As a portion of its 2018-2019 funding model to drive the adoption of open educational resources (OER) in SUNY’s general education, large-enrollment courses, SUNY OER Services solicited applications from SUNY campuses and faculty interested in authoring and creating OER. These applications targeted creating OER in content areas where OER was lacking or insignificant.
Four faculty members from and an instructional designer from SUNY Oneonta received funding to support the development of OER courses for Spanish I and Spanish II. SUNY Oneonta’s instructors wanted to create a resource for three introductory classes, Spanish I, Spanish II, and Elementary Spanish Conversations. Their goal was to create a resource that teaches Spanish through the communicative approach, where learners are encouraged to speak and write in Spanish. Learners will use their natural language acquisition strategies.
Through a partnership with Lumen Learning, SUNY Oneonta’s team ensured their content met the needs of SUNY Oneonta’s students and SUNY students but also the national need for Spanish language OER. The authors were able to define the project, create the chapter outlines, and do the most creative work. Lumen Learning used its network to develop additional activities, question sets aligned to the text, and commission voice actors to read the scripts that the authors created. After this one year initial creation period has finished, Lumen Learning will take over the long term maintenance of the text and future updates through its continuous improvement program. Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 are available in both SUNY’s Ready to Adopt catalog and Lumen Learning’s catalog as a Waymaker course.
The lessons learned from this project are that the combination of technical support, high-quality content, and integration into existing support structures allows campus teams to focus on the parts of the OER project that are tightly aligned with existing roles and expertise.
Learning Outcomes: Celebrate successes in OER creation from a panelist of authors, instructors, an instructional designer, and outside support.
Discuss from a variety of viewpoints the effects of partnership on the project and sustainability of the book.
Consider the need for continuous improvement of OER materials, and how the college, system, and partners are incentivized.
Share models that can be repeated for future projects.
