Open Education in Your Classes

One area growing in size with online technology is the use of Open Educational Resources (OER). These can be useful depending on the field you are in. OER is shared educational lessons, books, and tools for use in the classroom. There are multiple sites such as Openstax and OERProject.

I do think it is important to review any choices to be sure they fit within your lesson goals, or that you have the ability to adapt them accordingly. This is not usually hard to do, and may be much easier than developing an entire lesson on its own. This depends on your field. I do find the arts and design field is lacking in resources compared to STEM type courses. You may have to look hard to find something in the arts on several of the sites. Now looking at museums specifically, you may find many more art related projects for the fine art aspect.

I did explore one from the OERcommons site for art and ecology

https://www.oercommons.org/courses/art-and-ecology/view

Under the Find Lessons / College University - I found the Art Nouveau teaching packet in the section. This would be useful in some typography and layout classes to provide insight into the art movement. I do require students to take an art movement and use it as a guide to reproduce for a design project in some classes. This provides a nice learning unit for them to use as a reference to supplement their knowledge, then apply it to an existing design project. It does not replace the project, but does eliminate the need to buy expensive books or use unchecked online websites.

The nice thing about these resources goes to the costs. They are open copyright for public use. They are created for the public use by a variety of people donating their efforts to allow for teachers to build affordable options for their students.

Image from the oercommons in the link above for the lesson. resources