6 Integrating OER into your Curriculum
Course Planning
Effective course planning is essential for integrating Open Educational Resources (OER) into your curriculum, creating an inclusive and adaptable learning environment. Begin by defining your course learning objectives, which will serve as a guide for selecting and integrating OER materials that align with your teaching goals.
How Will Using OER Improve Student Learning?
When integrating OER into your course, you have the opportunity to critically evaluate your methods and alter them to better meet your needs. One way to go about this is to use backward design for your project.
Backward design is a framework for planning your course around its intended outcomes. There are three stages to the backward design process:
- Identify desired results,
- Determine acceptable evidence, and
- Plan learning experiences and instruction.
You might notice that this approach does not end with “create and/or curate educational content.” Instead, it ends with more planning. The purpose of backward design is not to be done with your course transformation in a quick 3-step process. Instead, it asks instructors to question the processes and materials they currently use and to start over by plotting out what is needed to meet your needs and your students’ needs.
How Will Using OER Improve Your Course?
Considerations
- What changes would you need to make to share your own content as an OER?
- What types and formats of OER are you looking for?
- Where should you begin your search? (See the Finding Open Content chapter for help)
Who is Your Audience?
Once you’ve decided that you’re ready to use OER in your course, it’s important to consider your target audience(s).
Considerations
- Do you have a primary audience? For example, majors or non-majors.
- Does your audience belong to a specific geographic location or ethnicity?
- Are there cultural differences you need to consider before creating your OER? (See our Diversity & Inclusion chapter for help)
How Will You Disseminate Your Course OER?
Considerations:
- Will you host created OER in an institutional repository or a third-party platform?
- How will you make evident when you (or other creators) post updates to the content?
- During your class, how will students access the OER?
