MHEC Supports Three Institutions with Career Technical Education Open Educational Resources Projects
MHEC has selected three projects to receive support through the Rebus Textbook Success Program, an initiative designed to equip institutional teams of faculty, librarians, instructional designers, and other interested stakeholders with the tools they need to make high-quality compilations of Open Educational Resources (OER). The three projects will produce OERs for career and technical education courses and fill gaps in available OER content to address the needs of incarcerated students. Participating institutions are:
- Alpena Community College, in partnership with Bay College (Michigan)
The colleges will be partnering to create OER resources on sheet metal and fabrication that can be used in multiple courses, including APP 210M - Metal Forming & Sheet Metal and WLD 242 - Welding Fabrication. These materials have the potential to save students $38-150 per course for materials. Materials will be shared via the Michigan Colleges Online OER Hub and will be included in the database of OER usage that is shared with all Michigan community colleges.
- University of Wisconsin Extended Campus (Wisconsin)
A team of faculty and instructional academic staff from UW Extended Campus, UW-Parkside, and UW-Milwaukee will be collaboratively creating OER materials in support of the UW Flex degree and certificate programs in Nursing and Health Care Informatics. These two programs that serve many adult learners across Wisconsin, and will provide a lower cost barrier for students.
- University of Wisconsin-Madison (Wisconsin)
The University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Odyssey Beyond Bars (OBB) program, in partnership with the UW System Prison Education Initiative, will be developing OER for an English 100 course to be taught in Wisconsin prisons. Of particular interest for this team is exploring the opportunity for meaning making” via the creation of OER that can be used in the English 100 course to address student diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging by creating course content that is relevant to the student context: customizing readings and examples to reflect the experience, community, and perspective of students allows them to see themselves reflected in coursework.
Teams from the three projects will work with the Rebus Textbook Success Program from June 2021 through April 2022. All OER developed under these projects will be openly licensed and made available through state and national OER repositories for adoption and adaption by other colleges and universities across the Midwest and the nation.