“A Plate for Every Student: A Buffet Style Approach to Course Development Using OER” is the title of the Open Ed 2021 session I watched tonight. The presenter was Jennifer Schneider, an Assistant Professor at Community College of Philadelphia. The goals stated by Schneider were to identify OER collections for use in course design, assess OER collections, and explain how to apply the “buffet style.” Schneider mentioned that the analogy of OER as a buffet originated from their interest in what’s best for their students. Schneider has experience in course design, and encouraged thinking about course design and the 5Rs of OER: retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. The benefits, Schneider listed, include flexibility that can be increased over time, for example. Schneider described how the buffet style can be welcoming and provide a dynamic set of resources such as OpenStax, Merlot, and the Open Textbook Library. To organize the resources one can collect, Schneider offered the suggestion of using the Learning Management System to organize resources by topic. I had not thought about this! I can envision a Project space populated with resources. Schneider also shared a list of topics in the LMS that they had curated. as an example. Schneider shared numerous links to resources and repositories. To share student work, there are numerous options! I learned about some websites I could review to learn about what resources are available. We could also build on the project site to create modules for podcasting, for example. This session reminded me to revisit that site and continue searching for OER on the topic.
