OE Global 2018

This session will cover two initiatives that promote OER through integration with different learning management systems: California Community Colleges with Canvas and Northern Virginia Community College with Blackboard.

The California Community Colleges (CCC) educate over 2 million students per year. The CCC Online Education Initiative (OEI) was developed to increase the quality of online instruction and learning, provide academic and student services inside online courses, and to develop a course exchange to assist students in completing the courses they need to earn their degrees. Within that framework, the OEI developed OER-enabled Canvas sample course shells for all of the OpenStax open textbooks, as well as a non-specific shell for any OER or commercial textbook. The shells are WCAUG 2.0 AA compliant and are aligned to the OEI design rubric developed by CCC faculty teaching online. They are shared in Canvas Commons with a Creative Commons Attribution License. The shells can assist faculty in incorporating OER and also provide an easily adopted sample course shell for faculty looking for support in technology-assisted instruction.

Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) is one of the largest 2-year colleges in the USA. NOVA is one of the first institutions to develop a degree pathway built with open educational resources. NOVA’s OER courses embed openly licensed content into the Blackboard learning management system (LMS), and are supplemented with open access materials and free digital library resources. By integrating OER into the course design process, and utilizing the Blackboard Learning Management System to deliver course content, NOVA was able to expand OER adoption across the college. Since launching our first OER courses in 2013, NOVA students have saved nearly $4 million dollars. NOVA will share the benefits and limitations of Blackboard, and how the LMS enabled the development and expansion of OER courses at the institution.