Final reflection on OERs for Introduction to Biology

As the term wraps up, I’m still very glad that I used OERs for my Introduction to Biology class. Mainly relying on the Open Stax Biology and Concepts of Biology resources worked well. Here are a few things that popped up as unanticipated in the last part of the term.

1) I was really excited to get questions via email, Moodle messages, and in person about from other faculty about my project. Sometimes I don’t get to collaborate with my colleagues on curriculum as much as I’d like (busy schedules, the reality of life as part-time educator). It is fun to be doing something that gets conversations started with others!

2) As the students progressed in the term, I felt like I got more and more answers on labs and exams that I didn’t necessarily anticipate. They were not incorrect, just answered at a depth that incorporated research or detail that wasn’t in the sources I provided which were at the introductory level. I give some online quizzes and exams to save class time for labs and activities and some of the assumptions I made in writing some of the questions were challenged (for example, thinking students won’t consider the minor contribution of a particular hormone to a particular disease and would focus on the big picture). I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, but writing and grading assessments is now a bit more time consuming and occasionally correct answers can be automatically marked wrong until they are reviewed. In fairness, this sometimes happened before I used OERs exclusively in my class, but the challenges I’ve faced in this realm seem to have increased as students embraced the OER world.

3) Students that did prefer to work from printed copies of the OER wanted to know what to do with the copies at the end of the term. Some felt it was wasteful to have printed the copies out and then to have no further use. Since I plan to continue to teach the class again using the resources I’ve said that I’d pass copies along to future students.

Overall, I consider this OER project a success and I learned a lot. I’m sure I’ll use and improve what I’ve developed for this course in the future. I love the challenge of trying to make a course better every term I teach it, and with the variety of OERs available I will be able to look to these resources in supporting innovations to my courses.

Here is a quick tour of the course Moodle site that presents the OERs I used to the students:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yERIMDR2k8A&feature=youtu.be&hd=1