It’s Open Education week and time to celebrate how open educational resources (OERs) are being used at UCCS. Open educational resources are free, open-licensed materials (not subject to restrictive copyright) materials that can be used to supplement or replace traditional textbooks, lesson plans, activities, and more. Last year, as part of the state’s Open Education Grant:

• 30 faculty members completed the OER Pathway self-paced tutorial on OER
• 13 faculty members incorporating OER in their courses Fa19 and Sp20
  • These materials are used in 16 courses
  • Impacting an estimated 1,000 students
  • And creating an estimated $100,000 in total savings

This year UCCS can look forward to awareness and adoption workshops, financial incentives for faculty members to create or adapt new OER content that is fully accessible, discoverable, and openly licensed. Additionally, we hope to work with high school concurrent enrollment courses to increase the use of OER as a textbook replacement. The UCCS Open Education Resources Committee is also working to expand and publicize our recognition of instructors who use OERs and providing opportunities for them to share their results. Keep an eye for announcements of workshops and funding opportunities!

Congratulations to the faculty already using OERs!

• Christine Biermann
• Linda Button
• Julie Cole
• Michelle Dorne
• Daniel Driscoll
• Lynnane George
• Phillip Heasley
• Crystal Herald
• Scott Kupferman
• Mary Alice Long
• Colleen Stiles
• Rebecca Theobald
• David Weiss

For more on OERs at UCCS visit the Faculty Resource Center.