Teaching with Technology Committee to develop a task force for OER

"According to Coleman, the job of the OER task force, now a subcommittee of Teaching with Technology, is to conduct an inventory of current courses that use some or all OER, discuss ways this college can scale up its use, determine the barriers to those who do not use it and come up with recommendations for incentives for faculty.

Coleman said this college’s OER task force would send a faculty survey sometime before spring break to find out who is using OER.

'Anytime a faculty member creates their own content and not take it from a publisher, they have the potential to be creating OER if they just share it with the rest of us,' Coleman said. 'We want to grow OER on our campus by tapping into those faculty who are already … giving people access to information,' she said.

According to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, access to a high quality education is the right of all individuals. To ensure that more students are completing their college education, Achieving the Dream, a non-governmental reform movement for student success, provides grants to colleges that demonstrate the ability and capacity to implement OER degree programs. The Alamo Colleges are part of this reform through this grant.

Achieving the Dream grant is targeted to increase OER adoption among faculty from this college, Coleman said. This grant’s goal is to reduce costs for students and accelerate their progress through college."