Open Education 2015

Salt Lake Community College has a number of faculty piloting or fully adopting Open Stax textbooks. While the Open Stax textbooks are well-designed for the national market, our faculty have still had to do some significant work in adapting the texts to meet the needs of our students and courses. SLCC faculty from four disciplines (Biology, Sociology, Math, and History) will describe their work in adapting Open Stax content to meet the needs to our students. In some cases faculty have been faced with the challenge making the content fit with our courses. History, for instance, is radically reducing the size of the text and making tough decision about what to include and exclude. In other cases (particularly with Math) the challenges have been technical: while the content is open, the various formats do not necessarily lend themselves to adaptation. Finally, the faculty will discuss the pedagogical surprises revealed in the process of adapting open content. How has working with OER influenced their pedagogy? How has it invited them to reconsider the relationship between learning resources and their course? We hope the faculty have the opportunity to do short, informative presentations on their work followed by a robust discussion with the audience.