Northern works on open education resources for classes

Four Montana State University-Northern faculty and staff members have received acceptance letters for three grants to create new Open Education Resources and ancillary materials for existing Open Education Resources texts.

Open Education Resources website defines open education resources as “research, teaching and learning materials that have been licensed with a Creative Commons license which allows them to be used and shared without fees.”

“Open Education Resources are important because they cut down on the amount of money that students spend on textbooks each semester,” Northern College of Arts, Sciences and Education Chair and Assistant Professor of English Valerie Guyant said.

She received an author grant to create all new open education resources for a course.

“In my case, that is a literature course I am teaching about serial killers in fiction and film,” Guyant said. 

She added that a majority of Northern’s students struggle with textbook costs, “so anything we can do to cut down on those costs increases the likelihood that students will succeed at Northern.”

Northern Department of Criminal Justice Assistant Professor Samantha Balemba and Instructional Designer Caleb Hutchins received an ancillary grant.

Balemba said ancillary grants support faculty in creating ancillary materials to support current or future adoption of open educational resources adding that, this grant may  include resources such as lab manuals or workbooks, quiz banks, online homework systems, videos, interactive homework systems or other such study aids complete with answers.

“I have adopted an existing Open Education Resources textbook for one of my courses, CJUS 236: Introduction to Research Methods, and have been creating content to go along with this existing text,” she said. “So far, I have been making lecture slides, test banks, and assignments, but also plan on creating short videos to go along with specific content — the tougher stuff that students usually need extra clarification on.”

She said Hutchins’ role in her course is to help her with the steps in making these resources accessible for students with disabilities, help shape content for efficiency and efficacy, help with the tech side of making these resources available on Open Education Resources sites, and consolidating the information into logical formats.

Hutchins said he will be helping record, edit, create and upload videos as well as sharing the videos made for the course as Open Education Resources.

“I am looking forward to learning this entire process because I used Open Education Resources content in the past, but I have never helped create content, so that is going to be an interesting process,” he said. “I am looking forward to being part of that creation and then just the satisfaction of knowing students will be able to use this in the future. It will be accessible, it will be freely available, and other instructors at other campuses will be able to use it, and it feels good to be part of that process.”

“The more Open Education Resources texts we can incorporate into our program, both within criminal justice and the College of Arts and Sciences and Education as well as Northern as a whole, the less the cost to students, which will hopefully lead to greater success in recruitment and retention efforts collegewide,” Balemba said.

The other faculty member at Northern to receive a grant was Department of Education Assistant Professor Joseph Todd, for his EDU225 course.

He said EDU225 is an introduction to educational psychology for which he has in the past been using Open Education Resources. With this grant, he said, he will be creating secondary materials for other professors at other campuses.

“I am creating sort of all the materials that a faculty would be able to use then to just kind of implement this course or this text into their course,” Todd said. “I tend to try to model to the students how they need some of this stuff, so I don’t use strict lecture and note-taking in a lot of my courses because I am more interested in context a lot of times.”

He added that it wasn’t so long ago when he was a graduate student, remembering how expensive textbooks are, so he said he tries to teach his students like the type of student he was.

People who want more information about Open Education Resources can visit https://trailsmt.org/oer .