Material Detail

The California State University and MERLOT have partnered to showcase how and why faculty have adopted Open Educational Resources (OER) to facilitate equitable access to their students’ course materials. This faculty showcase represent Open Educational Practices where faculty are sharing their "know-how" for adopting OER in their courses.    

The OER textbook is primarily an online textbook. Students have the option of downloading a PDF version and may order a print copy if desired. 

By chance more than plan, my adoption of OER materials came at the same time I had to adapt my class to a fully online modality in response to the pandemic. Student access to a home computer and good, reliable internet service would be a concern, but Cal Poly had to enhance their efforts to support students with computer access issues across the board. I hope that that support will remain in place even after most instruction returns to the campus classrooms. I have heard that the OER materials I have adopted meet high standards regarding computer accessibility issues, which I consider to be essential.

The OER textbook I used added videos to support many of the main points and included graphic presentations for numerous concepts, so it helps students who learn better when they can see or hear something to support their reading. It mostly focused its examples on well-known brands and companies. That has the advantage of giving examples with which students are generally familiar. On the other hand, it does not create a lot of space to highlight diversity.

This will delete the comment from the database. This operation is not reversible. Are you sure you want to do it?

Thank you for reporting a broken "Go to Material" link in MERLOT to help us maintain a collection of valuable learning materials.

If you feel this material is inappropriate for the MERLOT Collection, please click SEND REPORT, and the MERLOT Team will investigate. Thank you!