Rediscovering, Discovering, and Repurposing Content in an OER-based Post Pandemic World

Presented by Dr. Sorel Reisman

Even before March 2020, online education had become firmly entrenched in higher education - its growth accelerated from the "invention," in the early 2000s, of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Many institutions adopted learning management systems (LMS) to enter the MOOC world, enabling instructors to voluntarily or by fiat to move their courses online. Despite the growing demand for online instruction, surveys indicated a general dissatisfaction among students, instructors, and administrators of the quality of the online offerings. The advent of the pandemic and the necessity of teaching online have highlighted the legitimacy of these concerns. One of the primary causes of the quality issue is that instructors were and continue to be ill-prepared to move to online settings. This presentation provides a step-by-step roadmap for instructors wishing to move their "conventional" curricula to the online LMS environments required by their institutions as well as expected by today's technology-wise students. The process builds upon a "traditional" course syllabus, moving it online, and enhancing it in stages through the use of Open Education Resources (OER) - primarily using features of MERLOT - the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching system