Avoiding Monotony

I've spent this term creating my all-OER Math 4 course, and I've been pretty successful at finding good OER materials to use with my courses. I have a textbook and supplementary resources from CK-12 , worksheets available free on the web from Kuta Software and math-drills.com , exercises and videos from My Open Math, some resources I've created myself, and a number of videos (primarily from Khan Academy). I feel like I'm off to a good start, but I've identified two things that I'd like to work on as I move forward in this project.

The first concern came to me in a faculty meeting the other day. We were talking about tutorial videos, and one of my colleagues made the comment that, "the Khan videos are pretty good, but I can only listen to that guy for so long." The comment struck me because while I do try to use a variety of resources, I know that I've relied on Khan Academy for many of the tutorial videos I've posted for students - and required as assigned watching. As I've previewed more and more of Khan's videos for classes, I know that I've grown irritated by some of Khan's vocal mannerisms, frequently repeated phrases, etc. I'm sure that my students must, too. Since that meeting, I've been working on finding other sources of tutorial videos that are high quality and engaging, so that I can "mix it up" a bit with students, or at least offer them alternative sources of information.

The other thing I'd like to address with my course offerings are that I have sections of my course that are rich with a variety of materials tailored to my course, and other sections that due to time constraints or other issues I put together more quickly, using more "generic" materials. I'd really like to go back, fill in the gaps, and clean up these weaker units.

As this term winds down and I prepare for spring term, I plan to spend quality time on the OER blogs and repositories, looking for materials that will solve some of these problems for me.

Getting Started with OER

Well, ok, I'm not exactly "getting started" with OER, but I am excited to be getting started with the OER Fellowship. Having worked in alternative high schools and developmental ed for the past almost-20 years, I've learned to plan my classes in a way that accommodates a range of students - including those with limited financial means. That has meant looking for project materials, handouts, and texts that I and my students can get for cheap or free. The growth of online OER materials has been both a blessing and a curse - the number of high-quality, completely free resources is great, but doing the research and sifting through materials is time-consuming.

I currently teach in the Adult Basic Skills department; my classes are noncredit and tuition-free - a great deal, but it also means that students do not have financial aid to help with textbooks and other materials. For the reading class I taught previous terms, students were required to buy a $38 textbook, and for many students even this relatively inexpensive text was a burden. This term, I'm teaching math and I feel that it's really important for students to have a textbook. Students need a reference they can turn to outside of class, and they need problem sets they can do for practice. In addition, they need to develop the skill of reading a textbook because they will be expected to do so in future classes. For math, this is particularly important. Reading a math text requires a different skill set than reading a history, reading, or even science text; with a class text, I can teach students how to use the text.

This leads to my goal for the Fellowship: I plan to create a completely OER Math 4 (algebra) course for ABSE. My plan is to create a course covering basic algebra concepts (number sets and patterns, solving equations, functions, graphing, polynomials) and utilizing OER resources for text, practice exercise (both on paper and online), tutorial videos, and some assessment. I'd like to use a mix of materials developed by others and materials that I create. I already have several OER sources that I use regularly; I hope to find additional resources to add to my resource library.

I anticipate some technological glitches along the way, and I know that student access to Moodle and other online resources varies. I also know that I'll need to build time into my course to teach students how to access and use the materials I'll provide them. I have some concerns about my own time - I often have lofty ambitions for creating or gathering class materials that don't match the reality of my available prep time.

I'm really looking forward to concentrating on this goal this term. Here we go...