The Vol State OER Starter Kit

Open Educational Resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research materials in any medium – digital or otherwise – that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. --Hewlett Foundation

This is an invitation for you to join and help create the 

Vol State OER Starter Kit.

Agapi Theodorou-Shapiro (Humanities) and yours truly (Bryan Saums, Distributed Education) cobbled together the first iteration of the Vol State OER Starter Kit, a site on eLearn for faculty and staff, "interested in learning more about and/or transforming their courses to include OER materials. Including OER materials in your courses could be as simple as switching one material for another or as radical as completely changing your teaching style."

We rolled out the starter kit during the 2022 VSCC Summer Institute, and we already have several faculty members enrolled in the eLearn site. The starter kit will help anyone ready to introduce OER into their online or on-ground classes as it covers a wide array of topics:

• how to find open educational resources
• how to create and adapt OER
• copyright & Creative Commons licenses

The VolState OER Starter Kit compliments and extends the conversation already available to you on other VSCC resources like Open Educational Resources (OER) LibGuide. In the starter kit, we also link to great resources like the Tennessee Open Education Hub and the Open Textbook Library.

So, the starter kit is off to a nice start; however, to truly be a truly great resource, Agapi and I are asking you to become a part of this OER initiative by enrolling in the eLearn site. Please email bryan.saums@vscc.edu and ask to be enrolled in the VSCC Starter Kit. In the spirit of sharing behind the open educational resources movement, you will be enrolled as a faculty member so you can help grow this important resource by helping us curate and create content to create an even better starter kit.

We save our students money and make their education more accessible by using open educational resources. There is no success with access, and that includes financial access to learning materials. We hope you join the VSCC Starter Kit so we can work together to help our students be more successful through the use of open educational resources.

Please email bryan.saums@vscc.edu to enroll in the VSCC Starter Kit.