OER Teacher - Badge application (Responses)


13	Providing low-cost or no-cost textbook options for students has become an important initiative at Barton Community College. To that end, Barton Community College has a structured path to becoming an OER-certified course, which guarantees that each course created follows specific guidelines for the fair use of content, videos, and images. I was new to OER when I joined Barton but was immediately intrigued by the concept of OER. After learning about it, I researched available OER and chose a high-quality Open Educational Resource (Deutsch im Blick) produced by the faculty and staff at the University of Texas at Austin for my online Elementary German 1 and Elementary German 2 classes. This textbook has an accompanying resource called Grimm Grammar (also OER), which I use in German 2 to help students with German grammar. Although I use "Deutsch im Blick" as a basis for my two classes, for variety, I also use additional YouTube videos that are provided under Creative Commons with reuse allowed. Being able to offer a structured, accredited college class with a zero-cost textbook makes higher education that much more accessible to students all around the world (I have students enrolled from California to Maine to Germany!). In addition, it allows the hard work of the creators of OER to reach a wider audience and impact more people with their work. I see it as a total win-win.

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Providing low-cost or no-cost textbook options for students has become an important initiative at Barton Community College. To that end, Barton Community College has a structured path to becoming an OER-certified course, which guarantees that each course created follows specific guidelines for the fair use of content, videos, and images. I was new to OER when I joined Barton but was immediately intrigued by the concept of OER. After learning about it, I researched available OER and chose a high-quality Open Educational Resource (Deutsch im Blick) produced by the faculty and staff at the University of Texas at Austin for my online Elementary German 1 and Elementary German 2 classes. This textbook has an accompanying resource called Grimm Grammar (also OER), which I use in German 2 to help students with German grammar. Although I use "Deutsch im Blick" as a basis for my two classes, for variety, I also use additional YouTube videos that are provided under Creative Commons with reuse allowed. Being able to offer a structured, accredited college class with a zero-cost textbook makes higher education that much more accessible to students all around the world (I have students enrolled from California to Maine to Germany!). In addition, it allows the hard work of the creators of OER to reach a wider audience and impact more people with their work. I see it as a total win-win.