Wittenberg professor awarded grant that provides free resources

Brooke Spurlock, Springfield News-Sun, Ohio
·2 min read

Jul. 8—A Wittenberg University professor has been awarded a course grant that helps offer free resources.

Layla Besson, professor of practice in the Department of Education, was among 30 faculty members from Ohio colleges to receive the course redesign grant through OhioLINK's (Library and Information Network) Open Educational Resources (OER).

With the grant, Besson will participate in an online course this summer about OER to help her develop materials for her Education 352 class titled, "Upper Grades, Intervention & Content Area Literacy." OER also provides a consultation with a specialist librarian to help identify open resource alternatives to commercial texts in the course syllabus. Instructors are able to use open or library-licensed resources as early as this fall semester.

"The course spans the summer months, and the modules are helping me work through the process of developing my OER materials," Besson said. "Additionally, there are three librarians attached to the grant who are working as experts to help facilitate our learning. They are holding online discussions, and they give us feedback on the tasks that we complete."

The OER materials are publicly accessible free of charge, including textbooks, articles, videos, training modules and any other resources that are available to all users.

"These materials can be compiled, re-mixed, improved upon, and redistributed under specific licensing guidelines," Besson said. "By curating OER resources for my course, students will be able to access required course materials for free. This will save students money while offering a highly specialized set of materials that are not currently available. The OER materials that I develop will be made available free of charge to anyone else who wants to use them for their own course or for personal development."

Besson, who will receive a stipend for her work once completed, said she hopes to make other OER materials for other courses and support other instructors in their own development of OER materials. She said: "The ultimate goal of OER is to give people around the world equitable access to high-quality educational materials."

OhioLINK, establisted in 1992, is a statewide academic library consortium that provides shared print and digital resources to support research, teaching and learning through 117 libraries at 88 institutions of higher education and the State Library of Ohio, all while aiming to reduce the cost of higher education for students.

For more information, visit OhioLINK.edu.