Student Well-Being and Instructor Autonomy: Integrating OERs Into the Classroom

Through our pandemic years, much attention has been paid to student well-being: to more compassionate grading systems, to more concern to accessibility issues, and to more inclusive policies. Benefits like accessibility and lower educational costs demonstrate that OERs fit into this timely conversation about student-focused classrooms. Using insights gained through first-time faculty adoptions of OERs, this presentation will show that OERs not only give students greater freedom to be active participants in the classroom, but they can offer greater instructor autonomy in curriculum design as well. Participants of this session will learn about OER initiatives at the University of Saint Francis, a small, liberal arts college in Fort Wayne, IN. With the help of their OER librarian, faculty in English, Art History, and Photography redesigned their courses in Fall 2022 to utilize OER instead of traditional print textbooks. Their experiences adapting their courses and teaching with an OER for the first time will be presented as various models of implementation. Participants will understand how they might begin to experiment with and gradually integrate an OER into a classroom environment as well as reasons why an OER might serve their needs as instructors. This examination will offer specific strategies and analyze student perception surveys and other assessment tools as well