Open Educational Resources

Check out bit.ly/freemathtools

Several of my resources are linked in this map

I've always believed in the share and share alike idea though until a few years ago I wasn't aware of the OER movement. It is very exciting to me as my philosophy has always been if I take the time to create educational resources and another educator or students can use them to understand math---it is great pay for the time I invested.

I was asked to share my reasons for working with OER and my experiences with the OER calculus course I created. They were making a video for a website being put together by a Utah consortium promoting OER. I happily did that and you can hear what I had to say at this OER site.

I built tutorial PowerPoints for the online college algebra and trigonometry classes that I developed. This was in the day of dial-up when adding sound or video created files too large to practically download. However, students still love these so I recently moved them to this site. Many institutions all over the world (besides U.S. I know of Australia, England and Korea) including high schools, colleges and universities link to these as a student learning resource.

I have taken activities from OER Active Calculus as well as created some of my own to use for active learning in both Calculus I and Calculus II and offer these to others in the share and share-alike fashion. In collaboration with what we named the Math 1010 TNG team (TNG = The New Generation), we created activities for Intermediate Algebra for active learning.

OpenEd Leadership Summit working group.

I actively participated in Jason Pickvance's OER Advisory Group attended the OpenEd Leadership Summit in 2014 where we spent a couple of days with like-minded people including Lumen Learning's team brainstorming and sharing ideas about OER. It was a great educational experience to learn more about the OER movement and resources. I returned even more enthusiastic about OER and even more committed to utilizing and improving resources.

I developed an online course for Math 1220 and utilized MyOpenMath and OER textbooks to make the course completely textbook/software cost-free. It is very rewarding to hear from students surprised and excited to find they have no additional costs for the course.

I converted the Math 1210 online course to OER saving a $370 cost for textbook plus online homework system which were previously required.

The past several years I've been actively involved in OER at SLCC and in our math department.

I chaired a committee to choose and adapt a calculus book to use for our department. It was a huge undertaking as there are many strong opinions on calculus texts. After meeting several times and reviewing options out there, it was determined that there was not one "good" one ready to go with minor tweaks so we picked the one that came closest to meeting our needs and I began working on the limits chapter. At this time I found out that OpenStax was working on a calculus text. I contacted them to find out information about it and they asked me to submit a CV which I did and they had me review some of the chapters. This turned out to be a good book which we now use in the Online Calculus I and Calculus II courses.

I am teaching flipped classroom Calculus I and Calculus II making use of OER activities and materials as well as the Calculus Videos I've made and posted as OER.

I served on a review and advisory committee with Ruth Trygstad. In collaboration with the University of Utah, Weber State University and Utah Valley University, SLCC and this committee adapted an OER book to better suit our needs and curriculum for our Trigonometry class. I then worked using MyOpenMath and in collaboration with a grad student at the U to create and adapt online homework questions that mirrored the chosen ones in our textbook. Then last year, we did the same for College Algebra and Precalculus.

As part of the Math Accessibility Working Group , I looked at OER and accessibility and this work has made a difference in the direction our OER work has taken to enable better accessibility.

Ruth Trygstad and I presented "Free Quality Textbooks and Materials That Benefit Students and Instructors" at the STEM Tech League of Innovations Conference and at the American Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges to share this work with others.