Designing and Developing an Open Education Course for Library Science Students
legislative advocacy topics , at both the national and state levels , students were asked , for their primary assignment , to create a short video in which they would advocate for an issue of their choice . The premise was to role play making a case for an open education issue for an audience of faculty or librarians .
To deliver on giving the students a practical skill set they could apply right away , the primary assignment for week three focused on identifying and finding OER . Using a worksheet developed for SPARC ’ s Open Education Leadership Program , the students conducted an OER Treasure Hunt . After identifying an existing course at a college of their choice , students first priced out the required commercial textbooks . They then attempted to find OER to replace it , sought out reviews , examined the OER themselves and then reflected on their experience . It demonstrated that depending on the course , level at which it is taught and need for supplementary learning resources , identifying appropriate OER can be quite the challenge . The weekly discussion gave students an opportunity to delve into the OER quality debate . Using course readings and their own research into the topic , students developed their personal approach to responding to questions about or direct attacks on the quality of OER .
Even a four-week course can have a capstone project of sorts . In week three , students learned about campus OER initiatives and developing educational workshops to create awareness about open education among faculty . For their fourth and final assignment , students could choose any course topic and create a five-minute multimedia presentation as a segment of a broader open education workshop . Students chose topics such as developing an open pedagogy assignment , explaining the difference between free and open learning resources and an overview of how Creative Commons Licensing works . These creative presentations demonstrated that students had a firm enough grasp of the course content to explain it to others in just a few minutes . To introduce students to the research literature on the efficacy of OER , each selected one related article and wrote a summary and analysis for the final week discussion post . That enabled each student to leave the course having gained exposure to sources of literature on the pedagogical advantages of OER .
Results Student Reactions and Reflections
While the official iSchool evaluations would provide information and insights into the value students derived from the course , the formal evaluation would fail to collect some of the more unique feedback the author sought from students . Shortly after the course ended , students received a link to a set of the instructor ’ s own questions . Seventeen out of 30 students responded . To start , the students were asked why they selected the course . In Table 1 , it ’ s clear most of the students were influenced by their current job experience and what they heard about open educational resources . Several students were taking the course for a post-Master ’ s certificate .
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