General A&P OER Lab Manual

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.