197 OER Pressbooks — 10.16.2019

On October 16, 2019 participants of the Active Teaching Lab discussed the design and implementation of Open Educational Resources, specifically Pressbooks. The focus was on sharing examples, best practices, and how digital resources best fit the needs of modern classrooms.

Takeaways

• Contact the DoIT Help desk to request a consultation from the Learn@UW-Madison Team to get started !
• If you are venturing into Pressbooks for the first time: start slowly! Take your time to learn about your own design preferences. Experiment with page formatting to ensure that your content is accessible and appropriately laid out.
• Involve students. Creating an enduring resource for future classes increases motivation, quality of work, peer-to-peer learning, and diversifies the multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression (UDL) of course materials! 
• Advanced Planning is crucial. Designing good OER materials may require time to develop content authoring skills (in Pressbooks, H5P, Hypothes.is, etc.), but the payoff can be enormous for your students and your own experiences as an instructor. Also, take into account the time needed to revise, edit, and troubleshoot potential problems.

For more information, view the session’s activity sheet here.

Video

The Active Teaching Lab is a Faculty Engagement program with sessions held on Wednesdays from 1:00-2:00pm and Fridays from 8:30-9:45am in the Middleton Building (1305 Linden Dr.), room 120. Check out upcoming Labs or read the recaps from past Labs. We build interdisciplinary conversations that are more emergent than a presenter and more dynamic than a panel — a conversation with colleagues sharing challenges, solutions, and experiments on topics selected by a variety of stakeholders.

Sign up for regular Lab announcements by sending an email to join-activeteaching@lists.wisc.edu.