International Journal of Open Educational Resources Volume 2, Issue 1, Fall 2019/Winter 2020 | Page 28

International Journal of Open Educational Resources
Delivering the OER Training Course
Teaching presence.
Figure 4. Teaching presence in the OER training course.
First, by using the SUNY course content
as a backbone, librarians demonstrated
to faculty how OER can be used to
create a strong teaching presence in an
online course (see Figure 4). The course
began with a Welcome and Overview
module that introduced the course with
a quick syllabus and a welcome video
that outlined expectations for the
course and explained how the course
would incorporate materials created
and CC-licensed by SUNY into the informational
part of the course. This first
module also contained a discussion
board for introductions in addition to
a pre-course survey (see Appendices A
and B), designed to gauge participants’
familiarity and/or comfort level with
the topics covered in the course. Following
the Welcome and Overview module
were four content modules based on
SUNY’s course. The SUNY content selected
for inclusion was lightly edited to
be more institution-specific, renamed,
and reformatted as native HTML documents
in the LMS (see Figure 5), offering
a seamless, cohesive experience
to someone working their way through
the course materials. While SUNY materials
incorporate a variety of sources
and embedded content, such as videos
and podcasts, the overall course has a
consistent style and voice that would be
more difficult to achieve if the course
simply linked to SUNY’s website.
A wrap-up module was planned
(see Figure 6), but it was not released
to participants due to a compressed
timetable for the first round of grant
recipients. OER training for the first
cohort occurred during the second half
of the Spring 2019 semester and was
complicated by the final exam schedule
and summer break when faculty are
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