“Your help and encouragement was one of the best parts of this course on OER and the re-design of my course. I cannot wait to give you more detailed feedback on how all this helped. Your comments, Rebecca, read today are already taking me to the next step.”

Ellen Walroth, Technical Writing Instructor, Alamo Colleges

During Summer 2024, I assisted seven faculty members from Alamo Colleges District, a consortium of five different colleges located in San Antonio, Texas, with an Open Educational Resources (OER) project. Alamo Colleges hired Instructional Designers through Symbiosis Educational Consultants to work closely with faculty as they completed a series of eight workshops, and to help them realize their individual OER project goals.

In addition to earning a Certificate of Completion in the Texas Board of Higher Education’s OER Core Elements Course, faculty were to create course maps that aligned learning outcomes with new OER content. For some faculty, this meant completely redesigning their course and activities; for others, it meant creating their own OER resources, either via remixing or collecting existing resources or creating their own OER ancillary resources.

Screenshot of Pressbooks Text

I assisted SMEs with the following deliverables:

• created course maps

• research for suitable content, using Google advanced search and OER repositories

• tracking the various Creative Commons licenses

• corrected any accessibility issues

• wrote attribution statements

• assessed Canvas course sites according to QM guidelines

• created interactive Panopto video quiz and PowerPoint presentations following best practices for multimedia learning

• created three Pressbooks texts for their courses

Collaboration with faculty occurred in weekly meetings, emails, and via a shared Teams folder. Finding that perfect OER resource, helping improve course materials, and working with faculty to design their dream OER textbook was incredibly rewarding; the faculty were amazing and it was exciting to know that this would be a huge aid for many students going forward.