OpenEd20

This presentation from the University of New England’s College of Graduate and Professional Studies (CGPS), composed of a lead course instructor and 2 instructional designers, will explore the collaborative process behind creating and making accessible open lab assignments for an online Introductory Physics course in response to COVID-19. Introductory Physics has been redesigned using the OpenStax College Physics textbook, but lab assignments have relied on lab kits from a commercial vendor. When this lab vendor experienced significant delays in shipping to students, our team of adjunct Physics instructors tasked themselves with creating alternative lab assignments that could be completed by students safely in their homes as affordable remote labs. Instructional designers then incorporated these alternative labs into online course sections, ensuring students in geographically isolated locations were able to complete their full course without significant interruption or loss in educational quality. Building from CGPS’ commitment to adopting more OER in courses, instructional designers proposed openly- licensing these new instructor-created labs, in order to properly credit instructors for their individual contributions and to share back resources to the wider educational community. We will discuss how we seek to support instructors throughout the OER creation process and how we ultimately intend to share these materials out. Finally, we will talk about the unexpected challenges and additional labor requirements that have presented in our attempts to convert these lab assignments into fully open materials, and how we intend to mitigate these issues in future projects by planning for openness as an explicit project goal.

Learning Outcomes:
Explore a project framework for instructor-created, open labs in an online physics course; Identify opportunities and challenges present in applying this framework to other online STEM courses