7:30am – 9:00am Registration and Coffee

9:00am – 9:15am Welcome
Speakers:
Kevin Corcoran, Associate Executive Director, Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium
Robin Robinson, Director of Education Technology and Interactive Media, Framingham State University

9:15am – 10:15am Solving the Textbook Cost Crisis Through OER
Speaker: Nicole Allen, Director of Open Education - SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition

The cost of college textbooks has grown to a point that virtually every campus is now seeking solutions. While many institutions have successfully reduced costs for students through stop-gap measures such as rental programs, lending libraries and licensing deals, the greatest potential for permanently solving the problem lies in Open Educational Resources (OER). Institutions of all kinds have begun to leverage OER to reduce costs for students, expand access to information, and enable faculty to better tailor materials to their courses. This talk will provide an overview of the OER movement to date, including important definitions, major projects, and what the most successful institutions are doing. It will also help frame the opportunity for regional collaboration and provide specific advice for members of the audience to take back to campus.

10:15am - 10:30am Break

10:30am – 11:30am Incorporating Open Resources: Locating and Using OER for Teaching and Learning
Speaker: Mary Lou Forward, Executive Director of the Open Education Consortium

Educators want to provide their students with high quality, low cost learning materials, but often don’t know where to look for OER, or how to effectively make use of this growing body of educational resources. This section of the workshop will provide an overview of OER repositories around the world, along with other openly licensed resources that educators can incorporate into their face to face or online teaching. We will consider the scope and shape of the open education movement around the world, including OER development and use. We’ll review open licenses and their terms of use, and discuss case studies of OER use in higher ed contexts in the US and around the world, including the impact of OER on institutions. Workshop participants will then have the opportunity to find examples of OER and practice licensing works with an open license that would allow others to use and modify the work.

11:30am -12:00pm Activity - Led by Mary Lou Forward

12:00pm – 1:00pm Lunch

1:00pm – 2:30pm OERs for Online Teaching and Learning
Speakers:
Marilyn Billings, Scholarly Communication & Special Initiatives Librarian, University of Massachusetts – Amherst
Marisha Marks, Instructional Designer, CPE eLearning, Continuing & Professional Education, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Charlotte Roh, Scholarly Communication Resident Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst

For many educators and students, the classroom has moved from the campus to the computer. Open education resources (OERs) are particularly well-suited to this format since the bulk of OERs are online themselves. We will discuss practical ways to reach instructors and promote OER use through online and in-person workshops. We will address online education using OERs and library resources using case studies with the Blackboard learning management system within the UMass Amherst Department of Continuing and Professional Education. We will address the challenges and expectations to address while working with instructors, and lessons learned from the Open Education Initiative (OEI) program at UMass Amherst.

2:30pm – 3:00pm How Do We Move Forward? (Readiness Assessment)
Speakers:
Kevin Corcoran, Associate Executive Director, Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium
Robin Robinson, Director of Education Technology and Interactive Media, Framingham State University

3:00pm End