By Brittany Dudek, Manager, OER and Libraries at Colorado Community Colleges Online
Colorado’s collective impact approach and stakeholder-driven model have created an opportunity for impacting students, educators, and institutions across the state. This blog covers the status of the Open Educational Resources (OER) initiative as of May 2022.
Leadership Changes
Colorado OER Council is pleased to welcome new leadership. Chealsye Bowley began in Fall 2021 as the Director of Open Education and Learning Innovation at Colorado Department of Higher Education. Chealsye has been active in the open movement for the past decade in libraries and publishing. Her role will continue to support the OER grants and state-wide conference, but her top priority is to cultivate more connection and support for the state’s open education community.
Grantee Excellence
The OER grant program is in its fourth year with 35 public institutions of higher education across Colorado previously receiving grants. Since 2018 grantees have collaborated to save Colorado students more than $10 million on textbook costs by creating, adapting, and adopting open resources at campuses across the state. To learn more about the program, including impacts and reach of the grants, read the 2021 report Colorado Rises: Transforming Education Practices through Open Educational Resources.
We are thrilled to announce we have awarded $968,000 to 20 projects which range from comprehensive institutional efforts to individual course material redesigns that aim to reinvigorate approaches to teaching and learning at campuses across the state. View the list of awards.
Colorado OER Conference
The 2022 Colorado OER Conference will return in-person on Friday, June 24 in Denver at History Colorado. The conference will also be partially streamed with virtual sessions on Zoom. Sessions will highlight current OER work in Colorado, the challenges of OER in the sciences, creating accessible resources, success tips for creating OER, and the future of open education. Any faculty, librarian, student, staff, and advocate interested in OER is welcome to join. Registration for the conference is free.
Tanya Spilovoy, Ed.D. will be the conference keynote speaker. Currently, she serves as Director of Open Policy for the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) where she leads the National Consortium for Open Educational Resources (NCOER), a collaboration among the four regional compacts (MHEC, NEBHE, SREB, and WICHE), all 50 US states and associated territories. NCOER focuses on the policy, practice, and implementation of Open Educational Resources in states, systems, and higher education institutions. Previously, she served as the Director of Distance Education and State Authorization at the North Dakota University System where she also led a statewide OER Initiative.
To keep up with Colorado OER Council happenings, visit http://masterplan.highered.colorado.gov/oer-in-colorado/ and follow @CoHigherEd.