11 How Do I Turn My OER Into a Complete Learning Experience?

Your OER Is One Part of the Learning Experience

You now have an OER that supports what students need to learn. But the OER is not the course.

An effective course brings together learning materials, opportunities to practice and apply learning, assessments, interaction, feedback, and your guidance as the instructor. This is where you step back from developing the OER itself and look again at the complete learning experience you want to create.

Start with your Course Outline of Record (COR) and the course design decisions you have already made. If you created a course map, return to it. Then consider what students still need beyond the OER and intentionally design those pieces around the learning you want to support.

Return to Your Course Design

Begin where you began this process: with the course.

Return to your COR and the learning your students need to achieve. If you created a course map, bring that back into the process now. Your OER may address much of the learning materials students need, but learning materials are only one part of the course.

Look across the complete learning experience and consider:

• Learning: What should students know or be able to do?
• Learning materials: What information, explanations, examples, readings, media, or other resources will help them learn it?
• Practice and engagement: What will students do to develop their knowledge and skills?
• Evidence of learning: How will students demonstrate what they have learned?
• Instructor interaction and feedback: Where will you guide, respond to, challenge, encourage, and support students?

The gaps between those pieces show you what still needs to be designed.

Design What Students Need Beyond the OER

Move through your course one module, topic, or learning objective at a time. Consider what your OER already provides and what students still need to learn, practice, receive feedback, and demonstrate their learning.

You may discover that students need:

• a brief presentation that helps them see the most important ideas in a chapter;
• a study guide that helps them focus their reading;
• practice applying a new concept before they are assessed;
• a discussion that asks them to connect ideas to their own experiences or to one another;
• a case study or scenario that places the content in a real-world context;
• worked examples or demonstrations;
• opportunities to check their understanding;
• an assignment that asks them to apply or integrate what they learned;
• a rubric that makes expectations clear; or
• feedback and interaction with you at important points in the learning process.

You may already have many of these materials. Start by identifying what you already use successfully. Then create only what is missing.

What About the Ancillaries a Publisher Usually Provides?

Commercial textbooks often come with PowerPoints, test banks, homework questions, instructor resources, study materials, and other ancillaries. Giving up those resources can be one of the biggest concerns faculty have about moving away from a commercial textbook.

But creating your own learning experience does not mean you need to recreate everything a publisher might provide.

You now have something more useful to guide those decisions: a clear understanding of your course and an OER intentionally selected or developed to support it. Instead of asking, “What materials usually come with a textbook?” ask, “What do my students actually need to learn successfully in this course?”

Depending on your course, you might develop:

• PowerPoint presentations;
• study guides;
• reading guides or reflection questions;
• practice activities and exercises;
• discussion prompts;
• case studies and scenarios;
• worksheets;
• demonstrations or examples;
• assignments and projects;
• quizzes and exams;
• rubrics; or
• instructor guides and teaching notes.

These materials do not need to duplicate the OER. If the OER explains a concept well, your PowerPoint does not need to reproduce the chapter on slides. The presentation might instead highlight important ideas, provide additional examples, model a process, or prepare students to apply what they read.

The same principle applies to every supporting resource: create it because it serves a learning purpose.

Design Opportunities for Human Interaction

A complete learning experience is more than content, activities, and assessments. Students also need opportunities to interact with you and with one another.

As you design the course, identify places where your presence can make a meaningful difference. You might:

• introduce a topic and explain why it matters;
• connect new material to something students learned earlier;
• provide examples from your own disciplinary or professional experience;
• ask questions that help students think more deeply about the content;
• respond to patterns of confusion you notice;
• provide individualized or class-wide feedback;
• facilitate discussions or collaborative activities;
• check in with students during a challenging project; or
• help students understand how what they are learning connects to future coursework, careers, or their lives.

In an online course, this intentional interaction is particularly important. Your OER can provide excellent content, but it does not replace the instructor. Design the course so students experience you as an active participant in their learning.

Build the Learning Experience in Canvas

Once you know what the complete learning experience should include, Canvas becomes the place where you bring the pieces together for students.

You do not need to design that experience from scratch. Palomar has resources that can help you organize the course, build the Canvas structure, and develop the learning experience around your OER.

Use Quality Quest to Guide Your Course Design

Quality Quest: Crafting Quality Online Courses walks you through the elements of a well-designed Canvas course and can help you think intentionally about organization, instructions, learning objectives, assessments, interaction, accessibility, and the overall student experience.

Start With a Quality Course Template

Palomar’s Quality Course Templates provide an existing Canvas structure that you can use instead of beginning with an empty course.

The templates give you a foundation for organizing modules, pages, assignments, and other course elements. You can then add your OER, activities, assessments, interactions, and other materials within that structure.

Use the Palomar Course Design Assistant

The Palomar Course Design Assistant can help you develop and organize course content around your COR and course plan. It can support the work of turning your course design decisions into materials you can use in Canvas.

Review the Complete Learning Experience

Once the pieces are in place, step back and look at how they work together. A course can contain excellent individual resources and activities but still feel disconnected if students cannot see how those pieces support their learning.

A useful learning sequence often gives students opportunities to:

1. Understand: encounter new information, explanations, examples, and ideas;
2. Practice and apply: work with those ideas before being expected to demonstrate mastery;
3. Receive feedback: learn what they understand, where they are struggling, and how they can improve; and
4. Demonstrate learning: show what they know and can do.

Your OER may play an important role in helping students understand new information and ideas, but the complete course should help students move through the entire learning process.

Look at the connections among the pieces. The OER, presentation, activity, discussion, instructor interaction, feedback, and assessment should not feel like unrelated tasks. Each should have a clear reason for being there and contribute to the learning you want students to achieve.

Help Other Faculty Teach With Your OER

If other faculty adopt your OER, the supporting materials you have developed may help them use it successfully in their own courses. You do not need to share everything you create, but consider whether there are resources that would make your OER easier for another instructor to adopt.

You might think about supporting materials in three broad groups:

• Student-facing resources: study guides, worksheets, practice activities, presentations, examples, and other materials that could be shared along with the OER;
• Instructor resources: teaching notes, suggested activities, discussion guidance, assignment ideas, or implementation suggestions that could help another faculty member teach with the OER; and
• Assessment materials: quizzes, exams, test banks, answer keys, and other resources that may require more limited distribution to preserve their usefulness.

Decide what makes sense to share openly with the OER, what you might make available specifically to instructors, and what should remain within your own course.

You Have Built More Than a Textbook

At the beginning of this process, you may have been thinking primarily about replacing a commercial textbook.

But the work you have done can lead to something much larger.

You started with the COR and the learning your students need. You identified the materials that support that learning. You found, adapted, remixed, or created OER. You built and reviewed the resource. Then you used that resource as one part of a deliberately designed course that includes practice, interaction, feedback, and assessment.

Where Would You Like to Go Next?