Longtime Middlesex Community College faculty member Katie Durant has been using OER in her English classes for four years. She was attracted to OER due to the reduced cost and has received positive feedback from students.
She tells us, “The cost benefits are significant and the materials can be more up to date and fun…There are easy ways to use OER though programs like Lumen Learning. Some of their courses plug right into the Blackboard shell and you're off and running with not just textbooks, but also ancillary materials like test banks and supporting videos…Making your own handouts and worksheets can be fun, and you can make the material more tailored to how you want to teach and the topics you want to cover, instead of tailoring your teaching around an expensive text book or finding yourself using only 10% of the book that students are forced to buy anyway.”
Thank you for being an OER Champion, Professor Durant!