Escape rooms are popular now! The session of Open Ed 2021 had a session entitled “Using An Escape Room To Educate Students About Open Textbooks” with Amy Shannon, Teresa Schultz, Tati Mesfin, Elena Azabakht from the Libraries at the University of Nevada Reno-Library. Shannon described what an escape room is and the escape room they designed to teach about open textbooks. Students enjoyed the puzzles and could cite open access topics, according to Shannon. After this first event, student surveys identified that participants wanted more and more challenging activities. The next escape room they designed was from scratch. Azabakht stated their learning outcomes which were for students to identify open and affordable textbooks and their ability to equalize access to education, to distinguish creative commons icons and how they affect not only OERs but their own possible future works, and to discover how they can advocate for and support OERs. They showed images of the rooms they decorated and their team member who played the villain. They went with a fairytale story. Azabakht shared that they met regularly to brainstorm and design their puzzles. They had a master planning document and used an emailing list with a good turnout. Some of the lessons learned included no-show teams, resulting in fewer students. Schultz also mentioned the time and resources to run an escape room are not trivial. Nevertheless, they want to update and change the puzzle. One of the lessons learned is to have extras on hand for the props. Mesfin spoke about the assessment of participants. They ranked their experience on a scale and chose mostly “strongly liked.” Participants did mention some of the open-access and OER concepts. Some participants did mention wanting more clues and harder challenges. To wrap up, Mesfin shared a link to puzzles. They played a bit of the villain video introduction. It is fantastic! Schultz mentioned that they are sharing the materials and will post openly. One question in the discussion session after the presentation was if the team had thought about virtual escape rooms. Schultz mentioned the challenges of making a virtual escape room fully accessible. I had not considered that! Overall, while I am honestly not that excited about escape rooms, I appreciate the materials and experience the group shared!
