportunities to support open education work. This session will guide you through how to leverage this Repository and use the information to find and adopt open content.

Join us for a session on copyright and Open Educational Resources. This presentation will cover (1) the basics of copyright, (2) share the WTCS-created Using Copyrighted Content with OER guidance, and (3) walk through some real-world examples to assess the case for fair use. Bring your copyright and OER questions!

To address institutional priorities of increasing student success, mitigating equity gaps, and to offset the increasing costs of students’ textbooks, the Open Education Resources (OER) Program Team from the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay launched an OER development program to facilitate the development and curation of free resources. This program, which was initiated in the 2021-22 academic year, pairs instructional staff with a small project team. In addition to funding awards to instructors who adopt, modify, or create OER for UWGB courses, this program also leverages the existing expertise on campus from academic support offices such as the UWGB Libraries and the Center for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning (CATL). The instructor and the project team work together to add the OER to the course; librarians help find materials, advise upon accessibility improvements, and perform some copyright assessment. Simultaneously, the instructor and the CATL staff discuss various concepts that are vital to developing equitable and inclusive courses such as backward design; multiple means of expression, engagement, and representation; and using authentic assessments. Working collaboratively with these offices has garnered over 20 interested instructors over the past year, leading to successful outcomes as well as unexpected obstacles. For example, while students are expected to save money from the replacement of conventional textbooks with free alternatives, these OER are tethered to the schools LMS which can inhibit access after the course is complete. Please join us as the UWGB OER Program Team shares lessons learned and suggestions for forging collaborative partnerships.

Annotation improves student focus and comprehension, and social annotation gives students the opportunity to interact with and learn from each other, building class community. The presentation will discuss applying social annotation tools to OER texts and student perceptions of annotation. Participants will learn about Perusall and Google Drive as online social annotation tools towards their OER digital reading. Faculty and students in two-year colleges regularly work with online materials on laptops and tablets (Gierdowski, 2019; Galanek and Gierdowski, 2020). When online materials are OER texts,students have the materials digitally, providing increased access and accessibility. Yet, some students and faculty report a preference for printed materials (Cohn, 2021). Instructors can help students engage with online materials by teaching them effective ways to interact with texts online (Cohn, 2021). Social annotation is one method of effectively interacting with online texts to increase student comprehension and build community in the classroom.

Financials are a constant concern to students during a time when job instability is at a high. In some cases, the cost of textbooks can be higher than tuition. So what is our solution to help reduce textbook costs? MPTC has embraced the idea of OER. But how can we ensure that we have a common language regarding OERs, and how do we help faculty get started when they are already burdened with busy work schedules? One MPTC Curriculum Department solution has been the creation of a modular training experience developed with Articulate Rise. We’ll share the development of our training program designed to engage our faculty in discovering the convenience and benefit of OER resources. We will share our experience in choosing technology and layout, as well as our goals for faculty. Join us as we explore the goals for the training course, the tech used to develop it, the topics we included, and the takeaways from the experience.

Physics, Chemistry, Anatomy & Physiology, Biochemistry and many more science courses at Chippewa Valley Technical College are now textbook free. Over the last eight years the science faculty have consciously worked to lessen or eliminate textbook costs for their students. With the incentive of the pandemic this idea has been extended to include lab kits for online courses. These kits are being sent home with students so that they can have a real hands-on lab experience at home, at no cost to them. We are excited to share our OER ideas and journey while teaching science.

This session will focus on the acquisition and integration of OER textbooks for English Composition teachers, or other interested faculty, in the Wisconsin Technical College System. Attendees of this presentation will learn about where they can find OER texts, whether through OER Commons, Merlot, etc., and what to consider when looking for a text that meets the needs of their writing curriculum. Additionally, the presentation will cover strategies for integrating textbook readings and exercises into course syllabi and schedules. The session will also explore strategies for adopting OER texts into courses that already have an established textbook, and look at how OERs can supplement course content by either filling in gaps in coverage, or providing additional resources for students.

Too often, faculty do not realize the power of using OER as a teaching tool, let alone know how to search for resources to compliment a course they are teaching. As the teaching landscape changes to more flexible delivery modes, the need for varying teaching and learning resources may increase. At Waukesha County Technical College, the Curriculum Office collaborated with the Director of Library Services to create a brief workshop to acquaint faculty with the concept of OER and repositories available to them for free and open sources. Through a Lightning Presentation, we would like to share our approach in providing faculty with information regarding OER and Library Services to assist them in using materials that are free to students.

John McLeod, Account Manager at Pressbooks, will demonstrate how to use the Pressbooks Directory to search and discover content, and showcase how you can contribute to the OER ecosystem without writing a book from scratch. John will speak more broadly about the Pressbooks platform, its authoring and editing capabilities, how Pressbooks books can be connected to a learning management system, and how Pressbooks can be used on an institutional level to facilitate adoption, creation, and adaption of OER and courseware.

In this session, panelists will describe efforts led by the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC) under a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and in collaboration with the National Consortium for OER (NCOER), a partnership between the four higher education regional compacts to increase access, affordability, and equity using OER. MHEC’s focus has been to expand and strengthen capacity in the 12 MHEC states (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin) to scale up and implement a sustainable OER infrastructure and open education practices. Attendees will learn about promising practices in organizing and supporting grassroots regional and statewide collaboration.

The term "Copyright" can be a word charged with fear and worry of doing "something wrong." With a few tools copyright can be used to empower OER creators in developing resources to their full potential. This workshop will provide attendees with a basic understanding of Creative Commons licensing and fair use in relation to OER creation, use, and remixing. Attendees will leave with a toolbox of resources to further their understanding and build copyright confidence.

The General Anatomy and Physiology department at Western Technical College is committed to accessible and affordable learning materials for all students. Over the past year, we have created an entire lab manual using Open Educational Resources. Our lab manual is available to students in electronic (PDF or Word) or print versions through the bookstore. Our OER lab manual has increased the accessibility of our content by eliminating the financial burden of traditional textbooks, providing personalized content unique to our student demographic, and differentiating instruction through the inclusion of supplemental activities, resources and guides. We have found that moving to OER has enabled our students to be prepared for class the first day and be able to access these materials in print and online. In addition to improved student success, our department has grown tremendously in communication, collaboration and consistency, which also positively impacts the student learning experience. Moving forward we plan to update our Advanced A&P lab packet to include OER resources that are in line with the OER textbook. Students have appreciated the more engaging lab content and the reduced cost of these materials. We plan to work with Disability Services, to ensure our content works with added learning tools such as eReaders. I would like to share our OER lab packet to the free online database for other instructors to adopt and modify. It will save others the fear of copyright infringement and allow them to adopt something that is ready to implement.

In the life sciences, quantitative skills are crucial for being able to think critically about data and how to interpret it. Come to learn about a resource for many life sciences lessons that use quantitative skills to teach a topic. Not only are there lessons you can easily use in your classroom but there are also opportunities to join groups of like-minded faculty across the country (or globe) and work together to implement these lessons or create one of your own. This is well suited to life sciences faculty (microbiology, A & P, biology, ecology, etc.) and math faculty who teach life sciences students.

In 2019, CVTC was awarded a four-year, $2.5 million grant from the Department of Education's Open Textbook Pilot grant program to lead the collaborative creation of five Nursing OER textbooks and 25 Virtual Reality scenarios aligned with the WTCS statewide nursing curriculum. Over 65 WTCS faculty and staff have contributed to the development of the Open RN textbooks and VR scenarios, with three books published to date – Nursing Pharmacology, Nursing Skills, and Nursing Fundamentals. Open RN textbooks have been adopted by over half of WTCS colleges and have also been very well received internationally, with over 1 million page views and 300,000 users. This presentation will provide a tour of the three Open RN e-books and associated H5P activities. Student outcome data and Open RN’s sustainability plan will also be shared, with plenty of time for audience questions.

The LibreTexts Remixer, currently in it's second version, is a one-of-a-kind technology used to create, or adapt, OER for your courses. It's powerful but easy-to-use drag and drop technology allows for seamless remixing of openly licensed materials from across the entire LibreTexts platform--that's over 300,000 pages of content. Join LibreTexts Executive Director, Delmar Larsen, for a firsthand look at how the LibreTexts Remixer can make switching to OER a reality.

Have you thought about using Open Educational Resources but it all seems overwhelming? Great news! You don't have to jump into the deep end of the swimming pool on the first day. Being a Business faculty member at Nicolet College I knew my students needed help but also knew that although I wanted to tackle it all once, it wasn’t feasible. I will talk about what prompted me to start using OER and the journey I have taken from dipping my toes in the shallow end to wading into the deep end. You will walk away knowing that it is okay, take it slow, ask for help, and the steps I took from just adopting a book to totally revamping my courses.

This is a motivational speech that focuses on how I began my journey with OER with the adoption of a textbook to the creation of H5P in Pressbooks.

I teach horticulture. For many of my classes there either is not a textbook, or if there is it may be old or have many irrelevant parts. But more commonly the problem is that they are written for academic college courses, not hands-on classes for students who may have never been successful in high school. For this reason I used passages from books, trade magazine articles, and university bulletins to put together a course-book for my Greenhouse and Nursery Management class. I'll share what I did, how I did it, how the students responded, and what I'll change.

The Affordable Learning Steering Committee at CVTC wanted to recognize the time and effort that faculty put into implementing OER/AER in a course. The Committee created a stipend process through the Curriculum department. Faculty who successfully create, adapt, or maintain an OER/AER resource in a course which replaces a textbook are eligible for the stipend application process after piloting for at least one term. CVTC's application process will be shared in this Lightning Talk.

How do we expand upon the traditional tools found in most learning management systems to engage our learners and measure their understanding? H5P is an open learning content authoring tool that allows instructors to embed small formative assessments directly into their learning content. In this session, you will learn some of the capabilities of H5P and see examples of content created with it. Expect to walk away with fresh ideas on how to enhance your online instruction.

Since 2013, the use of OER materials at Chippewa Valley Technical College grew from a tiny pilot by passionate faculty to an institutional effort that delivered over $1,000,000 in student savings in 2020-21. This presentation will tell the story of the starts, stops, controversies, missteps, and successes that eventually led to a college-wide Affordable Learning initiative.

A review of current literature on the topic of Open Educational Resources (OERs) suggests that a key catalyst in the adoption of OERs is the effort to minimize the negative impact of cost as a barrier to education and learning. Yet, OER adoption is no easy matter and takes an effort to warm up the culture, so to speak, at the institutional and classroom level, even when there is a system-wide effort as a “push factor”. OER champions and early adopters have been instrumental in the adoption of OERs at our college, Moraine Park Technical College (MPTC), but it is a process and does involve the necessary and sticky challenge of dealing with organizational culture. During the presentation, a timeline with significant milestones that occurred at our institution will be presented. Steps to make OER adoption an institution-wide initiative involved integrating OERs adoption into our institution’s strategic plan. We will also present a case that is currently active and involves adopting OERs for our associate degree programs presented to the incarcerated population in cooperation with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections.