For the past 4 years, the HBCU Affordable Learning Community has been building the organizational, programmatic, and technical foundation for their Affordable Learning Solutions program for all HBCUs. Nine (9) HBCUs have been institutionalizing the Affordable Learning Solutions strategies, modelled after the programs develop by the California State University, MERLOT, and Skills Commons which are internationally recognized for providing access to free and open educational resources to millions of faculty, staff, students, and the broader education and workforce communities. Another eight (8) have initiated some elements of an AL$ project on their campus. The leaders of HBCU institutions such as Tennessee State University, Southern University, Bethune Cookman University and others within the HBCU AL$ community, in partnership with MERLOT-SkillsCommons have designed an open portal that provides easy access to:
• The largest aggregate collection of free and open e-textbooks, open courseware, open access journals, open learning objects, and more.
• Over 50 general education courses with multiple free and open e-textbooks aligned with the course curriculum.
• Free and open collections of virtual labs in STEM and workforce development curriculum.
• Over 100 free and open teaching ePortfolios that showcase faculty's adoption of OER across a broad range of disciplines.
• A free and open library of planning tools, guidelines, and professional development resources to support HBCUs developing and implementing their own AL$ programs.
• Free and open methods for sharing their use, reuse, revision, remixing, redistribution, and retention of OER that they have adopted and authored.
The MERLOT project has been scaling the adoption of free and open educational resources across the nation and around the world since 1997. Other higher education systems have already institutionalized the CSU's Affordable Learning Solutions program such as the University System of Georgia, and the Open SUNY system. "Putting educational innovations into practice" has been the mission of the MERLOT project and our ability to cost-effectively design and deploy open educational services such as derivative AL$ websites for institutions, enables us to fulfill this mission. Through the MERLOT institutional partnership processes, we learn about the innovative practices from our collaborators and in turn incorporates these innovations into MERLOT's baseline services.
The session will cover the research findings on the student adoption of Open Education Resources (OER) and their recommendations which include the following:
1) The need for OER awareness and benefits .
2) The need for hands on workshops.
3) The need for culturally related materials.
4) The need for more information about OER in their discipline.
By attending this session, attendees will be able to:- The participant will understand student needs and readiness for successfully adopting and creating OER
- The participant will understand strategies for adopting and creating culturally relevant OER materials
- The participant will understand Student Effectiveness of professional development programs to build capacities for AL$
- The participant will understand Student Qualities of existing tools and technologies (e.g. MERLOT and others) to support AL$ programs
