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Missouri A&OER 2025 Conference Recordings
Presentation Recordings
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Keynote:There’s no Blueprint? Recognizing Paths Forward to Support Open Education
In this engaging keynote presentation, our speaker will explore the dynamic and evolving landscape of open education and Open Educational Resources (OER). Drawing from her own experiences, she will share insights and practical guidance on fostering collaboration, overcoming challenges, and creating sustainable practices in open education. Attendees will gain valuable perspectives on open practices and envisioning new blueprints for collaboration to enhance educational access and affordability. Don’t miss this opportunity to be inspired and equipped to support open education initiatives at your own institution and/or at the state level.
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Blueprint for OER Success: Building a Collaborative Learning Community
The Open Educational Resources Learning Community at the University of Virginia serves as a dynamic model for fostering collaborative strategies in OER development and implementation. This community, launched in 2023, brings together faculty, librarians, instructional designers, and educational technologists to explore innovative practices in OER creation and adaptation. Over the course of five interactive sessions, participants engage in peer learning, resource sharing, and project building with an eye towards open pedagogy practices. This session will share the community’s design, activities, and outcomes, offering a practical blueprint for institutions seeking to establish their own OER learning initiatives. Participants will leave with insights into effective facilitation strategies, session design, and the impact participant work has had on student learning thus far. Emphasis will be placed on the role of cross-disciplinary collaboration and the power of collective knowledge-sharing in advancing OER initiatives. Attendees will have an opportunity to explore the OER the facilitators created to scaffold the community for replication in other settings.
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Developing Learner-Driven OERs with Design Thinking Mindset
The most crucial ingredient in applying a design mindset is to define the correct problem. Yes, OER is about reducing costs, but it serves learners in more ways. Do your learners relate better to visual explanations over long text narratives? Are your learners working a full-time job and trying to go to school? What is the problem you need to solve for the best learning experience? How do we get to know our learners? Empathy. It is about understanding people’s needs—the learners, teachers, or other stakeholders your OER will impact. Empathy helps us understand the problems and leads to ideation—the right solution. We need to ask the question: Do people want or need this? This is the circle of Desirability. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we learn that everyone can be creative under the right conditions. It is not about making things pretty but about functionality and results. Everyone is capable of ideation and turning that into a doable innovation. They need the right conditions. Are the tools needed to build this OER at hand? If not, how do we find them? This is the circle of Feasibility. We will also look at making sure our solution is sustainable. Is the cost of human and technical capital manageable? If not, how do we make it so? This is the circle of Viability. Understanding how your OER meets the three circles empowers you with a methodology for the most favorable learner outcome.
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Itinerary Insights: Unlocking the Potential of a Professional Association Conference as an Open Education Librarian
This presentation will share my experience and strategies as an open education librarian, aiming to inspire fellow librarians to engage with discipline-specific conferences and professional associations. Attending the International Textile and Apparel Association (ITAA) Annual Conference provided a unique opportunity to promote open educational resources (OER) within the rapidly evolving fashion and textiles industry. My institution's Apparel Merchandising and Product Development program is on the verge of achieving a “Zero Textbook Cost” model, and my dual objectives at the conference were to showcase our distinctive offerings while cultivating partnerships with potential collaborators to address any remaining resource gaps. Through my case study of the ITAA conference, I will illustrate how strategic collaborations can significantly advance OER adoption across various academic disciplines. By highlighting our progress towards a zero-cost model and engaging with industry professionals, I identified key collaboration opportunities that benefit our program and contribute to the broader goal of enhancing educational accessibility in the textile and apparel sector. This approach can serve as a blueprint for other librarians seeking to leverage conferences as platforms for promoting OER.
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OER Champions
At our two-year community college, a partnership among instructors, deans, and librarians led to an innovative OER Champion model that's reshaping how we think about open education. We are building an interdisciplinary community of practice around open education resources, resulting not only in cost savings to students but also in more engaged pedagogy across disciplines. In this session, we'll share our journey of creating Z-degree pathways, engaging faculty through targeted internal marketing, and developing streamlined OER adoption processes. We'll explore both our successes – bolstered by crucial institutional and legislative support – and the challenges we've faced. By sharing our tested resources, strategies, and lessons learned, we hope to empower other institutions to cultivate their own next generation of open education leaders while avoiding common pitfalls in the process. Join us to discover how your institution can harness the enthusiasm of early OER adopters to catalyze widespread adoption across programs, creating lasting change in educational accessibility and affordability.
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Bridging the Divide: An Example of Strong Interdepartmental Collaboration for Student Success
Enacting change within a higher education setting frequently poses significant challenges. Balancing the imperative of inclusive participation with the nuanced requirements of individual departments often presents obstacles for transformative initiatives such as OER. In this presentation, attendees will have the opportunity to hear insights from an OER librarian and a bookstore manager who spearheaded change at a 2-year technical college. Originating from a shared aspiration to mitigate the financial burden of textbooks and course materials, this initiative evolved into a collaborative endeavor. A pivotal component was the establishment of a Textbook Affordability Committee, which systematically evaluated conventional service provisions and remains engaged in ongoing enhancements reflective of evolving faculty and student needs.
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Open: A Future for Education
While many educators are initially drawn to OER with the goal of saving students money, it is imperative that we advance the discussion beyond that initial entry point in order to examine opportunities for OER and open educational practices to transform pedagogy, curriculum, and student learning and success–as many scholars have. In particular, OER and OER-enabled education provide avenues to enhance equity and access to information; transparency, flexibility, collaboration, and agency in education; and a pathway for life-long learning. In the session, we will project these opportunities against a backdrop of what the future of education may look like (based on current trends in and outside of education): a more social, democratic, learner-centered approach that is tailored and increasingly non-linear. While addressing some of the challenges of open education, we will nevertheless propose how OER and open pedagogical practices are uniquely oriented to meet the emerging demands of education while shaping a more equitable and responsive future.
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Blueprint for OER Professional Development: How Five Colleges Developed an OER Academy Through Courage and Collaboration
How can faculty, professional development leaders, instructional design leads, and OER advocates create an innovative OER professional development series? This presentation will describe how five colleges collaborated to develop the Alamo Colleges OER Academy, which recently supported over 80 faculty from multiple disciplines in learning the best practices for adopting, adapting, and developing OER. The presenters will share how funding from an Open Textbooks Pilot Grant contributed to the development of an OER strategic design that includes OER workshops, instructional design support, and a framework to develop OER courses and open textbooks. Attendees will learn how persistence, collaboration, and courage have played a role in supporting a community of OER educators. The session will provide participants with recommendations to support similar programs at their institutions.