Touro Libraries have teamed up with the provost’s office to offer the Touro University Open Educational Resources Faculty Fellowship. Faculty from a diverse cross section of departments and programs (both undergrad and post-grad) have completed the fellowship, developing unique OER for their courses. As the cornerstone of our OER program, the fellowship has been one of the main drivers of OER adoption at Touro. Since 2018, Touro faculty have saved their students close to $900,000 in textbook costs by teaching with OER!

SPARC, the non-profit OER advocacy group, summarizes the why behind using OER: “Textbook costs should not be a barrier to education. Students learn more when they have access to quality materials. Technology holds boundless potential to improve teaching and learning. And, better education means a better future.”

Read on for the first case study from one of our OER Faculty Fellows, as they describe their processes for developing unique OER for their courses. 

Creating an Open Educational Resource (OER) for a Kinesiology course with Google Sites.

Michelle Buccinna, OTD, OTR/L 
Occupational Therapy Department, Touro University School of Health Sciences

I chose to create an accessible Open Educational Resource (OER) to replace a textbook from the occupational therapy program in the Human Movement, Behavior, and Occupation lab course.  An OER not only reduces the financial burden on students by offering free access to course materials but also encourages a collaborative learning environment. As an educator, I typically add OER resources, like YouTube videos, as supplemental materials in my Canvas modules or add pictures and videos taken in class for students to study from.  My idea for an OER was to have my students help create pictures and video content as they learned the kinesiology techniques each week in my course.  By involving students in the creation of content, it allowed them to actively contribute and help foster a deeper understanding of the kinesiology material needed for clinical practice. 

As a participant in the Touro University OER Fellowship program, I learned several steps to create a sustainable OER. The first step was to find a free website builder that would be easy for me to learn and design.  I found that Google Sites was user friendly, free and required no coding knowledge. The next step of the process required me to organize the content for the website and I chose easy-to-use templates. I created an outline and followed my course syllabus to break down each webpage into a “Shoulder Range of Motion (ROM)” page or “Wrist Manual Muscle Testing" page, so that each page coincided with each module in the course.  The picture above displays one page and the navigation bar on the right displays each web page of content.  I wanted to use my own pictures, so several students signed photo releases and would stay after class to allow time to take pictures.  Time needed to be dedicated each week to develop each page including uploading photos and writing content.  Google Sites also allows the ability to insert YouTube videos and other open educational resources to the webpage. My OER site is still a work in progress, and my goal is to finish it when I teach and run the course again. I think it will be a valuable resource for my future students to have the materials needed to be successful in the Occupational Therapy program. This Open educational resource will also allow students to have assessment information at their hands for a quick review when they are on their clinical rotations.