Open Education 2013

Student-sourced OER is anything that is assembled and put together by students which can be released under creative commons licenses for a particular course.

There are multiple benefits of leveraging students to create OER:
- As they prepare lesson materials, they actually analyze and synthesize the content and engage in using critical thinking skills.
- Teacher lesson prep is reduced, even if the student-created materials need to be refined before they can be used for the course.
- Cooperative learning takes place as collaboration on material helps create much stronger and engaging lessons.
- Certain students generally have the time, energy and technical ability to create materials that are directed at the target demographic - them!

It's much easier to find an OER lesson online, and revise/revamp it to fit standards of curriculum than it is to start from scratch writing curriculum and trying new things in a lesson. Materials created by students are a great starting point when the hunt for quality OER isn?t turning up results that fit perfectly with the standards that need to be taught.

It is important to note that materials that are created by students are not created by subject matter experts. The materials that are created can later be refined by the teacher, and reused and tweaked yearly to fit the growing need of the students for that particular year. However, students who are motivated to make these materials generally have highly-engaged personality types, are already intrinsically motivated in the course and turn in quality work for their projects and assignments.

This presentation will explore successful and not so successful strategies for motivating students to engage in creating OER lesson materials that allow them to leave their legacy in their favorite courses. These ideas include study sessions that generate OER study guides and FAQ databases, utilizing TAs to create OER review presentations and course materials, and even using student modeling on projects that can later be released as OER.