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 couple of 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 recently received an e-mail asking if I'd like to share my reasons for working with OER and experiences with the calculus course. 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 the website http://oerutah.org/index.php/oer-stories (third one down).
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 from the college server to this site (as they are taking down the college server. 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've actively participated in Jason Pickvance's OER Advisory Group the past two years and 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.
With the help of Suzanne Mozdy, I converted the Math 1210 online course to OER saving a $370 cost for textbook plus Webassign which were previously required.
The past two 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. From what I've seen, this is going to be a good book, so I put my work on hold waiting for the release of this OER book. OpenStax is targeting the end of the year for a completion date.
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 currently am on a review and advisory committee for Ruth Trygstad. She is re-working an OER Math 1060 textbook to make it more readable to tailor it to our curriculum at SLCC. I plan to use this book in the spring when I teach trigonometry and further provide feedback for improvement of the materials. I also plan to create some classroom PowerPoints and activities which I can then share with others using our OER textbook.
As part of the Math Accessibility Working Group which I'm participating with we are actively looking 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 will present "Free Quality Textbooks and Materials That Benefit Students and Instructors" at the STEM Tech League of Innovations Conference November 1st to share this work with others.
I am also currently working with Words & Numbers, the company OpenStax has contracted with for several math OER projects. They are
launching a new website with a catalog of Open Education Resources (OER) for both educators and students. They have a list of OER sites and/or online textbooks, and I'm participating in evaluating the content pieces/potential learning objects from those locations and writing short intro & thumbnail text description for the content components. I'm excited about this project because it will be a great resource because instead of just a massive list of resources (good and not so good), a vetted site with descriptions will be an awesome resource for both edcators and students.