What are no-cost solutions when it comes to lab-based education? In a way, I think instructors teaching lab courses have an opportunity to develop and share OER that is tailored to their student needs and campus facilities. Tonight, I watched the Open Ed 2021 ten-minute session entitled “No-Cost Solution for the Organic Chemistry Laboratory.” Christine Whitlock, Nikki Cannon-Rech, and Shainaz Landge from Georgia Southern University worked with their libraries (Cannon-Rech) to adopt an OER for their chemistry course and evaluate the implementation. Landge described the need to provide accessible materials for chemistry courses at their institution. Rech wanted to help students and “positively impact the learning culture of the entire course and possibly the department.” Rech talked about the sustainability of the project that includes updating the online platform, lib guides, links to OER Commons… Faculty will disseminate their findings at a variety of conferences and peer-reviewed publications. Whitlock talked about adapting existing OER materials and hosting them on a lib guide. Rech mentioned that the advantage of this is that the platform is familiar and easy to reach. The platform also has built-in accessibility features. Whitlock talked about ongoing quantitative and qualitative assessments of the implementation of this OER system. Student survey responses were positive. The group continues to evaluate the impact of their OER on student performance and D/F/W rates, for example. I thought the use of lib guides was a nice example of thinking about sustainability from the beginning of the project! I would like to learn more about their platform and how they will continue updating the resource for their courses and students.
