A SANDBOX OF YOUR OWN*

Set up a “sandbox” course to give faculty members the opportunity to see, explore, and evaluate an OER course in their own discipline and learning management system.

Note: Asterisk denotes this is a proven, high-impact play.

In our experience, once a faculty member sees Lumen OER course materials in their learning management system, it’s easier for them to envision adopting, adapting, and teaching an OER course. They can review the course on their own terms and determine the best path forward.

Here’s how this play works:

As an OER champion for your campus, you can ask your Lumen point person to provide Waymaker cartridges for some of our most-requested courses, such as College Success, Psychology, Sociology, Marketing, and Introduction to Business. We provide the course cartridges along with easy-to-follow instructions for how to import the content. You create shells of those courses in your learning management system. Use your institution’s numbering  and naming system, for example change “College Success” to “Learning Frameworks EDUC 1300.”

Because these new sandbox courses are in your LMS, you control who gets added to them and you can reset as needed. This gives faculty an opportunity to explore OER on their own time and without you.

You may set up a generic login as a teacher and add the faculty as students or teachers – however you want.

Give the faculty members a heads up that they can treat these sandboxes like a textbook review. They won’t be able to copy the content into a blank course from the sandbox. If they are interested in the course, they can either contact you or the Lumen team directly.

Attributions:

Photo by Bárbara Montavon on Unsplash