7:30am - 9:00am  Registration & Coffee

9:00am - 9:10am  Welcome

9:10am - 10:00am  OER as Tool Supporting Retention
Speaker:  Robert Alan Harris, Director of the Center for Teaching with Technology, William Paterson University

This presentation will describe the impact of ancillary costs to student retention and will describe how use of open educational resources can work to keep students in classes. The substance of the talk will concern the creation, delivery, and faculty response to the material. OER is not the answer to the issue of student retention but, along with the rest of the curriculum, helps address one aspect of the issue over which faculty have some control.

Students who can barely afford college face the increased threat posed by spiraling university fees and other ancillary costs, including course materials. Studies suggest that students who cannot purchase texts respond by going through the course without the reading or drop the class; in some cases they drop out of school altogether.

As the leader of the instructional technology unit at my school I responded by creating a teaching with technology curriculum of faculty seminars which address how to resolve educational technology issues that might contribute to student dissatisfaction. Open educational resources and proactive universal design for learning were the first two topics I added to the curriculum. In this session, we will discuss OER solutions to increasing student satisfaction.

10:00am - 10:45am  OER@UMass: Taking Flight
Speakers: 
Andy Anderson, Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst ,and Academic Technology Specialist, Amherst College
Jeremy Smith, Digital Projects Manager in Scholarly Communication, University of Massachusetts - Amherst
Katie Kirakosian, Adjunct Lecturer, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst has been deeply engaged with the creation and promotion of open educational resources since 2011. In this presentation, we will describe our library’s faculty outreach efforts and a summary of the many OER activities across campus. In addition, we will provide more detail on the development, challenges, and student perceptions of two recent examples of collaboratively written, openly licensed digital textbooks. One, Community Service with Web-Based Geographic Information Science and Technology, uses open-source software and teaches Web and database programming as well as open-content principles. The second, From the Ground Up: An Introduction to North American Archaeology, offers a broad overview of the diverse groups that have called “North America” home for over 10,000 years and how lessons from the past are relevant today.

10:45am - 11:00am  Break

11:00am  - 11:45am  Renew and Redesign: 2 R’s for Open Pedagogy: Using Hypothesis and Pressbook
Speaker:  Susan Eliason, Associate Professor, Bridgewater State University

Come and explore how to engage students in the 5R activities required for an OER. See a redesigned course and assignments using OER-enabled constructionist pedagogy. Discover how to encourage students to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute content using renewable assignments. Engage in an activity using Hypothes.is to annotate a Pressbook created for the redesigned course. Download Hypothes.is software at: https://web.hypothes.is/start/ There will be a discussion to produce a list of ideas to explore for your teaching practice.

11:45am - 12:30pm  Lunch

12:30pm - 1:15pm  Upcycling Courses:  Supporting Faculty with Open Pedagogy
Speaker: Lance Eaton, Instructional Designer, Brandeis University

This session will explore methods and strategies for instructional designers to work with and encourage faculty to find ways to use and integrate open pedagogy within their courses with partiular attention to how OER can enhance opportunities for such strategies.

1:15pm - 2:00pm  Growing a Vibrant OER Initiative on Your Campus
Speakers:  Karen Hines & Kris Ricker Choleva, Professor,  Holyoke Community College

A session that engages participants in the process of developing an effective OER initiative. Implementing OER courses and scaling up requires the buy-in and coordination of many members of the campus community. An OER taskforce was founded at HCC in November 2016, this group sparked a movement that has engaged us all in meaningful conversations. During this interactive session, participants assume different roles (student/faculty/staff/administrator/parent/...) to consider and address challenges, illuminate benefits and craft a working mission statement.
 

2:00pm - 3:00pm  Showcase Your Institution’s OER Story

3:00pm  End