OER Textbook and Curriculum Creation: Commitment, Resources, and Results
Submission Type
20-minute Presentation
Abstract
Daniel Leisawitz (assistant professor of Italian) and Lora Taub-Pervizpour (Dean of Digital Learning) of Muhlenberg College will present their large-scale Open Educational Resource (OER) project, “Spunti.” With the institutional commitment and support of Dr. Taub-Pervizpour's office, Dr. Leisawitz and his colleague in Italian, Daniela Viale, developed their own free, online Italian textbook/curriculum for Elementary Italian, which is currently being used for the first time this year. Drs. Leisawitz and Taub-Pervizpour will touch upon the pedagogical, economic, and ethical motivations behind the project, the process involved, and the essential role of the institution in supporting this kind of work.
Start Date
5-23-2019 9:00 AM
End Date
5-23-2019 10:15 AM
Description
After years of teaching Elementary Italian at several liberal arts institutions, my colleague and I had become frustrated with the quality and cost of the available Italian textbooks. At a certain point, we decided that rather than ask our students to spend upwards of $250 for a textbook, which we then heavily supplement with our own material, we would simply do away with the textbook altogether and compose our own replacement. After exploring the resources already available on the internet and speaking with members of our institution’s Digital Learning Team, we decided to build our own text and curriculum as an Open Educational Resource (OER), freely available to anyone with an internet connection.
In this talk I will discuss our pedagogical, economic, and ethical motivations for embarking on this project. I will explain how we have gone about it, and the choices we have had to make. I will also describe the resulting textbook and curriculum and the experience of using it in the classroom.
Since a project of this magnitude would be impossible without institutional commitment and support, I will be joined by Dr. Lora Taub-Pervizpour, Muhlenberg College’s Dean of Digital Learning, who will discuss the the essential role the institution can play in promoting development and innovation of high-quality OER projects.
This presentation will fit nicely within the theme of “Emerging Technology and Methods,” as the field of OERs is rapidly expanding, even as many instructors and institutions still don’t know quite what to make of it, or understand what building large-scale OERs entails. We can all agree that producing free, high-quality teaching and learning resources is laudable, but it is imperative that instructors, administrators and institutions understand the time, effort, expertise, and resources required to build and support large projects of this sort.
OER Textbook and Curriculum Creation: Commitment, Resources, and Results
Daniel Leisawitz (assistant professor of Italian) and Lora Taub-Pervizpour (Dean of Digital Learning) of Muhlenberg College will present their large-scale Open Educational Resource (OER) project, “Spunti.” With the institutional commitment and support of Dr. Taub-Pervizpour's office, Dr. Leisawitz and his colleague in Italian, Daniela Viale, developed their own free, online Italian textbook/curriculum for Elementary Italian, which is currently being used for the first time this year. Drs. Leisawitz and Taub-Pervizpour will touch upon the pedagogical, economic, and ethical motivations behind the project, the process involved, and the essential role of the institution in supporting this kind of work.