“Access for All: Case Studies Investigating Open Education Resources” was a session presented by Lijun Jin, Maria Perpetua Liwanag, Patricia Westerman, Miriam DesHarnais, Aaron Dallman, and Amanda Jozkowski from Towson University as part of Open Ed 2021. They spoke about the Faculty Academic Center of Excellence at Towson and the Library and how they help institutional OER implementation along with the Maryland Open Source Textbook (MOST) initiative. The funding has helped develop a mini-grant program, a community of practice for OER, and collaboration. The first case study was by Liwanag, Jin, and DesHarnals and how they tried different textbooks. This group started with a needs assessment and included scenario analysis and culturally responsive assessments. The group worked with DesHarnais from the Libraries to navigate OER commons, schedule milestones, and focus on the best resources for their courses. They described their approach as “Divide and conquer” as they investigated several resources and databases individually and shared their findings in a spreadsheet. The first results yielded limited useful resources and highlighted the need to create the content they wanted. The group also shared valuable information through their information about the pitfalls of projects like this and mentioned “mission creep” and setting realistic expectations. The group looks forward to more OER research as part of their scholarly activities. Next, Dallman and Jozkowski spoke about reducing the cost of occupational therapy courses. I thought it was interesting that their accrediting body (ACOTE) “has strict regulations about what content must be taught.” This makes sense for this field. Dallman mentioned that most of the OERs were from related disciplines. Dallman explained how this was challenging and also a great way to highlight interdisciplinary work. Dallman and Jozkowski create a “roadmap” of resources they found: they collected various OER and organized them on Blackboard as a shareable repository for students and instructors. Dallman explained how they used studies that are generalizable to address ACOTE standards and scenarios to make sure content was emphasized and real-world connections are made. Dallman also considered access to resources after the course and graduation. In Dallman’s course, they used R and open-source software to analyze datasets. Jozkowski mentioned that their OERs will be reviewed by FACET staff to examine the outcomes and they will implement these OERs in the summer and fall. They are considering sustainability and opportunities to provide accessible materials while considering the time and effort to keep materials current. These two case studies were from very different fields yet both identified similar challenges with sustainability and finding appropriate resources for their courses despite the existence of materials. The honesty of the presenters and the advice they shared about program management and expectations were useful to me.
