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What's happening

Student Textbook Access & Costs

With the current shifting landscape, unemployment, and more, students are facing new burdens and challenges. The rising cost of textbooks and access challenges should not be another hardship they are struggling to overcome. Now is the right time for faculty to make a change in their assigned course materials.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

Openly licensed course materials can less the cost of education for students and provide faculty with quality content specific to their course. The licenses for these materials allow faculty to provide students with a customized, curated resource freely in digital format and for very low-cost to print.


The Workshop

During the Intro to OER Review Workshop, you will learn more about OER and the supporting resources available to faculty in Montana. After the workshop, faculty attendees will be invited to write a short review of an open textbook from the Open Textbook Library.

This workshop is the best, easiest way to learn about and begin engaging with open educational resources. The goal is to inform and encourage the use of OER.


Attending

Who: Everyone is welcome. Faculty are the decision makers and target audience in making the change to OER. Every member of the educational community is valuable in supporting and effecting positive changes across our institutions. So, we encourage faculty, instructional support staff, library and bookstore staff, administrators, etc. to attend.


How: Register for the specific workshop that you would like to attend. You will receive a calendar invite with connection information as well as a follow-up email with slides and recording after the event.


The Review

To further continue academic scholarship in open education, faculty attendees will be invited to review an open textbook in their field. This peer-review process is openly published. Faculty are welcome to review more than one textbook if they choose. There is a 6 week deadline to complete review(s) after the workshop date.


The Schedule

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If you missed this week's webinar for Perfecting Your Virtual Workshop, you can see the archived recording here. Members of the OTN community have also collaborated to create this 7 Tips for Hosting Virtual OTN Workshops. While these are aimed at those teaching Textbook Review workshops, the tips presented by myself and my excellent co-presenters are good for teaching in a variety of online formats.

This was a great webinar to be a part of and has me thinking about other applications in this online teaching environment. Much of our professional development comes in the form of webinars and workshops in higher education. This is a great way to learn something new, get a few ideas that we can implement, and leave not feeling overwhelmed or exhausted with information. Yet, when we teach online, we stay far away from this format for sharing information with our students.

So, I am proposing a social experiment in teaching online webinar style. I will be hosting a workshop on how to do just that June 2nd. Mark you calendars! Registration information will be up on the TRAILS website. And if you are teaching and would like to try out this experiment with me, let me know.

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