OER Introduction
As an Instructor at the University of Mississippi, I used the capacities of Blackboard to maximize the effectiveness of Open Educational Resources (OER) and eliminate $200 of textbook costs previously required by the most expensive first-year writing course offered by the Department of Writing and Rhetoric (Writing 102: Literature). These were published on a Lumen Learning course site piloted in the department during the 2016-17 academic year [EH1] . Over the course of two years, to achieve the best results of using Blackboard to integrate this material, I developed assignments and modified my Blackboard Writ 102 face-to-face and online course so that students could easily access OER content by using the features within Blackboard and new technology like Scrible, a digital highlighting tool. This process was well worth the challenge. This past year, using what I learned from developing OER in my traditional classroom, I fully modified my online version of Writing 102 with OER. Once I began integrating OERs through Blackboard, I found that students were engaged in the digital format of the texts in ways I had not thought possible. Students used laptops, iPads, eBook readers, and even their smart phones with the mobile Blackboard app to interact with the resources. By integrating these free and open-access resources through my Blackboard course site, I believe that my students were allowed greater access to learning materials that are crucial to their education. Ultimately, this combination of greater access and elimination of textbook costs helped increase retention within my first-year Writ 102 writing courses.
Results
Using OER cumulatively saved my Writ 102 students over $28,000 in textbook costs in 2016-2017 (see: Z-Degree Mississippi Results: http://oer.olemiss.edu/results/). While lowering textbook costs and saving students money was my primary concern when I began to implement OER in my Writ 102 course, I found was that in shifting from a traditional textbook I had to re-see and revise my own approach to teaching with Blackboard. I discovered that students wanted to mirror the experience they found when working with traditional textbooks, so I worked with the Office of Online Design and eLearning to integrate a digital highlighting tool in my Blackboard course. Doing so allowed my students to highlight, annotate, and save any html webpage. This allowed me to integrate the tool and use it in conjunction with Blackboard’s discussion board for asynchronous interaction and the journal tool for student reflection.
OER Writ 102 Textbook created in partnership with Lumen Learning
Award Recognition
I was awarded a Blackboard Catalyst Award for Teaching and Learning for my work in developing OER in my First-Year Writing Courses.